'Enjoy life while you can'

'Enjoy life while you can'

Climate science maverick James Lovelock believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do?

...Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference...

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

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Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

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Some of the errors in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth
• Gore, aiming to undermine the significance of previous warm periods such as that of the Middle Ages, promoted the 1,000-year “hockey stick” temperature chart (McIntyre & McKitrick, 2005).
• Gore showed heart-rending pictures of the New Orleans floods and insisted on a link between increased hurricane frequency and global warming that is not supported by the facts (IPCC, 2001, 2007).
• Gore asserted that today’s Arctic is experiencing unprecedented warmth while ignoring that Arctic temperatures in the 1930s and 1940s were as warm or warmer (Briffa et al., 2004).
• Gore did not explain that Arctic temperature changes are more closely correlated with changes in solar activity than with changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations (Soon, 2005).
• Gore did not explain that the Sun has been hotter, for longer, in the past 50 years than in any similar period in at least the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005).
• Gore said the Antarctic was warming and losing ice but failed to note, that is only true of a small region and the vast bulk of the continent has been cooling and gaining ice (Doran et al., 2004).
• Gore mentioned the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf, but did not mention peer-reviewed research which suggests the ice shelf comes and goes frequently (Pudsey & Evans, 2001, 2006).
• Gore hyped unfounded fears that Greenland’s ice is in danger of disappearing. In fact its thickness has been growing by 2 inches per year for a decade (Johannesen et al., 2005).
• Gore falsely claimed that global warming is melting Mt. Kilimanjaro’s icecap, actually caused by atmospheric dessication from local deforestation, and pre-20th-century climate shifts (Cullen et al., 2006).
• Gore said global sea levels would swamp Manhattan, Bangladesh, Shanghai and other coastal cities, and would rise 20ft by 2100, but the UN estimate is just 8in to 1ft 5in. (IPCC, 2007; Morner, 1995, 2004).
• Gore implied that a Peruvian glacier's retreat is due to global warming, failing to state that the region has been cooling since the 1930s and other South American glaciers are advancing (Polissar et al., 2006).
• Gore blamed global warming for water loss in Africa's Lake Chad, though NASA scientists had concluded that local water-use and grazing patterns are probably to blame (Foley & Coe, 2001).
• Gore inaccurately said polar bears are drowning due to melting ice when in fact 11 of the 13 main groups in Canada are thriving, and polar bear populations have more than doubled since 1940 (Taylor, 2006).
• Gore said the ocean absorbs heat from the Sun, when in fact the ocean takes nearly all of its heat from the atmosphere, without which the ocean would freeze over (Houghton, 2002).
• Gore said a review of 928 scientific papers had shown none against the “consensus”. In fact only 1% of the papers were explicitly pro-“consensus”; almost 3 times as many were explicitly against (Peiser, 2006).
• Gore showed a link between changes in temperature and in CO2 concentration in the past 500,000 years, but did not admit that changes in temperature preceded changes in CO2 concentration (Petit et al., 1999).

"The polar bear drowning myth is typical of the deceit practiced by many global warming alarmists," he said. "Polar bears are very strong swimmers and have been documented swimming more than 60 miles without interruption."

In 2004, researchers with the U.S. Minerals Management Service found four dead polar bears floating in the sea after a severe storm off the Alaskan coastline and attributed their deaths to the storm. These same researchers had observed the bears swimming longer distances in the past few years.

Proponents of global warming, such as Gore, believe polar bears could be jeopardized as ice glaciers break up.

www.cnsnews.com.../Culture/archive/200702/CUL20070222a.html

. . . individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy.

Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."