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September 19, 2006
| Lovelock: Too Late To Turn Back | Environment |
As we've noted in the past, James Lovelock, the environmental scientist who discovered that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, and who proposed the Gaia Hypothesis that views terrestrial systems as a sort of self-regulating superorganism, sees a global warming apocalypse coming our way, and quickly. WaPo (via Billmon):
"It's going too fast," he says softly. "We will burn." [...]"Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return." [...]
Lovelock's conclusion is straightforward.
To wit, we are poached.
He measured atmospheric gases and ocean temperatures, and examined forests tropical and arboreal (last year a forest the size of Italy burned in rapidly heating Siberia, releasing from the permafrost a vast sink of methane, which contributes to global warming). He found Gaia trapped in a vicious cycle of positive-feedback loops — from air to water, everything is getting warmer at once. The nature of Earth's biosphere is that, under pressure from industrialization, it resists such heating, and then it resists some more.
Then, he says, it adjusts.
Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.
"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover." [...]
Lovelock's radical view of global warming doesn't sit well with David Archer, a scientist at the University of Chicago and a frequent contributor to the Web site RealClimate, which accepts the reality of global warning.
"No one, not Lovelock or anyone else, has proposed a specific quantitative scenario for a climate-driven, blow the doors off, civilization ending catastrophe," writes Archer. [...]
What's perhaps as intriguing are the top scientists who decline to dismiss Lovelock's warning. Lovelock may be an outlier, but he's not drifting far from shore. Sir David King, science adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, saluted Lovelock's book and proclaimed global warming a far more serious threat than terrorism. Sir Brian Heap, a Cambridge University biologist and past foreign secretary of the Royal Society, says Lovelock's views are tightly argued, if perhaps too gloomy. [...]
"I'm an optimist," [Lovelock] says. "I think that after the warming sets in and the survivors have settled in near the Arctic, they will find a way to adjust. It will be a tough life enlivened by excitement and fear." [...]
Lovelock was a prodigy, earning degrees in chemistry and medicine. In the 1950s he designed an electron capture machine, which provided environmentalist Rachel Carson with the data to prove that pesticides infected everything from penguins to mother's milk. Later he took a detector on a ship to Antarctica and proved that man-made chemicals — CFCs — were burning a hole in the ozone. [...]
[Says Paul Ehrlich,] "If Lovelock hadn't discovered the erosion of the ozone, we'd all be living under the ocean in snorkels and fins to escape that poisonous sun." [...]
How will our splendid Spaceship Earth so quickly become the oven of our doom? As we sit at his table in Devon, Lovelock expands on his vision.
It begins with the melting of ice and snow. As the Arctic grows bare — the Greenland ice cap is shrinking far faster than had been expected — dark ground emerges and absorbs heat. That melts more snow and softens peat bogs, which release methane. As oceans warm, algae are dying and so absorbing less heat-causing carbon dioxide.
To the south, drought already is drying out the great tropical forests of the Amazon. "The forests will melt away just like the snow," Lovelock says.
Even the northern forests, those dark cool beauties of pines and firs, suffer. They absorb heat and shelter bears, lynxes and wolves through harsh winters. But recent studies show the boreal forests are drying and dying and inducing more warming.
Casting 30, 40 years into the future, Lovelock sees sub-Saharan lands becoming uninhabitable. India runs out of water, Bangladesh drowns, China eyes a Siberian land grab, and local warlords fight bloody wars over water and energy. [...]
"We like to think of Hurricane Katrina, or a killer heat wave in Europe, as a one-off," he says. "Or we like to think that we'll come up with a technological fix." [...]
Today the environmentally conscious seek salvation in solar cells, recycling and ten thousand wind turbines. "It won't matter a damn," Lovelock says. "They make the mistake of thinking we have decades. We don't."
Lovelock favors genetically modified crops, which require less water, and nuclear energy. Only the atom can produce enough electrical power to persuade industrialized nations to abandon burning fossil fuels. France draws 70 percent of its power from nuclear plants.
But what of Three Mile Island? Chernobyl? Lovelock's shaking his head before you complete the litany. How many people died, he asks. A few hundred? The radiation exclusion zone around Chernobyl is the lushest and most diverse zone of flora and fauna in Eurasia. [...]
"People say, ‘Well, you're 87, you won't live to see this,' " he says. "I have children, I have grandchildren, I wish none of this. But it's our fate; we need to recognize it's another wartime. We desperately need a Moses to take us to the Arctic and preserve civilization.
"It's too late to turn back." [Emphasis added]
What can one say? Of course, you hope that Lovelock's wrong. Utterly wrong. Given his track record, though, you have to think his intuition in these matters is probably quite good. I.e., it may not turn out as bad as he says, but it's probably going to be worse than most people are expecting. And it's happening quickly.
Posted by Jonathan at September 19, 2006 06:18 PM
Comments
2025. That's fast.
Posted by: Jeff at September 19, 2006 07:50 PM
Another prominent environmentalist who has been calling for a second look at nuclear power is Stewart Brand, internet pioneer and founder of "The Whole Earth Catalog". He has also been kind enough to endorse my novel "Rad Decision", which provides the lay person with an inside look at the real world of nuclear power. (I've worked in the nuke industry for over twenty years.) The book is available free to readers at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com - and they seem to like it, judging from the comments on the homepage.
Posted by: James Aach at September 19, 2006 10:45 PM
James,
With 20 years of experience in the nuclear industry maybe you can verify some things I've heard about nuclear power. One, power companies must make large, upfront investments of both time and money to get a nuclear facility online. This makes nuclear power somewhat unattractive to power companies because the ROI takes so long. Two, nuclear is not sustainable as there is a finite amount of uranium.
Thanks,
Jeff
Posted by: Jeff at September 20, 2006 08:25 AM
"Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees." This is wrong, absurd, and laughable. And you people take him seriously??
Posted by: UT at September 20, 2006 08:30 AM
UT,
It may be wrong, but it's not absurd or laughable.
"What's perhaps as intriguing are the top scientists who decline to dismiss Lovelock's warning."
This, which I believe is the most significant statement in the article, says that some scientists are cautiously perched on the fence with regards to Lovelock's vision of the future. This is where scientists should be when they don't have enough data, or when things happen so fast they don't have time to correlate the data.
Global warming today is all about how fast the climate has changed in the last three years. The fact that some scientists are undecided about the future of our climate should at least give you pause, not laughs.
Posted by: Jeff at September 21, 2006 08:33 PM