Interview: James Lovelock on Climate Change

FS: What would the climate be like without humans?

JL: If we had never developed as an intelligent species, the climate right now would probably be moving slowly back towards the next glaciation. There’s some debate about that: some think the present interglacial era would go on a bit longer this time, perhaps as long as 50,000 years. But sooner or later we would be going back into an ice age again. Now we will not: by putting so much carbon in the atmosphere, we have irreversibly changed the Earth. We won’t have another ice age, not at least for another 200,000 years.

FS: What can we expect to see in 20 or 30 years from now?

JL: I can speak not just from my own view, but from the opinions expressed by senior climatologists who have represented their thoughts in a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The last one was in 2001, but the update is due in 2007 [February 2nd] and I’ve seen it. Quite simply, it’s very stark: it says that by around 2040 to 2050, the European summer of 2003 (where over 20,000 people died of overheating) will be the norm. People might be able to deal with the consequences: they may go away for the summer to cooler places or they can turn up the air conditioning. But for the plants and the ecosystems, there’s no such relief. European agriculture will probably cease to produce food by then, it will become a desert and scrub region. And the rest of the world will not be exempt: Asia and America will be suffering the same consequences, as will Africa and the nations of the southern hemisphere. We will be entering a world where food supply becomes more and more scarce and there will be mass migrations. Anyone with an imagination can see the awful human consequences of that, and we’re talking about something which is only about 30 years ahead.

FS: Are there too many people on the planet?

Credit: Codrington, Stephen. Planet Geography 3rd Edition (2005)

 

A crowded mzrket in Delhi, India - India is the second most populated country in the world.

JL: I think that there are too many people on the planet now. I think Malthus was right: he wrote his famous treaties in 1800, and at that time, there were only a billion people on Earth. If his advice had been followed, and all the great green ideas of sustainable development and renewable energy had been applied back then in 1800, we might have escaped the mess we’re in now. But we didn’t, we went on increasing our numbers. I think that more than 6 billion people on Earth is quite unsustainable.

FS: Can nuclear power save the planet?

JL: I’m not a nuclear fanatic. I don’t think the right answer is to make the whole world nuclear, that’s going too far. I think we have to use the most efficient source of energy that is available, and which will give us what we need while causing the minimum damage to the planet. For densely-populated countries, like Japan, Britain, Germany and many other European countries, nuclear energy is almost ideal. It has a minimal footprint on the Earth, and yet produces huge quantities of electricity at a very reasonable price that will keep cities going. And don’t forget: a modern city like London or New York would convert to a camp like one of those in Darfur in one week if electricity were switched right off everywhere.