Sunday, November 05, 2006

How Close to Catastrophe?

Several author/scientists are currently writing about technological innovations and the need for radical lifestyle overhaul in the race against time to save the planet.

James Lovelock is among them ... best known for the idea that the earth might usefully be considered as a single organism struggling to keep itself stable. It's known as the Gaia theory.

Lovelock estimates various things are now ready to tip the earth into a catastrophically hotter state over the course of a very few decades, and that heat will in turn make life as we know it nearly impossible in many places.

In interviews during his book tour, Lovelock has predicted that about 200 million people, or about one thirtieth of the current world population, will survive if competent leaders make a new home for us near the present-day Arctic.

There may also be other survivable spots, like the British Isles, though he notes that rising sea levels will render them more an archipelago.


The foregoing is extracted, and mildly edited, from a very thought-provoking article in the New York Review of Books.

Read it and think. That's really what we all have to do.

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