Thursday March 15, 2007

The Guardian

If you think Britain is intolerably crowded today, you might well want to

brace yourself before reading the next sentence. Because this country is

going to become much, much more densely populated over the course of this

century as millions of people flee the uninhabitable desert that mainland

Europe is doomed to turn into.

Such at least is James Lovelock's fear. The esteemed - if controversial -

environmentalist and futurologist (he prefers to be called a planetary

physician) also believes that by the middle of this century, the

America-sized chunk of floating ice that currently covers the Arctic will

melt. As a result, the current habitat of polar bears will eventually be the

place where we, or our probably very fed-up descendants, live out their

pitiful existences. "Most life will move up to the Arctic basin because only

it and a few islands will remain habitable," says Lovelock, who is most

famous for coming up with the so-called Gaia hypothesis - the idea that the

Earth functions as some kind of living super-organism.

Lovelock is now seriously concerned about said super-organism. Humanity's

vast output of carbon dioxide over the past two centuries has prompted the

deserts to spread towards the poles at an alarming rate, he says. "The

Sahara is heading north. So where's the food going to come from? Not from

the European mainland. Even here things are changing: there are in Britain

now scorpions and snails hitherto only seen in the Mediterranean. Recently I

saw hawk moths. Something terrible is happening." On the plus side, hawk

moths are very pretty, I suggest. "That's not really the point," says

Lovelock.

"I think people forget that the whole world is going to be affected," he

goes on. "Climate change will affect China and the US." Indeed, Lovelock

envisages that the Chinese people will press to live in a newly lush Siberia

before the century is out. "No wonder Putin is arming like mad. In fact,

Putin is one of the more far-sighted of global leaders." In the US, even

now, distinguished academics are contemplating moving north, Lovelock says.

"I gave a talk at Stanford [the Californian Ivy League university] a few

months ago. Professors, including Nobel prize winners, were coming up to me

asking where in Canada they should buy real estate because they believed me

when I said much of the US will be uninhabitable. "

Are they right to think that way? "Absolutely ... we should be scared stiff.

If you speak to any senior climatologists, the summer of 2003 [in which

thousands of Europeans, many of them elderly, perished in the heat] will be

the norm by 2050. Old people might have air conditioning, but that won't

help the plants which we need to regulate temperatures. It will become a

desert climate."

But what of Britain? Is this green and sometimes pleasant land doomed to

become desert too? Lovelock thinks not. "We'll be a bloody lifeboat for

Europe. It will be their right to come here too." Why? "Because we're all

members of the European community." Good point, but one tends to forget such

footling matters as the rights that go with EU membership when one is

staring global catastrophe in the face.

Lovelock reckons that the British Isles will be among the few island oases

in a world given over to desert, scrub and oceans devoid of life: "Everybody

in Europe will be wanting to come here." Even people who live in currently

delightful spots such as Cap d'Antibes and Siena. They aren't going to like

Milton Keynes or Cumbernauld one bit.

But then Lovelock reckons we need some radical rethinking in the way we

organise Britain. Only with greater population density in urban areas can it

be divided up in the way he believes to be sustainable: one third for

cities, industries, ports, airports and roads; the second third for

intensive farming, though only enough for the population's needs; and the

final third left entirely to the natural world.

Lovelock may sound extreme to some, but although he is regarded as a sort of

dotty uncle figure by some scientists, and his Gaia hypothesis has been

criticised by the likes of Richard Dawkins, others hold him in high regard.

His fans include biologist Lewis Wolpert, green thinker Jonathan Porrit,

geo-grapher Jared Diamond, and philosopher John Gray. The environmentalist

Fred Pearce once said Lovelock was to science what Gandhi was to politics;

Prospect magazine included him in its list of the world's top 100

intellectuals.

Why, you might well ask, will the British Isles be spared the desert fate

predicted for much of continental Europe? Because global warming will be, in

our blissful case, cancelled out by a fall in temperature caused by the

failure of the Gulf Stream. The suggestion comes from Lovelock's latest book

The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back and How We Can Still

Save Humanity.

If, as Lovelock forecasts, the Arctic ice melts as a consequence of global

warming, the Gulf Stream - the flow that moves warm water towards northern

Europe from the Caribbean - will cease. This possibility has long been the

subject of science fiction, with writers imagining the return of an ice age

to the British Isles and the east coast of North America. Lovelock now

thinks that possibility is less likely because any such cooling effect will

be cancelled out by global warming.

I walk out with Lovelock into the unseasonably mild air, for a turn around

Kensington Gardens in west London, where crocuses press their charms weeks

too soon.

As we stroll, the 87-year-old scientist says: "Not only is the world turning

and fearfully, but everything is happening very quickly." He points out that

carbon dioxide emissions warm the planet and in so doing destroy some of the

regulatory systems - such as the reflective powers of the poles' icy wastes

- that have kept the earth cool despite the increasing heat of the sun.

