Arctic – the last refuge from climate change

By 2100, “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic, where the climate remains tolerable.”

“We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realize how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilization for as long as they can.”

These predictions are from Dr. James Lovelock, the scientist best known for the Gaia theory, which says the Earth is a super-organism, now totally out of whack.

Lovelock is a fellow of the Royal Society of England and the inventor of the Electron Capture Detector, which assisted in discoveries about the persistence of chlorofluorocarbons and their role in ozone depletion.

Lovelock believes that average temperatures will increase 5 C in the tropics and an 8 C in the temperate areas.

“Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return.”

Lovelock says he isn’t convinced it’s possible to fix the problem of global warming before it gets out of control.

“There’s no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing. Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover,” Lovelock says.

“I have children, I have grandchildren, I wish none of this. But it’s our fate; we need to recognize it’s another wartime. We desperately need a Moses to take us to the Arctic and preserve civilization. It’s too late to turn back.”

In a report published on Aug. 18, the World Meteorological Organization said the ozone situation will be back to normal by 2060 to 2075 above the Antarctica and a bit sooner for middle latitudes and the Arctic.

And some of the world’s top climate scientists now appear to be less concerned about global warming. A draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says temperature increases can be held to two degrees Celsius by 2100 by just holding greenhouse gas emissions at the current levels.