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Renowned scientist James Lovelock thinks mainland Europe will soon be desert - and millions of people will start moving north to Britain. Stuart Jeffries meets him http://environment.guardian.co.uk/ethic ... 70,00.html

Time to pack your bags and get movin' towards the Arctic which will be the only habitable land left. Lovelock appears every once in a while in papers (the last time was maybe three months ago) and he is a quintessential doomer of GW variety. Wonder how much he knows about PO? Gaia only provides so much crude until humanity exhausts it right about at the time that GW kicks in.

I think his timetable may be too soon but if he is talking a hundred years from now then I'll buy it. How 'bout you?

Lovelock? The one with "Gaia"? He comes trough as some kind of New Age romantic. I dont bother to much with him.

MacG wrote:Lovelock? The one with "Gaia"? He comes trough as some kind of New Age romantic. I dont bother to much with him.

He's far from New Age and a romantic but I understand you're sentiment. He is a GW doomer and I posted it just to see what the response was since GW is a popular topic here.

I think it was about 2000 that lovelock started pushing nuclear power as our only hope in saving the planet. He basically argued that all of the issues with it aside anything else would wipe us all out. Sometime last year people checked back with him on what he thought of the progress and he basically said go out and buy a ferrari or hummer, it doesn't matter anymore nothing can be done now.

When hardcore enviromentalists start pushing for the less of two evils you know you've really screwed things up.

When hardcore environmentalists give up and state it's too late you know you're really screwed.

Newsseeker wrote:

MacG wrote:Lovelock? The one with "Gaia"? He comes trough as some kind of New Age romantic. I dont bother to much with him.

He's far from New Age and a romantic but I understand you're sentiment. He is a GW doomer and I posted it just to see what the response was since GW is a popular topic here.

It can be argued that "Gaia" was hijacked by the new age, environmental, mother earth types. That put me off, but really it was simply putting the notion of the earth biosphere as a self correcting system into a word, to coin a phrase if you like.

A bit like Hawkings hand of god type stuff.

Grifter wrote:

Newsseeker wrote:

MacG wrote:Lovelock? The one with "Gaia"? He comes trough as some kind of New Age romantic. I dont bother to much with him.

He's far from New Age and a romantic but I understand you're sentiment. He is a GW doomer and I posted it just to see what the response was since GW is a popular topic here.

It can be argued that "Gaia" was hijacked by the new age, environmental, mother earth types. That put me off, but really it was simply putting the notion of the earth biosphere as a self correcting system into a word, to coin a phrase if you like.

A bit like Hawkings hand of god type stuff.

Uhu? So how could we mere humans ever come to believe that we could affect that Big Mother Gaia with our behavior then? We should be just fleas in the fur according to the original thinking?

Cognitive dissonance. Big time.

MacG wrote:

It can be argued that "Gaia" was hijacked by the new age, environmental, mother earth types. That put me off, but really it was simply putting the notion of the earth biosphere as a self correcting system into a word, to coin a phrase if you like.

A bit like Hawkings hand of god type stuff.

Uhu? So how could we mere humans ever come to believe that we could affect that Big Mother Gaia with our behavior then? We should be just fleas in the fur according to the original thinking?

Cognitive dissonance. Big time.

Eh!

what you on about. we're part of the biosphere.

we're just clever enough to contemplate it.

Uhu?

Edit: edited for problems with quotes.

MacG wrote:Uhu? So how could we mere humans ever come to believe that we could affect that Big Mother Gaia with our behavior then? We should be just fleas in the fur according to the original thinking?

Cognitive dissonance. Big time.

Yea. Not like those itty bitty ol' cancer cells can have any kind of impact on big, bad ol' human body me...

MacG wrote: We should be just fleas in the fur according to the original thinking?
.

I worked for a veterinarian for a few years..... a bad enough flea infestation can make a dog REALLY sick, weaken the dog to the extent that it can die from other, opportunistic diseases and parasites.

Fleas are basically harmless in normal numbers on a healthy dog - that's like us as hunter-gatherers.

"Lovelock has no logic.
We will be without ability to go to the arctic by 2020, no fuel, no culture and no piston driven motors.
Since he didn't see what was coming, he isn't that smart."

They'll walk. There won't be any rush. It could take decades.

Pstarr is right on target. No new-ager, Lovelock's scientific credentials are impeccable, and the Gaia hypothesis as he originally stated it is now the dominant paradigm in its field.

As for Lovelock's doomerish tendencies, yeah the first time I heard him say all of that I nearly pooped in my pants.

He may be right, and we can all hope he's mistaken.

As it is, we're all going to find out.

Ludi, I like your emphasis on stopping. I see this more of an non-action (drawing on Taoism, here) than an action, but it is certainly what is needed now.

I like to use the word they use to train kids about how to react if their clothing catches fire: STOP, DROP, and ROLL.

STOP--as much non-discretionary travel and other unnecessarily wasteful activity as possible, starting with the easiest to stop an the most damaging per time spent doing it--flying, most meat eating...At the global level, stop spending any more money on military, stop un-sequestering any more carbon (aka extracting ffs, starting with coal, but moving rapidly to oil and then ng), stop raping the seas, forests and other ecosystems...

DROP--to a much lower-impact lifestyle, but ideally one that is much more fulfilling

ROLL--into a new way of life that does not consume more of the earth than can be regenerated (using www.myfootprint.org or other similar metrics)--this is also where some adjustments like super insulating buildings and some alternative energy sources come in. But these aren't "answers" to how we are going to continue a planet-destroying, high-consumption lifestyle.

We should carry out this program even, as seems to be the case, if the world is going to continue to spiral into runaway gw, since it is right.

But of course we won't.

We will continue to flail our arms around, spreading our fire to the rest of our clothes and to the rest of our already-on-fire house.

Cid_Yama wrote:We were just an extremely successful species, and our enormous numbers has altered the climate on a paleogeologic scale.

I would say that this is proof positive of Darwinian Evolution. Humans are more adaptable, smarter, but no less tied to our basic animal instincts.

The way things are headed, it looks like I'm going to STOP, DROP DEAD and ROLL into the grave.

dohboi wrote:STOP, DROP, and ROLL.

I like it.

Cid_Yama wrote:We were just an extremely successful species, and our enormous numbers has altered the climate on a paleogeologic scale.

Don't get ahead of yourself. It's not over quite yet.

Quite, since humans have spread all over the world and gained such diversity, the chance to survive the next environmental catastrophe has vastly increased! That is why this kind of strategy actually seems very good in an environment like Earth's, because if we hadn't, a simply catastrophe like an asteroid or a supervolcano could truly have exterminated the human species.

DefiledEngine wrote:Quite, since humans have spread all over the world and gained such diversity, the chance to survive the next environmental catastrophe has vastly increased! That is why this kind of strategy actually seems very good in an environment like Earth's, because if we hadn't, a simply catastrophe like an asteroid or a supervolcano could truly have exterminated the human species.

Humans already lived through an evolutionary bottleneck in Toba before we even came close to our current population size, not to mention next to no technology. There is really no benefit in survivability in being this huge.