‘By 2050, Earth will be arid and empty’

‘By 2050, Earth will be arid and empty’

Jonathan Leake

If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years’ time, then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth's equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States.
“We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen,” said Lovelock. “We will be lucky if 20 of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.” Lovelock has delivered such warnings before, but this weekend they have a special resonance. Last week in Bangkok, the world’s governments finalised this year’s third and final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) setting out how humanity might save itself from the worst effects of climate change.
At the same time in Cologne, Germany, 4,000 sharp-suited bankers, lawyers and financial traders at Carbon Expo 2007 were congratulating themselves on the booming new markets in carbon credits that will, they boasted, save the world as well as making them rich. “I have a dream,” Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told the delegates. He set out his belief that carbon trading will help stabilise greenhouse gas emissions and aid developing countries by transferring pounds 50 billion a year to these nations from the First World to support green development.
For Lovelock, however, such dreams are dangerous nonsense on a par with a drowning man clutching at straws. “It’s all ridiculous,” he sighed.
“These new markets do some good in that they generate wealth and keep these people employed, but they and the IPCC are just raising false hopes. We have done too much damage to the world and now it is changing too fast for us to make much difference.”
Lovelock’s view is that the world has two stable states: the “icehouse”, when ice covers both poles, sometimes extending far into lower latitudes in the form of ice ages; and the “greenhouse”, when all the ice melts. Both have already happened many times in the Earth’s history. “Human outpourings of greenhouse gases have flicked the switch that turns the world from its colder to its warm state — and it is probably too late to stop it,” he said. “The warming impact of the carbon we have already released is such that the Earth has taken over and our greenhouse gas emissions are being amplified by nature itself.”
Lovelock believes the transformation is happening far too fast for usto tackle, especially in a world that remains committed to economic growth and whose 6.5 billion population is predicted to reach more than 9 billion by mid-century.
For evidence, he points to Siberia where the melting of the permafrost will enable bacteria to decompose organic matter that has accumulated in the soil over tens of millions of years — releasing billions more tonnes of CO 2 . SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON