James Lovelock is perhaps the world's leading thinker on environmental issues – and his prognosis for the future of humanity is grim. In Ireland to speak at UCD this week, he tells RONAN McGREEVYwhy he thinks climate change is irreversible and why Ireland may become 'a lifeboat for humanity'
IT IS DIFFICULT to have a sense of perspective on future events when the present seems so dire. These are hard times, but they may be viewed by future generations as a golden era of plenty, punctuated by occasional minor reverses such as the one we are currently experiencing.
According to scientist James Lovelock, we are on the cusp of a global catastrophe that will make the present recession look trivial.
Within 30 years, he believes, the Arctic’s floating summer sea ice will all be melted. The polar caps will no longer reflect sunlight back into space and, instead, the ocean will absorb sunlight, heating up. The permafrosts in northern Canada and Siberia will thaw out, releasing carbon dioxide (CO2). At the same time, the tropical forests, which play a critical role in taking CO2 from the atmosphere, will die out. Global temperatures will rise by between five and six degrees in a short period of time, rendering most of the world uninhabitable for the vast majority of mankind.
What sets Lovelock apart from other climate scientists, most notably the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is the swift timetable he envisages and his belief that such change is irreversible and will take most of the human race with it.
“It is out of our hands. When the floating ice finally melts, it will be the equivalent of nearly all of the CO2 we have put in the atmosphere to date, so the earth begins to join in the act of global heating, doing it in a big way,” he says. “The earth is already moving to its hot stage. The hotter it gets, the faster it goes – and we can’t stop it.”
Lovelock is a former Nasa chief scientist, whose discovery of the electron capture device (ECD) helped to alert the world to the depletion of the ozone layer, but he is most famous for Gaia, his bold hypothesis, now a theory, that the world is itself a living organism.
It is hard to reconcile the dire predictions of impending apocalypse with the soft-spoken and genial man holding court in the lobby of a Dublin hotel. Lovelock will be 90 in July, yet he looks and sounds like a man who has just qualified for his bus pass.
He concedes, rather euphemistically, that the impending catastrophe will be a “very tough school” for mankind, but it may be necessary to save ourselves.
“Evolution has brought us to where we are now. These events improve us,” he says. Many of the IPCC scientists share his views privately, he maintains, but cannot say so in public.
We tend to think of our climate – the oceans and seas and surface rocks – as huge forces acting independently of all life, but the essence of Gaia theory is that life shapes the conditions for its own survival. The earth is like the human body. We shiver when we are cold and sweat when we are hot to maintain a constant body temperature, a process known as homeostasis. Plants and animals regulate the levels of CO2 in the air without which the earth would be an uninhabitable furnace like Venus. The composition of atmosphere and soil, and salination levels in the sea, are all regulated to enable the optimal conditions for life.
The problem, as Lovelock sees it, is that we have trashed the planet, destroying ecosystems and pumping harmful levels of CO2 into the air. The damage is already done.
The temperature rises will be permanent, he predicts, and Gaia will adjust. Life will survive, but there is no guarantee that human beings will.
He pours scorn on the idea that climate change can be reversible. For a man who is one of the world’s most noted environmentalists, he has a withering contempt for the green lobby, with its opposition to nuclear power (he is an unequivocal champion) and its support for renewable fuels (especially wind power, which he regards as a subsidised scam).
“I think humans just aren’t clever enough to handle the planet at the moment. We can’t even handle our financial affairs. The worst possible thing that could happen is the green dream of taking charge and saving the planet. I’d sooner a goat as a gardener than humans in charge of the earth,” he says.
He says a process called biochar carbon sequestration, which is gaining increasing credence, may be the only hope for mankind. It involves taking farmyard waste, such as wheat chaff, turning it into charcoal and then burying it, either on land or at sea, to prevent it releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
QUITE THE MOST dire of his predictions is that the human race will be reduced in numbers to around one billion people by the end of this century. The biggest problem, he believes, is that there are just too many of us. Simply by existing, we and our lifestock account for a quarter of all man-made CO2 emissions.
He is remarkably sanguine about this prediction. People die anyway, he says, they just will not live as long in the future. He may be an incredibly durable man, but he is unlikely to be around to see what he has forecast come to pass. However, he has nine grandchildren and a great-grandchild who was born earlier this year. I ask him if he worries about their future.
“I’m not callous,” he says. “I’m trying to encourage them to get to the right places. Many of them are in Australia, which I don’t think is a bad place to be because it is so lightly populated.
“I lived through the second World War and I thought it was exciting even though I was a pacifist. Life is going to be the opposite of boring. Young people will not regard the catastrophe in the same way as our generation will do.”
Though his predictions for the world are dire, his predictions for Ireland are of some small comfort. Because of our proximity to the sea, our relatively high latitude and our low population density, we may be spared the worst excesses of global warming.
He says Ireland, along with New Zealand, will be the “most fortunate countries on earth”. We will be a “lifeboat for humanity”, but a lifeboat can only take so many passengers.
"Ireland will be fortunate, but only if it can limit immigration to what it can carry," he says. "It is madness to let people flood in if you can't feed them. Ireland has been through that once, there is no need to go through it twice. If you are the captain of a lifeboat, you have got to decide who you can let in and who you can't. Otherwise everybody would sink." , is published by Penguin
The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, by James Lovelock