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  BBC 6 Jul 06
The illness in Planet Earth
VIEWPOINT by James Lovelock

BBC 6 Jul 06
Climate change 'real and severe'
By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website

An expert panel convened by BBC News has concluded that climate change is "real and dangerous".

Temperatures are likely to rise by 3C to 5C by the end of the century, with impacts likely to be "severe" but not "catastrophic", the panel said. It also concluded that politicians are unlikely to cut emissions sufficiently to prevent dangerous global heating.

The panel's discussions were based on themes set by Professor James Lovelock in his latest book The Revenge of Gaia. The book argues that human society, through greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of environmental degradation, has brought the natural world to the brink of a crisis.

Temperatures will rise, Professor Lovelock warns, reliable supplies of water will be disrupted, life in the oceans will be compromised, food production will decline, and there will be mass migrations to areas of the planet's surface which remain habitable.

With fossil fuels currently the dominant source of energy, he sees a large-scale switch to nuclear power as vital if electricity supplies are to continue reliably and carbon dioxide emissions are to be brought down.

Testing times

After its publication earlier this year, The Revenge of Gaia was criticised by some scientists who felt it painted an overly apocalyptic vision and did not reflect uncertainties in scientific understanding.

Despite the phrase "How we can still save humanity" in the book's subtitle, others argued it was an alarmist text, likely to promote despair and hopelessness rather than being a "call to action", as the author intended.

For perspectives on these issues, BBC environment affairs analyst Roger Harrabin brought together a panel of seven eminent academics with expertise including climate modelling, the Antarctic, and social aspects of environment policy.

On Monday and Tuesday they discussed and debated issues raised in The Revenge of Gaia in BBC Broadcasting House in London, a discussion recorded for use on Thursday's edition of the Today programme on Radio 4 and for a future BBC World Service broadcast.

'Pessimistic but possible'

There was general agreement that Professor Lovelock had used rather severe projections of future climate change. But, he insisted, he had not gone further than the science indicated; a temperature rise of between 3C and 5C over this century was within the range projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its most recent major report. Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, declared that Professor Lovelock's choice was fully justified.

"The fact that you've been taking higher-end, pessimistic predictions of the IPCC is something that shouldn't be dismissed," he said, "even if there's only a 5% or even a 1% probability that they might be real. "Would you get on an aeroplane if the pilot told you there was a 5% or a 1% probability that you wouldn't reach your destination? No of course you wouldn't; you have to take even very low-probability scenarios very seriously."

The panel spent a vigorous session debating how precisely to word their view of the climate "threat", eventually concluding unanimously that it will "probably bring severe changes" to human societies and rejecting the phrase "catastrophic changes".

There was acknowledgement that some areas of climate-related science remain substantially uncertain. The behaviour of forests and the impacts of rising greenhouse emissions on oceans were two fields picked out as needing further study.

Hans von Storch from the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, cautioned against making public statements on the basis of science that is not fully mature.

Early computer models of climate, he said, had predicted increases in storminess, which had not shown up in later, more sophisticated models. "So as long as we simply play around with these models as toys and enjoy ourselves and develop our knowledge, that's fine," he said. "But if we at the same time go out and speak to journalists and say 'therefore we will have this and that disastrous event', I think we are doing a disservice to the public."

Nuclear solution

There was general agreement that the rising global population and rising levels of consumption are major issues which are largely absent from discussion in political and public circles in many countries.

But on nuclear power, Professor Lovelock found himself at odds with the BBC panel. While declaring it an option meriting "full public and political discussion" for the UK, they could not endorse his view in The Revenge of Gaia that it was "the only effective medicine we have now".

Professor Lovelock insisted he did not rule other energy options out. "I'm not a nuclear fanatic, I don't believe in it for all the world, or that it's the absolute solution for everything," he told the panel. "But it happens to be the cheapest, the cleanest, and the most reliable source of electricity; and that's the key thing, electricity. You can't run a modern city without it; London would die within a week, totally die, if the electricity supply was cut off."

'In our own grasp'

If the panel endorsed Professor Lovelock's climate diagnosis, what of its potential impact on society?

Views were divided on whether it was likely to promote action or apathy. "I hope the reaction won't be the one that I think there may be, that everything is so bleak that we should just throw up our hands and enjoy what remains, or commit suicide, or whatever occurs to us," said chairman Brian Hoskins of Britain's Reading University. "I think it should be a call for action, and that action has to involve organisations and governments worldwide."

The panel did not believe, however, that governments were hearing alarm bells as loudly as they should, with only one of the seven members feeling that carbon emissions would be cut sufficiently to avoid "dangerous" warming.

Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, contended that the die had not yet been cast. "Whether the very serious and gloomy scenarios that Jim is emphasising come about is really within our own grasp," he said. "I'm confident on the technology; I'm much less confident that we have the social and political will to make the hard decisions that are required.

"The future is not inevitable, but we have to work hard to avoid the scenarios Jim has described."

BBC 6 Jul 06
The illness in Planet Earth
VIEWPOINT by James Lovelock

Planet Earth is unwell, argues James Lovelock in The Green Room. Emissions of greenhouse gases and other environmental changes have, he says, brought humanity and the natural world to the edge of crisis.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in 2001, is one of the scariest documents you will ever read. It talks about changes to the Earth by the end of this century which will be as great or greater than occurred between the end of the last Ice Age and the time when humans started changing the atmosphere; it is huge.

It alarms me, and it should alarm anyone. Just imagine that you had lived 12,000 years ago, before the last Ice Age ended, in a tropical civilisation somewhere in South-East Asia.

What would have been your reaction if some scientist had told you that within not too many years the sea level would rise by 120m, by 400ft?

What the precise impacts of elevated greenhouse gas levels will be I cannot say; but we are on course for changes on that sort of scale. In addition, as the world gets very hot, it will not be able to produce anything like as much food as it does now; so quite literally, billions of us are going to be faced with starvation.

These issues amount to a challenge far greater than anything humanity has faced since the shift out of the last Ice Age into the interglacial period.

Dead worlds

As a Gaian scientist, a general practitioner of planetary medicine, I have spent decades trying to see the Earth and life on it as an integrated whole. It is not only climate change and the emissions of gases which are causing it - carbon dioxide, methane, halocarbons, nitrous oxides - which concerns me.

At the same time we are taking for our own purposes more and more of the natural ecosystems that usually regulate conditions at the planet's surface. We are denuding forests, changing biodiverse lands into monoculture deserts, acidifying the oceans.

To put Earth's self-regulation into perspective, compare our planet with its neighbours, Venus and Mars. These I call "dead" planets - there is no life at all, and they show no sign of regulation. Their temperature follows what the Sun does; as it warms up, they grow hotter.

If there were no life on Earth, the temperature on our planet would be way up above 60C, possibly 100C; there would be no water, it would be a giant arid desert, just like Mars and Venus.

It is instead a cool, beautiful world, because of the life that is on it. It has been present for three and a half billion years; and however the Sun's output of energy has changed, life has kept the planet comfortable for itself, for its continued survival.

The life out there is necessary for our welfare; we cannot just go taking it for our convenience, cutting down forests, turning the productive oceans into the marine equivalent of deserts, and expect Gaia not to take revenge.

Grim future

In 100 years' time, I would expect life to be very grim. I suspect that people will be migrating towards what will be more comfortable parts of the Earth like the Arctic basin. To an extent Siberia and northern Canada may flourish.

The British Isles, I have often felt, will be blessed, because our oceanic position means that the intolerable heat that will hit Europe even by mid-century will not affect us anything like as badly.

But social effects there will certainly be. Many good scientists say that by 2050, almost every summer in Europe will be as hot as it was in 2003. In that case I can foresee a mass movement of people from mainland Europe to Britain, because they are free to come, it is their right to come. We are overcrowded enough already; where are we going to put them?

Call to arms

During the last week I have had the benefit of wise comments from seven well-respected scientific peers who have examined the content and the message of my book. I have listened to what they have all said and taken it aboard.

Having done that, my general feeling is there is not a lot I would rewrite; I would be more careful in the way I phrased some passages, but the content would be pretty much the same.

And it is crucial to see what the book is not. It is often claimed to be a counsel of despair; critics say it will cause people to throw up their arms and say "what's the point of doing anything, let's just enjoy it while it lasts".

It isn't that at all. I compare these times to the period just before World War Two; I remember it so vividly, because I was a young student in those days, and concerned about things.

People did not see the almost inevitable consequence of war coming as something to be frightened of; they saw it as an opportunity, strangely enough. And once war did come, people were amazingly busy, finding jobs, doing all sorts of things; there was a sense of purpose around.

I hope that as climate change worsens that same sense of purpose, that almost tribal pulling together, will work again, to find such solutions as are still available in Gaia's damaged state.

Professor James Lovelock is an independent scientist and the originator of the Gaia hypothesis His recent book The Revenge of Gaia formed the basis of a BBC panel discussion on Monday and Tuesday

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental issues running weekly on the BBC News website A series of thought-provoking environmental opinion pieces
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