I, HUMBLE DOCTOR TO THE PLANET...:

The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years: Each nation must find the best use of its resources to sustain civilisation for as long as they can ( James Lovelock, 16 January 2006, Independent)

This article is the most difficult I have written and for the same reasons. My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 per cent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

By failing to see that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we have blundered into trying to do it ourselves, acting as if we were in charge.

Boy, haven't been this scared since Malthus/Darwin/Ehrlich/etc.... warned about diminishing resources and survival pressures....

The great thing about this sort of nonsense is that it discredits sciencism generally. Michael Crichton's amusing, if pedantic, State of Fear has one hilarious section where he demonstrates, probably too well for his own broader purposes, that scientists arrive at whatever result they choose to: "All that matters is that hundreds of studies prove again and again that expectations determine outcome. People find what they think they'll find.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 17, 2006 9:25 PM