[THS] !!!!!!!!! Adapt and Survive

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25838.htm

Adapt and Survive

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning James Lovelock Allen Lane, UK, 2009,
ISBN 9781846141850

By Stephan Harding

June 29, 2010 "Resurgence" -- It is often said that it takes great ideas in science
some forty years to gain widespread acceptance. Sadly for us all, James Lovelock’s
concept of a self-regulating Earth has fitted this mould with a frustrating and yet
thoroughly predictable punctuality: had acceptance come sooner we would by now
have been much further advanced in our understanding of the dangers of climate
change.

It was in 1965, whilst thinking of a workable life-detection experiment for a NASA
mission to Mars, that Lovelock received a “flash of enlightenment” which would lead
him to overturn a notion widely held by scientists at the time: that living beings are
merely passive passengers on an Earth governed mostly by geological, chemical and
physical processes. Not so, said Lovelock – life’s tightly coupled feedbacks with the
abiotic domains of atmosphere, rocks and water configure the Earth into a dynamic,
evolving planet that has actively maintained its surface in a state suitable for life over
thousands of millions of years despite the vagaries of plate tectonics and an ever-
brightening sun.

Thinking of the Earth as a system with life at centre stage was a challenging and
controversial proposal that met with severe disapproval from the scientific community,
more so because Lovelock had dared to name his theory of a self-regulating planet
after Gaia, the ancient Greek divinity of the Earth. But in responding to his critics,
Lovelock was forced, over many years, to produce convincing models, to gather
evidence and to hone his arguments in ways that developed in him a unique and
resilient understanding of our Earth as a living planet and of the impact of humans
upon its tangled web of relationships.

Lovelock’s long devotion to establishing the science of Gaia has at last come to
fruition – many scientists no longer deny that life plays important roles in configuring
the Earth’s climate, or that the Earth is a complex dynamic system with oftentimes
surprising emergent behaviours, including sudden shifts from one semi-stable state
to another.

In this, his latest book, published in the year of his ninetieth birthday, Lovelock uses
his matchless transdisciplinary Gaian viewpoint to eloquently warn us, once again,
about the severe dangers that our destruction of wild ecosystems and our burning of
fossil fuels are likely to bring us in the very near future. He cautions us that most
mathematical models run on supercomputers to predict climate change over the next
century, including the many models collated by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), vastly underestimate the likely severity of the problem
because they “do not yet include the physiological response of the ecosystems of the
land or ocean”.

In other words, most of these models deal only with the physics and chemistry of the
air and oceans, and leave out life’s impacts on climate altogether, not because
scientists deny their importance, but because our technical and mental capacities are
not advanced enough to include them. This shortcoming of conventional climate
models is increasingly recognised and yet politicians glibly use the IPCC predictions of
smooth and therefore potentially manageable change to create strategies for a
supposedly liveable future. Instead, says Lovelock, policymakers should compare the
IPCC projections with what is happening in the real world.

Pay close attention to sea-level rise, he says, for this is “a thermometer which
indicates true global warming” because it only comes about in two main ways:
through the melting of land-based ice and through the thermal expansion of the
oceans, both of which only take place on a warming planet. He shows us sea- level
data, which is decidedly worrying: in 2007 observed sea level had risen 1.6 times
faster than predicted by the IPCC.

We also discover other observations of the real Earth that are equally alarming. By
2007 the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by summertime floating ice had fallen to 4
million square kilometres, a condition that the IPCC models predicted was unlikely
before 2050. If this trend continues, within fifteen years all the Arctic sea ice will have
melted in summer and the extra heating caused by the sun’s warming of the dark
ocean will be equivalent to that caused by all the anthropogenic carbon dioxide now
present in the atmosphere.

Lovelock also points to a third process of immense significance for the Earth’s climate
that the IPCC models seem to have ignored altogether: the shockingly rapid loss of
planet-cooling marine algae caused by our warming of the oceans.

Lovelock explores what sort of climate we can expect to experience over the next
decade or so due to these changes, using one of his simple but powerful Gaian
models that includes feedbacks between oceanic algae, land plants and global mean
temperature. To begin with, not much happens when the model is forced with
increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, but when the atmospheric concentration of
the gas reaches between 400 and 500ppm, global average temperature suddenly
increases by 5°C, after which the model stabilises in this new, hot state. In contrast
to the non-Gaian models of the IPCC, which predict smooth linear changes,
Lovelock’s model captures the dynamics of the real Earth, where similarly rapid
changes have not been uncommon.

His prognosis, now shared by increasing numbers of eminent climate scientists, is
that with around 380ppm carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere, a sudden
catastrophic warming is either currently in process or is extremely likely. In the hot
state much of the Earth will become uninhabitable due to desertification in the low
latitudes and severe weather elsewhere. As a result, within decades billions of people
will lose their lives. The survivors will be forced to seek refuge in the high latitudes,
particularly in the northern hemisphere. Things will also go badly for the biosphere,
which will experience an extinction event of gargantuan proportions that will make
the warming more severe as forests burn and marine algae disappear.

SO, WHAT CAN be done to avert this dreadful prognosis? Lovelock urges us to make
adaptation “at least equal in importance to policy-driven attempts to reduce
emissions”. What he means by adaptation beggars the imagination: for the UK and
many countries in the north it means preparing for a huge influx of climate refugees.
He suggests that we will need to create mega-cities to house the billions of people
who will be displaced, we will need to grow food chemically to feed them and we will
need to generate the electricity they will need, for the most part, using nuclear
power.

Most forms of renewable energy, carbon trading, offset schemes and so on are
dismissed by Lovelock as largely ineffectual, given the little time left to ameliorate the
situation, if indeed this is possible at all. His one ray of hope for renewables is solar
thermal energy deployed in the deserts of the world to generate electricity from
steam-driven turbines.

Lovelock examines each of the major contenders for engineering our way out of
trouble, including putting mirrors in space, introducing cooling aerosols of sulphuric
acid droplets into the stratosphere and fertilising the oceans with iron to feed planet-
cooling algae. He doubts that these measures will stop the warming: at best they can
only reduce its early consequences. His favourite ‘geo-engineering’ option is biochar –
in which carbon captured from the atmosphere by photosynthesis is fixed by making
charcoal – but my own delving into this possibility has convinced me that it probably
won’t work. There are serious doubts about whether the carbon in the biochar is
stable for significantly long periods of time, and we simply don’t have time to find
out.

One might think that Lovelock were both pessimistic and misanthropic, but nothing
could be further from the truth. He hopes that the few survivors of the catastrophe
will create a new civilisation that is truly in tune with Gaia. It took the Earth some 3½
thousand million years to produce human intelligence, so his hope is that one day we
will become the “hearts and minds of Gaia”, wise enough to regulate our own
numbers and skilled enough in science and technology to maintain her habitability
and protect her from harm. Only then, he says, will Gaia have become a “truly
sentient planet”. In the meantime, Lovelock’s well argued yet passionate “final
warning” needs to be taken with utmost seriousness, for it is now blindingly obvious
that business as usual is wreaking huge and unremitting havoc upon the Earth.

Stephan Harding is the Co-ordinator of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher
College, where he is also Ecologist in Residence. He is author of Animate Earth
published by Green Books.