KEY POINTS:
Do you want the good news or the bad news?
People generally prefer the bad news first _ I suspect it harks back to childhood when we were given sweets as a reward for taking our medicine _ so let's get it over and done with.
The bad
news is that global warming is now irreversible and catastrophic consequences are inevitable. The good news is there's absolutely nothing we as individuals can do about it so we might as well stop wasting time and energy on recycling and stressing over the morality of plastic bags and air travel and make the most of the decade or so before all hell breaks loose.
And eventually _ say in a million years _ the planet will recover.
These unpalatable prognostications come from 88-year-old English scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis that Planet Earth is a self-regulating super-organism, a living entity. Initially dismissed as new- ageism or even a cult religion, the theory now forms the basis for much climate science.
Lovelock also played a pioneering role in cryogenics, invented a device for measuring pesticides and gases in the atmosphere (he would have made a fortune if he'd patented it), and alerted the world to the build-up of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere.
If he hadn't done so, says biologist Paul Ehrlich, "we'd all be living under the oceans in snorkels and fins to escape that poisonous sun."
Prophets of doom don't have a great track record and most have turned out to be conmen or madmen but for most of his career Lovelock has, if anything, tended to err on the side of breezy nonchalance. His confidence that CFCs posed "no conceivable hazard" opened the way for other scientists to win the Nobel Prize for figuring out that they'd burn a hole in the ozone layer.
Up until a few years ago he was similarly sanguine about global warming, believing Gaia, "tough bitch" that she is, would sort the problem out herself.
So how bad is catastrophic? Lovelock's short answer is that "we'll be living in a desperate world in no time." If you want a timeline and gory details, by 2020 extreme weather will be causing global devastation; by 2040 mainland Europe will be an extension of the Sahara; food shortages will lead to mass migrations triggering deadly epidemics and territorial wars. By 2100 80 per cent of the world's population will have been wiped out.
Once again the baby boomers' timing is impeccable.
If Lovelock's scenario comes to pass, the oldest baby boomers will be hitting 80 when it all starts turning to custard. By the time my parents were in their mid-30s they'd lived through the Great Depression, World War II and 14 years of rationing, but aside from growing up in the shadow of The Bomb, it's been pretty much a breeze for the luckiest generation in history.
There's a touch of the curmudgeon about Lovelock, as if he believes we've had it too good for too long and need a jolly good threat to our very survival to jolt us out of our self-indulgent complacency.
He likens the situation to 1938-39 when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". Once the war got started, he argues, it gave people a sense of purpose: "Everyone got excited; they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday."
Actually, not everyone got excited: a lot of people got scared and/or dead. Lovelock's tendency to view that period through rose-tinted spectacles is perhaps explained by his claim to have spent much of the Blitz shagging nurses in underground bomb shelters.
There's also a certain cold, Darwinian relish in his conviction that the wheat will be separated from the chaff until only those worthy of being the "carriers of the civilisation ahead" remain. He evokes a world in which innovative, resourceful go-getters "sequester" themselves in a high-tech civilisation sustained by nuclear power, desalination plants and synthetic food, leaving the rest of mankind to their own devices and the tender mercies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
When a writer from Rolling Stone magazine caught up with him in Oslo, Lovelock cited the Norwegian capital as being well-placed to withstand the coming crisis because of its location and temperate climate (which will actually improve with global warming), plentiful water and creative thinking about energy.
Remind you of anywhere?
That's the good news.
The bad news is that Oslo and other clean, green parts of the world will become too popular for their own good. Their problem, says Lovelock, will be managing the hordes that descend upon them wanting shelter from the storm.
