No return

The news about climate change, and its ramifications for human life, gets increasingly depressing with each passing day.

James Lovelock, a scientist who articulated the simple yet brilliant concept that it is possible to think of the Earth as one living unit (in the same way we might think of an individual cell, for example), believes that life as we know it is already irreversibly headed towards extinction.

In a recently published article, Lovelock writes, “Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

“Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 percent of the Earth’s surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.”

His haunting prediction: “Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable… We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of [CO2] emissions. The worst will happen…”

Lovelock’s conclusions hardly seem controversial in the wake of news reports, coming in almost daily, of haphazard weather and broken records. The European Environment Agency now states that water shortages and soaring temperatures in southern Europe are becoming the norm, and that climate models suggest much of the continent may start to become drier as deserts advance. Record freezing temperatures have been recorded in Moscow the last few days. And to add to all of this, scientists now fear that climate change is set to dramatically accelerate because of increasing carbon levels in the atmosphere.

All of this suggests that things on this planet are about to get much worse within a very short time frame, perhaps a decade.

Climate change is a difficult problem for people to grasp, because it goes hand-in-hand with modern life. Our lives, especially in the resource-wasteful United States, are made possible by the same forces that are now producing these incredibly catastrophic circumstances. We will not be able to mitigate climate change without altering our everyday habits and by questioning why it is we do what we do. We will have to un-zombify ourselves from the relentless mundanity of consumer society (especially from the media and all of its mindless and numbing consumer products) in order to truly grasp the potential scope of the problem and possible solutions.

This type of questioning is difficult for those open to it, and near impossible for everyone else. Yet there has never been a more critical time to engage in this type of self-examination. The alternative is to continue the steady and ever quickening slide to the barren and man-made fields of a collapsed global civilization.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 5:10 pm and is filed under A Changing Planet, Climate Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.