16 Februaary 2009
by Camilla Cavendish
You may feel, as job losses soar and parts of the world descend into turmoil, that you're apocalypsed-out for February. If so, you may not immediately leap at James Lovelock's forthcoming book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. His warning that climate change is spinning us into a hot world, where billions will starve and whole ecosystems will collapse, is a horror few want to contemplate, leavened only by the faint consolation that those of us lucky enough to live in the British Isles, Siberia, Chile, Canada or New Zealand may survive. But his prophecies are plausible and they will also make you think, which are two good reasons to grit your teeth and read him.
It is human nature to prefer writers who confirm the accepted wisdom to those who speak inconvenient truths. Look at the journalists who warned two years ago that Iceland's banks were over-leveraged. Remember the late fund manager Tony Dye, who was ridiculed for predicting the dotcom bust and was fired by his employer, Phillips & Drew, only weeks before the stock market turned. The media has been similarly dismissive of scientists who fear that it is too late to avert serious climate change. We prefer those who warn that there are dangers, but that they are far off and containable. Four years ago, when Lovelock forecast widespread devastation, he was generally dismissed as a lovable "maverick", a word that always makes me sit up because it is a favourite weapon of the Establishment to fend off difficult ideas.
Suddenly, in 2009, Lovelock's fears strike a chord. The Vanishing Face of Gaia has been hailed as "the most important book for decades" by Andrew Marr, a man not especially sympathetic to green issues or conspiracies. The book is powerful, not only because of the scary scale and speed of change that Lovelock foresees, making the first chapters as pacey as a Hollywood romp, but also because he is a serious, hands-on scientist. While working at Nasa in the 1960s he invented the electron capture detector, which enabled him to point the world to the dangers of the ozone hole and pesticides such as DDT. He has also built spy gadgets for MI6. Nor is he a conventional green. He loathes wind farms, is passionately pro-nuclear and is scathing about "saving the planet". The planet will look after itself, he says. It's humans we need to save, and soon.
What Lovelock calls his "final warning" (he is 90) has new resonance because of the increasingly alarming data that is coming from the observation of everything from species numbers and deforestation to sea levels and Arctic ice. Satellite images and expeditions suggest that Arctic summer sea ice is disappearing much faster than was thought even two years ago. Then, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that this ice would disappear towards the end of this century. Now, scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, Cambridge University and elsewhere, are predicting that the summer sea ice may disappear in 20 years.
Why does this matter? Because ice reflects sunlight. A dark iceless sea will absorb it. If the Arctic does an "albedo flip" from light to dark, this could raise sea levels and melt parts of the Arctic permafrost that are keeping the lid on enormous quantities of greenhouse gases. As a result, Jim Hansen of Nasa has said that the IPCC models that expect gradual changes may be woefully misleading. Hansen points out that when temperatures increased to between 2 and 3 degrees above today's level 3.5 million years ago sea levels rose by 25m, not the 59cm being predicted by the IPCC. Like Lovelock, Hansen is dismissed in some quarters as an extremist. I had dinner with him last year in London. He came across as supremely rational.
Even a 5m rise in sea level would dramatically change life for millions of people. While only 2 per cent of the world's land is less than 10m above the mid-tide sea level, it is inhabited by 10 per cent of the world's population. A 5m rise would inundate large parts of cities, including London, New York, Sydney, Vancouver, Mumbai and Tokyo, and leave their surrounding areas vulnerable to storm surges. Shanghai has an average elevation of only 4m. Whole regions of Florida, Louisiana, the Netherlands and Bangladesh would also vanish. This is one reason why the Dutch have been at the forefront of developing renewable energy and floating houses - 60 per cent of them live at or below sea level - and the dykes and pumps they have built are increasingly vulnerable to flooding. The feared 25m rise is predicted to occur within our lifetimes. To put it another way, our grandchildren will be living in this submerged world.
As we begin 2009 there is a striking gap between the tone struck by politicians and business leaders, who are beginning to take climate change seriously, but with a "we can beat it" tone, and scientists who are getting markedly more gloomy. In the past year researchers at the University of East Anglia have suggested that the Gulf Stream will be altered by changes in Arctic temperatures. The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has stated that world carbon emissions must peak by 2015 and disappear altogether by 2050. Dr Vicky Pope, at the Met Office Hadley Centre, has said that temperatures will rise by 5C by the end of the century if no action is taken. The mainstream view is that such an increase would be catastrophic.
