Future Hope column, August 3, 2009

British scientist and author James Lovelock has just had published a follow-up book to his 2006 book, “The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity.” This 2009 one is entitled, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning.” Throughout both books he presents scientific evidence to support his view that humankind has caused so much damage already to the Earth, burnt so much coal, oil and natural gas, cut down so many forests, and unthinkingly overdeveloped so many cities and towns in an environmentally destructive way that the chances are not good that we can avoid a worldwide climate catastrophe.

Lovelock believes that the likely result of our historic, short-sighted disregard for what he calls Gaia, “a self-regulating Earth with the community of living organisms in control,” (1) is the mass die-off of 85% or more of the human population over the course of this century. Despite this severely depressing belief, he has used his considerable intellect in these two books to try to think through how we can make the best of a very bad situation.

While generally supporting their work, he is critical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-supported organization of 2,000 scientists who have been studying climate change since 1989. He is critical of them for underestimating the severity of climate change.

One example he uses of this failing is the forecast by the IPCC of a range of possibilities as to how much sea level would rise up to 2007. The forecast for the most amount of rise was less than what actually occurred. Another major example is what has been happening to Arctic sea ice. Lovelock points out that “the discrepancy is huge” between what was predicted and what has actually happened; “if melting continues at this rate the summer Arctic Ocean will be almost ice-free within fifteen years. The IPCC prediction suggests that this is unlikely before 2050.” (2)

I was glad to see Lovelock’s comparison of our situation today to that of the late