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January 16, 2006

The Earth Gets Even

Here's the kind of cheery stuff I like to wake up to on a Monday morning:

We've passed the point of no return on climate change.

James Lovelock, a celebrated British scientist whose well-established theory that the earth is a self-regulating entity with carefully balanced systems that allow life to flourish here (he originally called the mechanism "the biocybernetic universal system tendency" but eventually recrhistened it Gaia), is convinced that the systems that have longed kept the earth fit for life will now interact to make large portions of it uninhabitable.

Here's how Lovelock summarized his theory for a reporter from the Independent UK:

"If on Mars, which is a dead planet, you doubled the CO2, you could predict accurately what the temperature would rise to," he said.

"On the Earth, you can't do it, because the biota [the ensemble of life forms] reacts. As soon as you pump up the temperature, everything changes. And at the moment the system is amplifying change. "So our problem is that anything we do, like increasing the carbon dioxide, mucking about with the land, destroying forests, farming too much, things like that - they don't just produce a linear increase in temperature, they produce an amplified increase in temperature.

"And it's worse than that. Because as you approach one of the tipping points, the thresholds, the extent of amplification rapidly increases and tends towards infinity."

Lovelock has written a new book entitled The Revenge of Gaia, which details the devastation to be wrought by climate change and suggests that we prepare "a guidebook for global warming survivors"--though he doesn't imagine there will be many of them. Still, those few will need to know some of the things humanity struggled centuries to discover--like what bacteria and viruses are and what they do, or the layout of the solar system.

A separate story reports that findings taken from readings done at the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that "Global warming is set to accelerate alarmingly because of a sharp jump in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."

And yet another story informs us that not only climate change but nasty chemicals flowing to the Arctic (which is, apparently, one of the "sinks" of the world) are combining to threaten polar bears in unprecedented ways.

I could quote these four stories from the Independent UK at length, but I suggest you read them yourself.

Posted by Holly at January 16, 2006 10:10 AM