James Lovelock has gone off the deep end

Environment in crisis: 'We are past the point of no return'

Professor Lovelock, who conceived the idea of Gaia in the 1970s while examining the possibility of life on Mars for Nasa [sic] in the US, has been warning of the dangers of climate change since major concerns about it first began nearly 20 years ago.

He was one of those chosen to brief Margret Thatcher on the coming climate change back in 1989. (This was part of Thatcher’s desire to spark nuclear power plant construction. She felt if people believed in climate change due to CO2, she could get them to accept nuclear power plants as an alternative to coal fired plants. More history of the global warming scare here.)

In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today's Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late.
The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster timescale, than almost anybody realises, he believes. He writes: " 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."

Lovelock sees an ever increasing spiral that is unstoppable; one which will bring the European continent to unbelievably high temperatures.

Rather than calling for further ways of countering climate change, he is calling on governments in Britain and elsewhere to begin large-scale preparations for surviving what he now sees as inevitable - in his own phrase today, "a hell of a climate", likely to be in Europe up to 8C hotter than it is today.

And all this is to happen during this century.

Definitely bonkers. The old boy should be fitted for a white coat with super long arms.

(PS. I am writing this as I look out the window at the snow falling here in the north-central mountains of Pennsylvania. It was 14 degrees F this morning and we already had a foot of snow on the ground. New Hampshire and Vermont may end this storm with as much as three feet of snow.)