Earth Equity News

Climate Change Blues: How Scientists Cope. By Marlowe Hood, AFP, March 16, 2009. "Researchers gathered [in Copenhagen] last week for a climate change conference [International Scientific Congress on Climate Change]... heard, among other bits of bad news, that global sea levels are set to rise at least twice as fast over the next century as previously thought, putting hundreds of millions of people at risk... What haunts scientists most, many said, is the feeling that -- despite an overwhelming consensus on the science -- they are not able to convey to a wider public just how close Earth is to climate catastrophe. That audience includes world leaders who have pledged to craft, by year's end, a global climate treaty to slash the world's output of dangerous greenhouse gases. It's as if scientists know a bomb will go off, but can't find the right words to warn the people who might be able to defuse it... Hanging over the conference proceedings like an invisible cloud were the apocalyptic predictions of the monstre sacre of Earth sciences, 90-year-old British scientist James Lovelock. A true iconoclast, Lovelock commands respect because he understood decades before his peers that Earth behaves as a single, self-regulating system composed of physical, chemical and biological components, a concept he dubbed the Gaia principle. In his just-released book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, he basically says we have already passed a point of no return, and that it is now impossible 'to save the planet as we know it. Efforts to stabilized carbon dioxide and temperature are no better than planetary alternative medicine,' he wrote. It is perhaps telling that more than a dozen scientists interviewed could only say that they hoped Lovelock was wrong. None could say -- based on the science -- that they knew he was wrong."