According to one profound view of climatology, Gaia, the earth, is one body, a living and vast self-regulating organism, whose system is now so out of whack that Gaia has a fever. We call it global warming. In a time when the environment is deteriorating, we need to use personal carbon calculators to estimate and lower individual carbon footprints.
Gaia has a fever and it is too late to help her. She is sick and she soon will be even sicker. She will be desperately ill. She is headed for a period of misery and it will take 200,000 years for her to return to normal.
Dr. James Lovelock, ninety years old, a grand fatherly and kind acting man, has a horrifying message: In order to get well, Gaia is ejecting the source of its sickness and in this century it will see that billions of people will die.
There are now almost seven billion people in the world and the projection is that before mid-century there will be nine billion. Dr. Lovelock predicts that by the year 2100, there will be fewer than 500 million people on the planet.
He says it is foolish to focus on developing alternative energy sources and useless to attempt to bring Gaia to health. Gaia has caught a fever, and just like our human body, when we realize we are sick, it’s going to be a bad weekend. Our body will work it out, but we will be miserable in the meantime. For Gaia, the misery will be 200,000 years.
Lovelock says that in the last one million years, this fever has happened seven times when huge doses of carbon dioxide has made Gaia sick. Now it is happening again. In the big picture Gaia will eventually be OK — when she succeeds in ejecting billions of humans and has a chance for some rest.
The geological and glacial records indicate that the global climate fluctuates rather widely, regardless of whether or not humans are present. We really should not worry so much about what effect we might be having on the climate as much as we should develop some idea of how we’re going to cope with the changes the Earth is going to force on us, no matter what we do.