The Sunday Times has begun publishing a series of excerpts from James Lovelock’s new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, due out at the end of this month. It makes bleak reading for climate optimists:
So are all our efforts to become carbon neutral, to put on sandals and a hair shirt and follow the green puritans, pointless? Can we go back to business as usual for a while and be happy while it lasts? We could – but not for long. Apart from a lucky break of a natural or a geo-engineered kind, in a few decades the Earth could cease to be the habitat of seven billion humans; it will save itself as it dispatches all but a few of those who now live in what will become the barren regions. Our greatest efforts should go to learning how to live as well as is feasible on the soon-to-be-diminished hot Earth.
Lovelock is riffing on the theme he developed in The Revenge of Gaia: it’s too late to stop rapid and highly damaging climate change, so we should concentrate on saving ourselves. Climate change will cull humanity: from seven billion down to one billion will deliver effective emissions reductions. Meanwhile, we should start looking for lifeboats.
There are some amazing people in NZ. Just when I’m tearing (what’s left of) my hair out at the