CLIMATE CHANGE INEVITABLE

This was the view expressed by Professor James Lovelock at the Royal Society on 29th October. The world, he said, is now so close to the tipping point that it is very likely too late for us to prevent a marked increase in global temperatures. This will result in even more catastrophic storms, devastation to ecosystems as species die out, and eventually areas of Earth becoming effectively uninhabitable.
The problem, he said, lies in positive feedback. This means that, as the world warms up, the changes that result accelerate the warming process. Of most concern at the moment is the melting of the polar ice cap, which is now disappearing at an unprecedented rate. As the ice melts, it is replaced by vast areas of open water, which absorb the sunlight which the ice used to reflect back into space. Before long, he warned, the solar heating resulting from this will be greater than anything that we can offset by reduction of carbon emissions. At that point, the cycle will have been triggered for an unstoppable temperature rise, with a new equilibrium being perhaps twenty or thirty degrees higher than at present.
This, he said, may now be inescapable. As we stop using fossil fuels, our carbon emissions drop, and so eventually will the heating from the greenhouse effect. Unfortunately, this can take ten to twenty years to take place. In the shorter term, we lose the limited shielding effect that the smoke provides, leading to a rise of two or three degrees centigrade. We are now so close to the tipping point that this may be enough to send us over.
The only remaining hope, said Professor Lovelock, was that an ecological disaster would wake us up to the emergency facing us. When asked what he thought would do the job, given the disasters that we have already seen, he showed a ready grasp of human motivation: “It needs to hit us in the wallet”, he said.