Al Gore

At the suggestion of my dear friend, Nick Lore, today I read "The Prophet of Climate Change: James Lovelock", an October 17, 2007 posting on the Rolling Stone site. I think it is a 2005 article.

OK, so it is at the fringe of what the popular press says about global warming. Take a gander at Lovelock's language:

By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. "The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia," Lovelock says. "How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable." With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes -- Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

By the end of the century, according to Lovelock, global warming will cause temperate zones like North America and Europe to heat up by fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sanctioned body that includes the world's top scientists.

It would be (and I'm sure is) easy to dismiss Lovelock as a Chicken Little character. I'll refain from that, not just because he's a pretty damn smart scientist (read the article), but because of what I've noticed over the last couple of years about this debate. Gore's film was readily dismissed as alarmist. Yet, in the 15 months since it was released, most of the world's climate scientists have gone on the record as saying it understates the case. So, I have an appetite for those who seem to be ahead of the curve, like Lovelock.