We're all doomed! 40 years from global catastrophe - and there's NOTHING we can do about it, says climate change expert
The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it.
According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.
By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine.
The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain.
We will, he says, have to set up encampments in this country, like those established for the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict in East Africa.
Lovelock believes the subsequent ethnic tensions could lead to civil war.
Crackpot or visionary, the fact is that more and more people are paying attention to Lovelock, and that he, himself, supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the influential group who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former American vice president Al Gore for their campaigns on global warming.
Lovelock also says that Margaret Thatcher and the Queen are "sympathetic" to his views.
He has been proclaiming his Gaia Theory for a generation. This states that the Earth is a living, self-regulating system and that by filling its atmosphere with CO2 (carbon dioxide emissions) we have destroyed the balance and overheated the planet. We are in the phase when the thermometer suddenly shoots up.
Lovelock believes it is too late to repair the damage. Government targets are "futile". Britain contributes such a tiny amount of emissions compared with countries such as China that our self-regulatory measures are pathetic.
"Everyone could burn coal all day and drive around in 4x4s and it would not make a scrap of difference," he says.
It is hubris, he argues, to believe we can prevent the inevitable consequences of mankind's actions. Lovelock reminds us - in case it has slipped our memory - that the Earth has gone through exactly the same correction before.
"It was last as hot as this 55 million years ago. There was a geological accident in the North Sea, near where Norway is. A volcanic layer of lava came up underneath one of the large petroleum deposits. It vaporised the whole lot, putting into the atmosphere about two million, million tons of crude oil.
The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it.
According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.
By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine.
The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain.
We will, he says, have to set up encampments in this country, like those established for the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict in East Africa.
Lovelock believes the subsequent ethnic tensions could lead to civil war.
Crackpot or visionary, the fact is that more and more people are paying attention to Lovelock, and that he, himself, supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the influential group who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former American vice president Al Gore for their campaigns on global warming.
Lovelock also says that Margaret Thatcher and the Queen are "sympathetic" to his views.
He has been proclaiming his Gaia Theory for a generation. This states that the Earth is a living, self-regulating system and that by filling its atmosphere with CO2 (carbon dioxide emissions) we have destroyed the balance and overheated the planet. We are in the phase when the thermometer suddenly shoots up.
Lovelock believes it is too late to repair the damage. Government targets are "futile". Britain contributes such a tiny amount of emissions compared with countries such as China that our self-regulatory measures are pathetic.
"Everyone could burn coal all day and drive around in 4x4s and it would not make a scrap of difference," he says.
It is hubris, he argues, to believe we can prevent the inevitable consequences of mankind's actions. Lovelock reminds us - in case it has slipped our memory - that the Earth has gone through exactly the same correction before.
"It was last as hot as this 55 million years ago. There was a geological accident in the North Sea, near where Norway is. A volcanic layer of lava came up underneath one of the large petroleum deposits. It vaporised the whole lot, putting into the atmosphere about two million, million tons of crude oil.
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