Wikipedia may be making us smarter, but it’s not going to happen fast enough to save the planet, according to James Lovelock, the man who developed the concept of earth as Gaia—the planet as an organism, with its own homeostatic mechanisms and its own processes for protecting itself from disaster. Mankind has over-whelmed those processes and mechanisms, according to Lovelock, and it’s too late to do anything about it.The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia – the Earth which keeps itself fit for life.
In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today’s Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late.
The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster timescale, than almost anybody realises, he believes. He writes: " 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."
Lovelock’s new book, to be published in February, is titled “The Revenge of Gaia”. The only people whom it’s likely to make happy are the fundamentalist end-time crazies. Lovelock, in the Independent interview, describes as “a wake-up call”. But it seems to me that we’ll be waking up to a much worse nightmare than the one we were dreaming. It will be interesting, if disheartening, to see how our government’s respond to the message that Lovelock delivers.