And now the bad news: Global Warming may be much worse than previously
predicted
By James
Lovelock
(James Lovelock is an independent
British environmental scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society.)
Imagine a young policewoman delighted
in the fulfilment of her vocation; then imagine her having to tell a family
whose child had strayed that he had been found dead, murdered in a nearby wood.
Or think of a young physician newly appointed who has to tell you that the
biopsy revealed invasion by an aggressive metastasising tumour. Doctors and the
police know that many accept the simple awful truth with dignity but others try
in vain to deny it.
Whatever the response, the bringers of such
bad news rarely become hardened to their task and some dread it. We have
relieved judges of the awesome responsibility of passing the death sentence, but
at least they had some comfort from its frequent moral justification. Physicians
and the police have no escape from their
duty.
This article is the most
difficult I have written and for the same reasons. My Gaia theory sees the Earth
behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health,
or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my
profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad
news.
The climate centres around the
world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have
reported the Earth’s physical condition, and the climate specialists see
it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long
as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth’s family and
an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave
danger.
Our planet has kept itself
healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than
three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting
at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and
soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before
and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will
suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8
degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the
tropics.
Much of the tropical land mass
will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds
to the 40 per cent of the Earth’s surface we have depleted to feed
ourselves.
Curiously, aerosol pollution
of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to
space. This “global dimming” is transient and could disappear in a
few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the
global greenhouse. We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by
smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few
breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate
remains tolerable.
By failing to see
that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we have blundered into
trying to do it ourselves, acting as if we were in charge. By doing this, we
condemn ourselves to the worst form of slavery. If we chose to be the stewards
of the Earth, then we are responsible for keeping the atmosphere, the ocean and
the land surface right for life. A task we would soon find impossible - and
something before we treated Gaia so badly, she had freely done for
us.
To understand how impossible it is,
think about how you would regulate your own temperature or the composition of
your blood. Those with failing kidneys know the never-ending daily difficulty of
adjusting water, salt and protein intake. The technological fix of dialysis
helps, but is no replacement for living healthy
kidneys.
My new book The Revenge of
Gaia expands these thoughts, but you still may ask why science took so long to
recognise the true nature of the Earth. I think it is because Darwin’s
vision was so good and clear that it has taken until now to digest it. In his
time, little was known about the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, and
there would have been little reason for him to wonder if organisms changed their
environment as well as adapting to
it.
Had it been known then that life
and the environment are closely coupled, Darwin would have seen that evolution
involved not just the organisms, but the whole planetary surface. We might then
have looked upon the Earth as if it were alive, and known that we cannot pollute
the air or use the Earth’s skin - its forest and ocean ecosystems - as a
mere source of products to feed ourselves and furnish our homes. We would have
felt instinctively that those ecosystems must be left untouched because they
were part of the living Earth.
So what
should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and
realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must
find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long
as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without
crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent. On these British Isles,
we are used to thinking of all humanity and not just ourselves; environmental
change is global, but we have to deal with the consequences here in the
UK.
Unfortunately our nation is now so
urbanised as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of
agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance;
climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from
overseas.
We [in Britian] could grow
enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion
that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is
ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United
States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and
they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will
have to adapt to a hell of a
climate.
Perhaps the saddest thing is
that Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole
ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilisation the planet has a precious
resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and
communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen
herself from space, and begins to know her place in the
universe.
We should be the heart and
mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of
human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and
need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough
to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we
should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our
home.
‘The Revenge of Gaia’
is scheduled to be published by Penguin in February.
Posted: Wed - February 1, 2006 at 11:30 PM