Published: January 03, 2007 11:09 am      

Have we passed the point of no return?

Tuesday, January 2, 2007 — Dr. James Lovelock is a former NASA scientist who proposed the Gaia Theory while helping NASA look for signs of life on Mars.

In the 1960s the theory was considered revolutionary, but now it is widely accepted.

According to the Gaia Theory, the entire Earth is a living organism, and all the living things on the planet are part of its metabolism. All of these systems self-regulate, just as any other living organism self-regulates. Think of people, plants and animals as ‘cells’ in the organism of the Earth.

According to Lovelock, the Earth has a fever. Climate change caused by global warming could make large parts of the Earth uninhabitable and could potentially threaten the lives of billions of people.

Earlier this year Lovelock published a paper in which he states that in his opinion we have “already passed the point of no return” to avoid planetary climate change on a catastrophic scale.

Lovelock, no stranger to climate research and planetary modeling, said that a traumatized Earth, one impacted by global warming, might only be able to support and sustain less than a tenth of the current world population. “A hot Earth couldn’t support much over 500 million,” Lovelock told reporters at a press conference recently.

"Almost all of the systems that have been looked at are in positive feedback, and soon those effects will be larger than any of the effects of carbon dioxide emissions from industry and so on around the world," he added.

The rise in average temperature worldwide could bring floods, famines, much stronger storms and hurricanes, and global chaos as nations fight over dwindling resources.

"It is a bit like if your kidneys fail you can go on dialysis, and who would refuse dialysis if death is the alternative. We should think of it in that context," he said.

Lovelock believes that although we have passed the point of no return to prevent continued global warming, if we take drastic, firm action now to cut carbon emissions we could minimize the damage.

He doesn’t think that the entire human race will be wiped out if this disaster strikes, but he does think that we are facing a dramatically different future.

"In the change from the last Ice Age to now we lost land equivalent to the continent of Africa beneath the sea," he said.

"We are facing things just as bad or worse than that during this century."

As global warming progresses, Lovelock sees vast global migrations as humans and other life forms move to the Polar Regions. These regions will be warmer, whereas areas currently occupied will be intolerably hot, especially near the equator.

Developing nations like China and India could tip the scales one way or another very rapidly.

Both countries are building coal-burning power plants to fuel their increasing energy needs.

If they stopped such developments they would be facing rebellion and revolution, yet if they continue, rising carbon emissions will cause even higher temperatures, which will kill of plants and animals and produce famine in these countries.

"If climate change goes on course, I can't see China being able to produce enough food by the middle of the century to support its people. They will have to move somewhere and Siberia is empty and it will be warmer then," he said.

If Lovelock is correct in his assessment, global change may be on us even sooner than we expected, possibly as early as the end of the century. Unless drastic measures are taken, the world in which our grandchildren live will be vastly different from the world in which we grew up.



Chuck Hall is a Sustainability Consultant and author. His latest book, Green Circles, will be available in Spring 2007. You may contact him by email at: chuck@cultureartist.org or visit the Culture Artist Web site at www.cultureartist.org.