Apocalypse now

Whether it’s something in the air (such as greenhouse gases) or something in the economy (such as oil and food prices), the only field where there currently seems to be a boom is in gloom. But it’s not just ranters wearing bathrobes on street corners: Some of the most respected thinkers about science and society are issuing alarming prognostications about humanity coming to an end, with a bang or with a whimper.

Canadians, brace yourselves: One day soon, something unusual may be showing up on the border – climate refugees trying to stream into the country from the United States.

If global warming really starts to unfold, according to well-known British scientist and author James Lovelock, it will lay such waste to the U.S. that millions of desperate people will be fleeing a country no longer suitable for human habitation in favour of the newly temperate regions of Northern Canada.

It may seem far-fetched that Americans – people obsessed, as Canadians subjected to the latest passport requirements know, with the security of their own borders – might turn into illegal immigrants. But not to Mr. Lovelock, who says global warming will get so bad in the years ahead that he “can assure you” that we’ll be facing an influx of unwelcome Americans in search of greener pastures.

In the 1970s, Dr. Lovelock gained worldwide renown for his Gaia hypothesis, the New Age-sounding idea that the entire Earth should be viewed as a kind of living organism, with a system of interactions that make it a Goldilocks planet – not too hot or too cold, but just right for living things. It was a scientific foundation for the idea that there really is a Mother Earth.

But these days he is fretting that Mother Earth is ready to whack us, big-time. In one of the gloomiest forecasts yet by a respected mainstream scientist or academic, he thinks nothing less than that the environmental apocalypse is at hand.

And he’s not alone. In the past year, amid financial panics, wild fluctuations in oil prices and reports on global warming happening faster than anyone expected, there’s a spate of books making the case that something monumentally bad is about to unfold.

Globe and Mail