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With his trademark flare for provocation, Lovelock said the current pandemic could even be seen as beneficial, in a cruel Darwinian kind of way \u00a9 AFP\/File \/ JACQUES DEMARTHON<\/b><\/p><\/div>\n
“The flu pandemics were worse in terms of deaths, and no such reaction took place then,” he said, adding that he barely recalled the 1957 Asian flu, which left more than a million dead worldwide. Another flu outbreak in 1968 was just as deadly.<\/p>\n
The new coronavirus has claimed more than 430,000 lives to date.<\/p>\n
With his trademark flare for provocation, Lovelock said the current pandemic could even be seen as beneficial, in a cruel Darwinian kind of way.<\/p>\n
“It mainly kills off my age group — the oldies — and there are too many of us anyway,” he said. “At the same time, it is relatively harmless to the young.”<\/p>\n
The far bigger threat to humanity in the early 21st century is global warming, Lovelock insisted.<\/p>\n
“Climate change is more dangerous to life on Earth than almost any conceivable disease,” he said. “If we don’t do something about it, we will find ourselves removed from the planet.”<\/p>\n
– Buying time –<\/p>\n
With his 2006 book “The Revenge of Gaia” and its 2009 sequel “The Vanishing Face of Gaia”, Lovelock became known as a prophet of climate doom, though he later walked back his most dire predictions, at least in terms of how quickly they might befall us.<\/p>\n
But an uncharacteristic note of optimism has since crept into his analysis.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think humanity will simply go back to loading the atmosphere with CO2,” he said, noting the sharp drop-off in emissions caused by economic slowdown.<\/p>\n
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Solar radiation management proposes ways to slow global warming by reflecting more sunlight away from Earth \u00a9 AFP\/File \/ Jonathan WALTER<\/b><\/p><\/div>\n
But if the glimmer of hope he offers will be welcomed by many climate activists who had written him off as a climate Cassandra, his solutions probably won’t.<\/p>\n
Even if humanity knows the causes of climate change, Lovelock doubts we can switch from dirty to clean energy quickly enough to avoid a scenario in which Earth itself — via melting permafrost, the shrinking Arctic ice cap — begin to drive global warming as well.<\/p>\n
To buy time, he argues, we need to turn to technology.<\/p>\n
“Many different ways to keep Earth cool have been suggested. One idea I find attractive is a sunshade in heliocentric orbit” — essentially a giant sun umbrella in space.<\/p>\n
Being cooped up in his home on England’s south shore has been something of a strain for his wife, but Lovelock admits that he has rather enjoyed the COVID lockdown.<\/p>\n
“I grew up as an only child hardly meeting anyone — it isn’t any great hardship for me,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We had a long period of unusually beautiful weather, sunny and warm, and there were not people,” he said, clearly delighted. “From my point of view, that is maximally desirable.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paris, France, Jun 16 – James Lovelock — founder of the Gaia theory and, arguably, the field of Earth system science — thinks the world has lost perspective in responding to the new coronavirus, and should focus on a far more formidable foe: global warming. “My impression is that we have overreacted almost everywhere to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12327,"featured_media":572528,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-572531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\n