Friday, 20 December 2013

The Revenge Of Gaia

The 19th annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is beginning in Warsaw this week with an apparent ‘mood of realism’ over future climate deals. This is much needed as the the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) has recently stated that rich countries are spending seven times more supporting coal, oil and gas than they are on helping poorer nations fight climate change!

Against this backdrop I thought it might be 'fun' to examine an apocalyptic scenario I’ve wanted to cover for a little while given that it encompasses James Lovelock's ideas.
James Lovelock is one of the most famous geographers/environmentalists out there. He had a great 'eureka' moment over the earth's atmosphere. This was known as Gaia - a new way of thinking about the Earth as a holistic, self-regulating system. In essence he believes that if left to itself, the Earth will stabilise itself between certain boundary points (think back to the ball rolling in the bowl analogy) and can thus be viewed as an organism i.e. alive! It's a fascinating idea, and one that I put some stock in so I would thoroughly recommend investigating Gaia and James Lovelock himself - especially as i will be later returning to his ideas on nuclear energy as the only realistic green alternative to fossil fuels. His ideas are certainly 'out-there' at times, but are enthralling to read, if not daunting, and I feel are possible to be proved correct, although maybe not too the the extent he fears. The general scientific consensus is that warming will be more than 2 degrees celsius, meaning some regions of the globe will experience some dangerous climate change.
To get to the point of Lovelock's ideas in relation to tipping points, i.e. moving beyond a self-regulating, self-stabilising system (due to human input of Green House Gases (GHGs). Here is an exert from the BBC 4 series Beautiful Minds. If you could watch it now it will nicely summarise the degree of danger Lovelock perceives us to be in. Only 1 billion people to survive? 
Note in the video when he states: 
"When it gets too much, Gaia can't cope with it" - this is him referring to the tipping point.




As I'm sure you've gathered he is certainly in the 'Alarmist' camp, and is certainly controversial, it is wrong to simply dismiss him as over dramatic (although some people do just that). The melting of ice caps will as he says reduce the reflectivity (known scientifically as 'albedo') and cause further warming. As we've previously covered in the blog, this is known as a positive feedback mechanism as the process was instigated by rising CO2 levels. Lovelock believes that the further warming from this effect alone will equal the GHGs impact thus he thinks we are already in an irreversible dangerous world where terrible climate impacts await us in the next 100 years as the globe heats up. The possibility exists, to him, that less than a billion people will survive. This just isn't something people are willing to really contemplate yet.

James Lovelock's new book: The Revenge of Gaia, further builds on these ideas. He states that the Earth is about to pass into a morbid fever (remember that he likes to view the earth as an organism) that may last as long as 100,000 years. He states that as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger. We are the ones 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.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. Lovelock believes we are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and 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. 

It really is hard to even imagine the necessary degeneration needed for this to occur. 

To answer the question posed in my introductory post, over whether the film 'The Day After Tomorrow', was total bullsh*t or not? It seems not. Even wind turbines are turning against us.




Here's the Amazon link to his book:   

Over and out.

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