Respected scientist sees 6 billion perishing

James Lovelock, 88, ranks as one of the 20th century’s influential scientists. He invented the device that helped detect the growing hole in our ozone layer. And he introduced the theory of Gaia – the notion that our planet is a kind of superorganism that is, in a sense, “alive.”

Life is not just a passenger on Earth, but an active participant, helping to create the very conditions that sustain it.
While others still debate global warming or climate change, he is much farther down the road to a vantage point from where he can see “a dark time” where irreversible global warming will claim more than 6 billion people by the end of the century.

While many people are still content to think of balmy 80-degree temperatures at Halloween as an excuse to extend the golf season, even with widespread drought and California burning, Lovelock says in the Nov. 1 Rolling Stone that droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace by 2020.

At first, Lovelock didn’t regard global warming as an urgent threat to our planet, either, but has come to believe that climate balance is out of kilter due to pollution and deforestation.

“You could look at climate change as a response of the system to get rid of an irritating species – us humans,” he says.

Lovelock sees the Sahara Desert arriving in Europe and a Berlin as hot as Baghdad by 2040. Atlanta could be a kudzu jungle, with Phoenix, Las Vegas, Beijing, Miami (under the sea) and London (likewise flooded) uninhabitable.

Dowagiac Daily News