The other day someone — actually it was my MP, the member for Henley-on-Thames and former editor of this magazine — asked me if I ‘believed’ in global warming. The question was put in such a way as to suggest it was a matter of faith rather than commonsense. I replied that only half-wits and conspiracy nuts refused to accept that it was real and largely our doing. The question is no longer whether or not it is happening, but where it will take us and how quickly.
If James Lovelock’s analysis of the condition of our planet is sound, the answer is: into the flames of Armaged- don, fast. He suspects we are already past the point of no return; that even if we abandoned our tribal differences and foolish ways now, it would probably be too late. Lovelock’s consolation is that, while it may be the end of us, or most of us, it is not the end of Gaia, the metaphor he conceived of the earth and its biosphere as a self-regulating planet system. Civilisation will burn. Gaia will slip into a state akin to fever, and then recover.
In many respects his vision differs little from that of the mainstream brigade of apocalyptists. Polar icecaps melt, deserts spread, hurricanes multiply, forests shrink, cities vanish beneath the rising seas, methane bursts uncontrollably into an overheating atmosphere, the sun gets hotter and hotter. We sink into what Lovelock pictures as ‘a chaotic world ruled by brutal warlords on a devastated world’. All very jolly and familiar.
Where he parts company with his old chums, the Greens, is in his prescription for the crisis. He argues that if civilisation is to be saved — which seems a considerable if, since everything else he says suggests it isn’t — the paramount priority is to secure the energy source on which civilisation is founded, namely electricity.
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