As independent scientist and futurist James Lovelock marked his 100th birthday recently, he must have pondered for the nth time the catastrophe that he postulates would have befallen Earth had it not deposited over the ages its huge age-old build-up of carbon dioxide back to its surface as calcium carbonate instead of returning it to the atmosphere as gas, thus keeping the plant’s temperature down: “We would have been as hot and dead as Venus a long time ago.”
IMAGE CREDIT: HOMER SYKES/ALAMYLOVELOCK IN THE 1980S: HE NOW CALLS HIMSELF AN ENGINEER RATHER THAN A SCIENTIST
For such ideas Lovelock became an icon of environmentalism, “the prophet of Gaia,” and is recognized to have “contributed more to our understanding of the planet’s reaction to global warming than any other living person.”
As told by
New Statesman features editor Kate Mossman in a July 31, 2019 article, Lovelock had made this prediction this way back in 2010: “I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”
Lovelock said this with such chuckling demeanor that’s so at odds with his draconian predictions—that “most of the world will be uninhabitable by 2040, 80 per cent of humans will perish by the year 2100, with a few breeding pairs relegated to the Arctic.”
Read “James Lovelock at 100: “My life has been one mass of visions” in the July 31, 2019 issue of NewStatesman.com now!
