Interesting reading: on the one hand, Christopher, Lord Monckton, Britain’s most famous climate crank, is exposed as, well, something of a crank in a profile in The Observer, while James Lovelock comes on a bit strong in the Times Online.
‘Well,’ he says, breezily, ‘for a few years, the temperature will continue to rise, but nowhere near as fast as the alarmists would wish it to rise. Then solar physicists suggest that in the next solar cycle but one, and a solar cycle is about 10.6 years, there will be a considerable cooling of the Sun. And the panic will disappear.’ Hey presto.
If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years’ time then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States. “We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen,â€? said Lovelock. “We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.â€?
Meanwhile, Vanity Fair‘s now annual Green Issue includes an excellent profile of Myron Ebell, the man behind the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s sceptical effluvia. Worth reading if only for the phrase:
Many of the skeptics are curmudgeons: old, bald, and bitter. But not Myron Ebell.
Old, bald and bitter. Who can they mean…?
The really scary thing is that Lovelock has been right about a whole bunch of things. Something you would do well not to discount
I wonder what he thinks Greenland will look like in 50 years?
“The really scary thing is that Lovelock has been right about a whole bunch of things. Something you would do well not to discount”
Because he’s been right before he must be right today?
That’s the same line of logic people use in dismissing AGW today – because they were wrong before, they must be wrong today.
I think Eli’s dealing in hunches here, Andrew. If you want to know why, have a look at the sea ice in the Arctic, or the Greenland melt.
I can’t see how Lovelock’s fears can be taken too seriously, not to say that IPCC concerns should be considered the same way.
I don’t think a net reduction of global precipitation is on the cards and nor is a run away GH effect, so the rain has to fall somewhere, and of course the tropics are expected to be least affected by GW.
I don’t think anyone is taking Lovelock’s specific predictions seriously, but his sense of impending doom is infectious!