James Lovelock and Gaia's 100,000-year-long morbid fever

[Dogmudgeon]

By any scenario you subscribe to (my own "favorite" is the bistable model that oscillates between mild periods and ice ages), the news is grim, and getting worse. James Lovelock, who gave us the Gaia Hypothesis, is likewise pessimistic. Today's clip doesn't even require the full four paragraphs:

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.

(read more in the UK Independent at http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article338830.ece)

In a million years, will our ancestors rediscover the science of archeology, and wonder what the hell pre-historic hominids were doing to leave so many curious artifacts in a stratum thick with polycyclic-aromatic carbon compounds? The Flaming Tarball Hypothesis -- that a previous human species had somehow developed high civilization, and was destroyed by an asteroid composed of superheated tar -- will prevail for a long, long time, until they figure out what really happened.

--p!

[file83]

1. It's a very appropriate analogy. Global warming as a fever to rid

the body of what ails it: people. Good article. Nice post.

[Skeptor]

2. W(h)ither Gaia

Energy Inc.'s response: simple - build more air conditioners!