"Things are changing all the time, but because we live in towns we don't see

it. We modulate the temperature. We don't want to notice the big disturbing

picture, we want to see the next episode of the soap opera. There are

children," he says ruefully, shaking his head, "who live in cities and have

never seen the Milky Way."

Where did we go wrong? "If we were hunter-gatherers and this was a bigger

planet we would be all right. But we're not: we're farmers and that's what's

screwed us up. There are just too many of us living the way we do. Our

wrongdoing has been to take energy hundreds of times faster than it is made

naturally available."

How can we reduce human population to more sustainable levels? "We can't

solve the problem. There's no human way of cutting numbers. You can empower

women and persuade them to have fewer children butwe don't have the time for

that."

His diagnosis may be grim, but Lovelock's prognosis is much more bleak. He

suggests that the current population of six billion humans will be cut to a

more ecologically sustainable half-to-one billion people. "How will this

mass cull happen? "It'll be worse than Hitler - Gaia's going to do it," says

Lovelock. He writes about this chillingly at the outset of the Revenge of

Gaia, where he considers the December 2004 tsunami. "That awful event

starkly revealed the power of the earth to kill. The planet we live on has

merely to shrug to take some fraction of a million people to their deaths.

But that is nothing compared with what may soon may happen; we are now so

abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in

55 million years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will

die."

Lovelock first came up with the idea of Gaia 40 years ago to try to account

for his view that the planet's chemistry, climate and veneer of life worked

together as a self-sustaining organism. It was widely ridiculed by

scientists. "One even called it an evil religion," he says with a giggle,

"but they later admitted not having read my books."

He maintains that no academic scientist would have been able to come up with

such a radical idea as Gaia. "I hate academia. Most of the scientists who

work there are not free men any more and they can't speak out. That's no way

to do science." He believes the increasing specialisation of university

science departments has made academic scientists unlikely to have the

overview necessary to envisage the Earth as a self-regulating organic

system.

As we walk, Lovelock talks about Gaia. "She's an old lady who has lived for

three and a half billion years but she only has half a billion to one

billion to go," he says. "She's a bit like me - near the end of her life.

I'm pretty unlikely to live beyond 100. She will die the same way as me."

How? "Your ability to resist perturbations gets less as you get older."

Looking at the dead red landscape of Mars, as he did during his years as an

independent scientist, gave him a premonition of what Earth might become

like if global warming continues. "Vast tracts of it will become like Mars -

uninhabitable for humans." His suggestion is that all we can do is minimise

humanity's impact on Gaia. "We have got into this mess by burning carbon. We

shouldn't have burned things in the atmosphere to get energy. We shouldn't

have burned forests to drive out animals as a cheap way of hunting, because

Gaia demands that the forests are kept in order to regulate her temperature

and health."

I suggest to Lovelock there are many sceptics about global warming. For

instance, Michael Crichton, in his novel State of Fear, suggested that

global warming was a fiction, while Mother Theresa said in 1988 that the

fate of the planet was not humanity's concern, adding: "God will take care

of the Earth." Recently Newsweek columnist George F Will wrote that the

central tenets of the global warming thesis are all unproven, and that the

benefits of trying to reverse it will far exceed the costs. "Maybe they're

right," says Lovelock, sarcastically.

He goes on: "There are several things we can and should do to make the

situation better, but they will only be like dialysis machines are for a

kidney patient. It's not going to cure you." His suggestions for

ameliorating global warming are intriguing. Among them are massive

terrestrial or space-mounted sun shades to cool ourselves back to

pre-industrial temperatures. He also supports the idea of the artificial

production of clouds across large areas of the sky in order to reduce the

input of solar radiation. His book also calls for sailing ships and even

giant sailing airships for sustainable long-distance travel.

Lovelock, who is pro nuclear power, derides renewable energy, such as wind

power. "It's gesture stuff. I'm not anti-wind turbines. You need

5-10-megawatt ones on oil platforms in the sea because the wind is more

reliable at sea. Planting thousands of them in the country-side is not going

to solve the problem." Nor does he like biofuels. Indeed, he is suspicious

of any policy that results in more land being used in cultivation. "Gaia

needs at least a third of the land for self-regulation. "

Before we part, I ask Lovelock, who lives in Cornwall, if he is utterly

gloomy about the future. "No! Humans have gone through seven major climactic

changes in the million years we've been around. Even those changes - ice

ages - were ones we adjusted to. Admittedly, those adjustments usually took

place over thousands of years, and ours will involve an adjustment in little

more than two centuries, but we are flexible as a species." He draws a

parallel with his wartime experiences in London: "I was here for much of the

war and when it happened it wasn't as bad as we had thought it would be. If

people are honest, they rather enjoyed it. It could well be similar in the

next few decades. Life will become a little more interesting than it was

before."

· The Revenge of Gaia is published by Penguin, price £8.99.