You can question these figures. The Met Office isn't great at predicting the weather three days ahead: how can it know what will happen in 2100? There has been a steady rise in sea level for the past decade but little change - possibly even a drop - in global temperature. This must surely cast doubt on the warming-world thesis, a point made elegantly by Nigel Lawson in his book Appeal to Reason. Lovelock himself admits that there are still huge gaps in our knowledge. The Earth's system is so complex and interconnected that, he says, "we are like a 19th-century physician trying to give a sensible prognosis to a patient with diabetes".
So why is he so sure that the hot world is on its way, within decades? "Compare the Earth with an iced drink," he says. "The drink stays cold until the last of the ice melts ...a great deal of the heat of global heating has gone into warming that huge lump of water, the ocean, and into melting ice." This could help to explain why temperatures have not yet risen. The danger is that they will rise rapidly once the ice disappears, causing the Earth to flip into a permanently hotter state.
"There is a trustworthy indicator of the Earth's heat balance, and that is the sea level. Its rise is a general and reliable indicator that cuts through arguments as to whether some glaciers are melting and others advancing. The sea level rises for two reasons only: from ice on land that melts and from the expansion of the ocean as it warms. It is like the liquid in a thermometer: as the Earth warms the sea level rises."
Even if concerns about sea-ice are overdone, Lovelock thinks that global warming is not the only problem. He is one of the few scientists prepared to address the deeply unfashionable issue of population. Even if we were not pumping so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere by heating buildings and driving, he believes, the Earth cannot support seven billion people who are destroying natural habitats and species at a rate not seen since the death of the dinosaurs. This is not romantic: by razing forests and making the oceans barren we are reducing the planet's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. We cannot solve the problem simply by abandoning fossil fuels, he believes. In fact, one theory, of global dimming, suggests that our pollution haze partially shields us from the Sun's heat. If European governments ever deliver on their grand promises to reduce emissions by 60 per cent, the atmosphere may get hotter. What a scary Catch-22.
The thought that maybe nothing can be done will be anathema to the many scientists and entrepreneurs who are being swept up in what I have previously called a new Green Rush, accelerated in the past two weeks by President Obama's declaration of war on global warming. But it is worth thinking through the worst-case scenario. Lovelock believes that many countries will be wiped out by drought but certain temperate ones will remain fertile, rather conveniently including Britain and New Zealand. These will be the "lifeboats" of the world. Their leaders will have to take difficult decisions about who to let on board, creating the hideous spectre of a fortress Britain, with land divided rigidly between high-density cities and intensive farming.
Lovelock's views about energy are equally controversial. Crusty greens who are attracted to the New Ageiness of "Gaia", Lovelock's concept of the Earth as one living whole , will be spitting lentils at his ideas about energy. He believes that renewable energy is "an elaborate scam" made possible by enormous subsidies. He loathes the ugliness of wind farms and thinks that Europe's widespread use of wind "will be remembered as one of the great follies of the 21st century".
It is great to hear someone challenging the accepted wisdom about alternative energy. But he lacks the detailed knowledge that he has about the atmosphere. Tom Burke, of Imperial College (an opponent of nuclear power), says that Lovelock is "very knowledgeable about how Earth systems work, and he is right about the need to integrate science. But he does not apply the same intellectual rigour to his judgments about energy".
Nevertheless, he is right when he rails that environmentalism has come too close to being a religion, "complete with dogma, icons and simple answers to all environmental problems". This book makes you realise that nothing - GM food, nuclear power, family planning - should be taboo. The problem is that his descriptions of the Earth as Gaia, a living system, are so religious in tone.
But Lovelock does offer some hope: for example, that climate change could be reversible through geo-engineering, by reflecting the Sun's heat back into space (for instance, with giant sunshades or artificial clouds) or by fertilising the oceans to grow more algae and remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Meanwhile Lovelock is about to blast off into space, courtesy of Sir Richard Branson's "ultimate upgrade" on Virgin Intergalactic. He wants to see the Earth before she fades from the blue and green we know to the brown that he fears. We must hope that he is wrong. But if we face the possibility that he could be right, we have a better chance to avoid that future.
