Rapid
Global Warming Will Create Famine And Drought, Lovelock Warns
By Steve Connor
29 October, 2007
The
Independent
Climate change is happening faster
than anyone predicted and its consequences could be dire for the survival
of civilisation in the 21st century because of the chaos it will cause
in terms of famine, drought and mass migration, according to a leading
scientist.
James Lovelock, the inventor
of the Gaia theory, which likens the Earth to a living organism, will
tell the the Royal Society in London this evening that humans have in
effect declared war on the planetary survival system, causing it to
explode out of control.
Man-made emissions of greenhouses
gases were triggering a positive feedback in the climate in which temperature
increases generated further temperature rises and the release of vast
amounts of carbon dioxide from natural stores on land and in the oceans.
"I see our predicament
as like that faced by any nation that is about to be invaded by a powerful
enemy: now we are at war with the Earth and, as in a blitzkrieg, events
proceed faster than we can respond," he will say.
"We are in a strange
position of living on a planet where climate and compositional change
is now so rapid that it happens too fast for us to react to it."
Professor Lovelock's address
will spell out why he believes change is happening faster than many
experts had predicted. "The positive feedback on heating from the
melting of floating Arctic and Antarctic ice alone is causing an acceleration
of system-driven heating whose total will soon or already be greater
than that from all of the pollution CO2 that we have so far added,"
he says.
But Professor Lovelock believes
there is some hope that the natural, "negative" feedback cycles
of the planet can be exploited to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
© 2007 Independent News
and Media Limited
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