James Lovelock Surfaces. How the Climate Effort Could Backfire.

The venerable James Lovelock has chosen the opening of the COP26 climate summit to send a few words of warning.

His message is we don't stand a chance unless we tie the climate crisis to our destruction of nature. They're not separate problems, just different sides of the same coin.

This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics. It is impossible to understand these subjects in isolation because they are interconnected. The same is true of living organisms that greatly influence the global environment. The composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and the temperature of the surface is actively maintained and regulated by the biosphere, by life, by what the ancient Greeks used to call Gaia.

At the risk of sounding immodest, Lovelock validates the writer's longstanding contention that every existential threat we now face, primarily climate change, overpopulation and over-consumption, are directly linked; that we must solve them all if we are to solve any of them; and that the solution to each demands that humanity accept the need for mankind to live in harmony with nature and within the very finite limits of our one and only biosphere, Spaceship Earth.

Warnings that once seemed like the doom scenarios of science fiction are now coming to pass. We are entering into a heat age in which the temperature and sea levels will be rising decade by decade until the world becomes unrecognisable. We could also be in for more surprises. Nature is non-linear and unpredictable, never more than at a time of transition.

Lowering these risks and adapting to those we can no longer avoid will require a mobilisation of resources on the scale of a war economy. We have no choice but to reduce the burning of fossil fuels or face even worse consequences.

But we should also not become over-reliant on renewable power, which will leave us with an energy gap. We need to build more nuclear power stations to overcome that, though the greens will first have to get over their overblown fears of radiation.

We also need to address the problem of overpopulation and to urgently halt the destruction of tropical forests. Most of all, we need to look at the world in a holistic way.

...my fellow humans must learn to live in partnership with the Earth, otherwise the rest of creation will, as part of Gaia, unconsciously move the Earth to a new state in which humans may no longer be welcome. The virus, Covid-19, may well have been one negative feedback. Gaia will try harder next time with something even nastier.

Each point Lovelock makes is prescient. He can see what's coming if we stay on this myopic course of allowing the enormity of the climate emergency to blind us to other existential challenges that also loom large.