Warning on climate change 'catastrophe'

It may be too late to avert a catastrophic collapse of human civilisation by 2100 due to the impacts of climate change, a leading British scientist, James Lovelock, warned last week.

His new book, The Revenge of Gaia, published in the UK last Thursday, will be on sale here this week. Gaia is the name he gave in 1979 to what he believed to be the single living self-regulating system of the planet which maintains it in a state favourable for life.

Presenting his book's key conclusions in an article in The Independent, Professor Lovelock warned that "as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8°C in temperate regions and 5°C in the tropics. Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 per cent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves."

"Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This 'global dimming' is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable." One hundred thousand years might pass before all the world's ecosystems were fully restored, he emphasised.

Reacting to his predictions, other scientists and environmentalists have been less pessimistic, but all warn that little time remains for nations to take radical measures to slow the current pace of climate change due to human-induced greenhouse gas emissions so as to avoid major dislocations in natural systems and the world economy.

A report entitled "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" issued last week by the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs comprising presentations made at a UK government-hosted high-level scientific conference a year ago, stated that global greenhouse gas emissions had to peak by 2025 and rapidly decline thereafter. Several presentations identified 'tipping points' after which runaway climate change would become unstoppable.

Announcing a new programme to cut US dependence on Middle East oil by 75 per cent by 2025, President George Bush did not mention climate change. In 2001 he withdrew the US from the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Convention on Climate Change which mandates a small cut in global greenhouse gas emissions during the period 2008 to 2012, as well as negotiations for further cuts thereafter to be completed by 2008. These negotiations were launched at the UNFCCC's Contracting Parties' 11th conference in Montreal in December.