Super Eco

Photo credit: dmitri_c, SXC

Pack your bags and get ready to vacate Spaceship Earth, because within just a few years it could get mighty uncomfortable around here. We hope you like water, a LOT of water. And warm weather. At least, if James Lovelock has things right. In his forthcoming book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, he warns that the climate change problem is gong to be much worse than anyone is so far speculating, and the only thing we can do requires huge changes.

Some of Lovelock's predictions:

• ecosystem collapse
• billions starving
• only people who live in the British Isles, Siberia, Chile, Canada or New Zealand might survive
• (the rest of us will be under water or living where crops won't grow)
• sea levels may rise 25 meters within our lifetime
• (that will erase London, Shanghai, New York, Sydney, Vancouver, Mumbai and Tokyo as well as the Netherlands, Florida, and Bangladesh)

According to Lovelock, the damage is already done. He says that climate change could possibly be reversible through geo-engineering, reflecting the Sun's heat back into space, or by fertilizing the oceans to grow more algae and remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Not with wind farms, which he finds laughable. But by acknowledging that the Earth is a living system and that everything is connected.

Lovelock is a guy who should know his stuff. He's been around. In the 1960s he invented the electron capture detector which helped point out the dangers of the ozone hole and pesticides such as DDT. He's the originator of the Gaia Theory. On the other hand, he's pro-nuke—not your typical greenie.

Some dismiss him as radical, and we can hope all we want that he's wrong, but ... better to start making radical changes. Our planet can't really sustain 7 billion people. Change is coming.