By Amanda Kovattana -- Energy Bulletin/Blogspot
In Japan, scientists enjoy a celebrity status much like a sports hero or rock star. Their achievements evoke national pride, thus their pictures grace billboards and t-shirts and their appearances at public venues cause a stir. Scientists in the West have been so summarily dismissed for their inconvenient truths that I felt compelled to impart a little celebrity idolatry to the British scientist, James Lovelock during his recent book tour.
Catherine had already bought a copy of his latest book "The Revenge of Gaia." This was the man who came up with the Gaia hypothesis, which states, in short, that the earth is a living, self-regulating organism and not a dead rock upon which life clings. This view of the earth was considered controversial in the scientific world, given its anthropomorphic flavor.
James Lovelock is now rattling the cages of environmentalists by coming out in favor of nuclear power. His opinion is not easily discounted, because he was the man who convinced the scientific community that the ozone hole was indeed a threat and that governments should ban ozone-destroying CFCs.
In a recent article on the issues of global warming, Lovelock stated that he would happily offer his own backyard for the storage of nuclear waste if that's what it would take to convince the public to support the building of nuclear power plants, so adamantly did he feel that the waste was of little consequence next to the dire need for emission free power. Nor would it take up much space. Though I agreed with him that the situation was dire, I was far from convinced that nuclear power was as benign as he claimed. I was curious to see how he would present his case.
We made an outing of it with our friend Dave. Our quest led us to a packed auditorium in the bowels of Stanford University. The 87-year-old scientist, trained in chemistry, cut a mild mannered figure as he calmly read his paper on the impending desertification of the planet. This was not the first time the planet would experience a devastating global warming, he told us. Fifty-five million years ago such an occurrence did happen when as much as 3.0 terratons of carbon were released into the atmosphere due to a geological event that is still under debate, but might have been prompted by a subterranean volcano. It took another 100,000 years for the earth to recover its lush green coolness.
There is something about history repeating itself that seems curiously inevitable. If it happened before, it can certainly happen again and according to Lovelock's forecast, it will take us about 40 years to add enough carbon dioxide to the atmosphere to cause the ice on Greenland to melt, algae in the too warm ocean to stop growing and the tropical forests to dehydrate. All of this "positive feedback" would quickly create a planet so barren of life that only the most northern and most southern parts would be habitable.
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