Reply #8: Dr. James Lovelock, who was the first to realize that Earth is a single system [View All]

[bean fidhleir]

also believes we're in for a mass extinction event, that around 2100 Earth will have perhaps 20% of the current population, and we'll be struggling to survive, most of us clustered in the Arctic Circle.

He's quite a smart man, and has predicted the changes we're seeing. He's been more accurate than the scientists using computer models because, he says, he looks out the window at what's really happening. The modelers can't believe that things are as bad as they are, so they keep their models conservative and fail to predict the correct magnitude of change.

To Lovelock, it's "simple" on some level: Earth acts to maintain homeostasis, for example by growing more trees to keep the oxygen level high and the temperature down. But we humans have disrupted Earth's ability to maintain homeostatic conditions in which we ourselves can live. We've deforested most of Earth, so now the chief mechanism for carbon capture is gone. This has the knock-on effect of, first, forcing the excess carbon into the oceans, which become acidified and start killing off fish, and second, changing weather patterns and increasing desertification, killing off more forest as is happening to the Amazon rainforest. Both the loss of fish and the increased desertification reduce our food supply, which will cause starvation, disease, and human extinction. Which will eventually let the forest cover come back and Earth cool down again. But without humans and, probably, most other species above the level of bugs. (This of course is a highly abstracted and incomplete picture, but nevertheless a correct one)