Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.
It follows a tumultuous few months in which public opinion on efforts to tackle climate change has been undermined by events such as the climate scientists' emails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit.
"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change," said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. "The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful."
One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."
Lovelock, 90, believes the world's best hope is to invest in adaptation measures, such as building sea defences around the cities that are most vulnerable to sea-level rises. He thinks only a catastrophic event would now persuade humanity to take the threat of climate change seriously enough, such as the collapse of a giant glacier in Antarctica, such as the Pine Island glacier, which would immediately push up sea level.
"That would be the sort of event that would change public opinion," he said. "Or a return of the dust bowl in the mid-west. Another Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report won't be enough. We'll just argue over it like now." The IPCC's 2007 report concluded that there was a 90% chance that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are causing global warming, but the panel has been criticised over a mistaken claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2030.
Lovelock says the events of the recent months have seen him warming to the efforts of the "good" climate sceptics: "What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: 'Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?' If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours.
via James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change | Environment | The Guardian.
I agree. Denial may doom our species... but at the moment there are waaaaay too many of us... so bring on the floods. Our descendants who survive the hot phase will be amazing individuals.
4 comments:
Well said, James. But, it's a slight under-statement, I'd say. You'd think we would have learned something from our past "intelligent" accomplishments of destruction ...
Oops! Sorry about the inclusion of xag-apziq name with mine in the last comment, but I'm sure he(or her or it) would agree.
Actually, a trip to the local University will set you folks straight about human potential and optimism! New students are STILL showing up with notions like "a six thousand year-old Earth" and "Deep Impacts are just movies." Can you believe it? In 2010, one can actually get accepted into state colleges without having a clue where we came from or how long it took us to get to this point. THAT is depressing to me, and it's probably a good example of what James Lovelock means. How in the world could anyone expect survival from a species that a.)is a product of evolution, and b.)is moderately ignorant of how evolution works, and c.)isn't even sure anything evolves at all? We might survive, but it's looking increasingly bleak as far as our status as the top of the food chain goes. EVERY mass extinction gave rise to a different group of animals to the top; if we're at the top now we have no reason whatsoever to believe that we will continue to dominate after the next big cataclysm.
Nice comment Sam.
It's certainly a sad state of affairs. It makes me think that humans' "tool-making" ability has far out-paced their intellectual capacity or to allow for its simultaneous growth. The inventive-creative process that humans have for making different sorts things, gadgets and devices (i.e technology) (and of course the theories behind them), doesn't seem to require knowledge of the world into which they are used - a knowledge that appears should have been taught. A failure in education, but actually it's a failure in the discontinuation of very ancient oral traditions that teaches man's place the ecological in the scheme of the natural world.
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