The latest book by Britain’s foremost climate scientist, James Lovelock, predicts that within the lifetime of many of the world’s population the Earth will switch to an ultra-hot state in which 90% of the human species will die. Climate change deniers will of course dismiss this as the rantings of an extremist, but the argument for this conclusion is set out with a systematic and relentless logic which cannot be readily set aside. He conclusively demonstrates that the conventional climate models used by the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) vastly underestimate the severity of the problem because they deal only with the physics and chemistry of the air and oceans, and leave out life’s impacts on climate altogether. In place of the simpliste IPCC models which predict smooth linear changes and which the politicians glibly assume will enable change to be managed acceptably, the Gaian model captures the dynamics of the real Earth where rapid, unpredictable and violent change is not uncommon.

Using his powerful model that includes feedbacks between oceanic algae, land plants and global mean temperature, Lovelock notes that below an atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases of 400-500 ppm (parts per million) increasing emissions of carbon dioxide have little effect, but when this level is reached (and it is now about 390 ppm) tghe global average temperature abruptly increases by 5 degrees Celsius, after which the model stabilises in this new, very hot state. Five degrees may not sound dramatic, but it represents in fact the difference between today’s relatively equable climate and the Ice Ages of past millennia when an ice sheet a mile thick covered North America, northern Europe and Siberia. In other words, he is predicting that a sudden catastrophic heating is either currently in process or is extremely likely soon.
Indeed, quite separately, the Met Office has also just issued a warning that a catastrophic 4 degrees Celsius rise in temperature could happen by 2060 without much tougher measures to cut emissions than any action so far seen. A 4 degrees rise over pre-industrial levels would, according to the Met Office, threaten the water supply of half the world’s population, wipe out up to half of all animal and plant species, and swamp low coasts. In Lovelock’s view, in the very hot state predicted, much of the Earth will become uninhabitabledue to desertification in the low latitudes and severe weather elsewhere. As a result, within decades billions of people will lose their lives.

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