Seasoned journalists tend to look down on the Q & A format as useful only for those who can't really write, but when it comes to truly original thinkers — such as James Lovelock, famous for the Gaia idea that the earth is a self-regulating system — I dare disagree.
It's difficult to hear "the voice" of genuine originals in brief snippets of quotes; frankly, they deserve a chance to speak at greater length. A good example is this alarming interview by New Scientist with Lovelock, in which he casually forecasts the death of billions of people this century, but at the same time offers an alternative to disaster.
Do you think we will survive?
I'm
an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2
°C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we
could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The
reason is we would not find enough food,
unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century
is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining
at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has
happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there
were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.
I
don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle
what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done
except endless talk and meetings.
Best of all, Lovelock as briefly as possible explains the "deep time" reason why so many scientists are so worried:
How much biodiversity will be left after this climatic apocalypse?
was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures
rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years. The world became
largely desert. The polar regions were tropical and most life on the
planet had the time to move north and survive. When the planet cooled
they moved back again. So there doesn't have to be a massive extinction.
I commend New Scientist for their open-mindedness, but must chide them for failing to distinguish (as Lovelock does) between the end of life as we know it (our civilization) and the end of our species ("mankind").
"One Last Chance to Save Mankind" was their headline, but as Andy Revkin and countless other scientific experts have said, the existence of our species is not threatened. Yet somehow, despite The Road and countless other harrowing stories of the apocalypse, the other obvious possibility — the collapse of our way of life — seems impossible for most non-scientists to believe. The New Yorker, for instance, last week sneered at "the doom boom" (not on-line).
Jeez, I'd think after seeing our economy melt down in a matter of months to a fraction of its former self, the possibility of disaster might become more realistic. But to TNY, evidently not…
Kit Stolz 