What an incredible mistake Greenpeace made when it took the government to
court in an attempt to delay the building of new nuclear power stations. By
so doing it increases the burden of carbon dioxide (C02) the Earth has to
bear; nuclear is the only large-scale energy source that is emissions free.
Why don’t we wake up and emulate the French, who make almost all their
electricity from nuclear energy? French trains are legendary, especially the
TGV. One of these bound for Marseilles was standing at the Gare de Lyon; it
seemed like any other train except that it was double decked. We climbed
aboard and took our seats on the upper tier and sat back as it travelled
from Paris to Marseilles at 200mph.
No wonder the French are building an even faster train track from Paris to
Germany. Best of all, this form of intercity travel is the world’s only
wholly carbon-free nonpolluting way of travelling, because the trains are
powered by nuclear electricity. Soon our cars and trucks will be powered by
batteries charged from the electricity supply. What a wonderful way to avoid
C02 emissions, but only if we make nuclear our source of electricity.
I am a green and I have been one for most of my life, but I am also a
scientist and my main contribution has been to show that the planet actively
sustains its climate and chemistry so as to keep itself habitable. We have
disabled this wonderful capacity by taking its natural forests for farmland
and by burning fossil fuels.
Doing this has driven the Earth to a state profoundly dangerous to all of us
and to our civilisation. I am deeply concerned that public opinion and
consequently the government listen less to scientists than they do to the
green lobbies. I know that these lobbies mean well, but this time their good
intentions are truly the road to a hell of a climate.
They understand people better than they do their world and recommend
inappropriate remedies and action. The outcome is as if the medieval plague
had returned in deadly form and we were earnestly advised to stop it with
alternative not scientific medicine.
Now that we have made the planet sick, it will not be cured by green remedies
such as wind turbines and biofuels. This is why I recommend instead the
appropriate medicine of nuclear energy. After all, the whole universe runs
on nuclear energy, so why not us?
Today humanity faces its greatest trial. The acceleration of the climate
change now under way will sweep aside the comfortable environment to which
we have adapted. Change is a normal part of geological history. The most
recent was the move from the long period of glaciation to the warmish
interglacial period we presently enjoy.
What is unusual about the coming crisis is that we are the cause of it and
nothing so severe has happened since the long hot period at the start of the
Eocene epoch 55m years ago. The planet, when in an interglacial period as it
is now, is trapped in a vicious cycle of positive feedback, and this is what
makes global heating so serious and so urgent. Extra heat from any source,
whether from greenhouse gases, the disappearance of Arctic ice and the
changing structure of the ocean, or the destruction of tropical forests, is
amplified.
It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm and failed to notice, as we
piled on fuel, that the fire was out of control and the furniture had
ignited. When that happens there is little time left to put out the fire
before it consumes the house itself. Global heating, like a fire, is
accelerating and there is almost no time left to act.
This year, perhaps more thanany other in the two decades since the first
alarms were sounded, marks a shock of recognition: global warming isn’t
conjecture, alarmism or partisan overstatement, but rather a clear and very
present danger.
I am old enough to notice a marked similarity between attitudes more than 60
years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of
global heating. Most of us think that something unpleasant may soon happen,
but we are as confused now as we were in 1938 as to what form it will take
and what to do about it.
The Kyoto agreement was uncannily like the Munich pact, with politicians out
to show their eagerness to respond while in reality merely playing for time.
Because we are tribal animals the tribe does not act in unison until a
danger is perceived. This has not yet happened. Consequently we individuals
go our separate wayswhile the ineluctable forces of the Earth marshal
against us.
The prospects are grim and even if we act successfully in amelioration there
will still be hard times that will stretch us to the limit. We are tough and
it would take more than climatic catastrophe to eliminate all breeding pairs
of humans. What is at risk is civilisation.
There is a small chance that the sceptics are right, or that we might be saved
by an unexpected event such as a series of volcanic eruptions severe enough
to block out sunlight and so cool the planet. But only losers would bet
their lives on such poor odds.
Whatever doubts there may be about future climates, there is no doubt that
both greenhouse gases and temperatures are rising.
Predictions of climate change do not depend only on theoretical models in the
form of computer simulations. There is now a vast array of monitoring
activitiessustained globally. Air and sea temperatures are continuously
measured, as are the gases of the atmosphere, the cloud cover, the floating
ice, glaciers and the health of the ecosystems in the ocean and on the land.
Satellites monitor the Earth’s ever changing scene. The more subtle
instruments aboard these spacecraft record temperatures at different levels
in the atmosphere and the concentrations of many different gases.
Another important source of information about the cause of climate change is
the long-term geological record. We have learnt an immense amount about the
history of the climate and the composition of the atmosphere from the
analysis of ice taken from the depths of glaciers in Greenland and
Antarctica.
In 2004 Jonathan Gregory and his colleagues at Reading University reported
that if global temperatures rise by more than 2.7C the Greenland glacier
will no longer be stable. It will melt and will continue melting until most
of it has gone, even if the temperatures subsequently fall below the
threshold temperature.
Because temperature and C02 abundance appear to be closely correlated, the
threshold can be expressed in terms of either of these quantities.
Scientists Richard Betts and Peter Cox at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre
have concluded that a rise in global temperature of 4C would be enough to
destabilise the tropical rainforests and cause them, like the Greenland ice,
to melt away and be replaced by scrub or desert. Once this happens the Earth
will lose another cooling mechanism and the rate of temperature rise will
accelerate.
The floating ice of the Arctic serves as a white reflector of the summer
sunlight that falls upon it and helps to keep the world cool. When that ice
melts, as soon it may, the dark sea that replaces it will absorb the sun’s
heat and as it warms accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice.
While we cannot go back to the world of 1800, when there were only 1 billion
of us, we may not be incapable of lessening the consequences of global
heating. If there is a threshold and if we pass it, the nations of the world
could limit the damage by stoppingand methane. The temperature rise would
then be slower, as would the rise of sea levels, and it would take longer to
reach the final steady hot state than it would if we continued business as
usual. Even so, enormous damage would still have been done.
I am not recommending nuclear fission as the long-term panacea for our ailing
planet or as the answer to all our problems. I merely see it as the only
effective medicine we have now. But we will have to do much more than turn
to nuclear energy if we are to avoid a new Dark Age later in this century.
We must follow the good green advice to save energy and we must all do this
whenever we can, but I suspect that, like losing weight, this is easier said
than done.
We have to take global change seriously straightaway and do our best to lessen
the footprint of humans on the planet. Our goal should be the cessation of
fossil-fuel consumption as quickly as possible and there must be no more
natural-habitat destruction anywhere.
When I use the term “natural” I am not thinking only of primeval forests. I
also include the forests that have grown back after farmland has been
abandoned. These reestablished forests probably perform their services as
well as the original forests did, but the vast open stretches of monoculture
farmland are no substitute for natural ecosystems.
We are already farming more than the Earth can afford and if we attempt to
farm the whole planet to feed people it will make us like sailors who burn
the timbers of their ship to keep warm. The natural ecosystems are not there
for us to take as farmland; they are there to sustain the climate and the
chemistry of the planet itself.
Astronauts who have had the chance to look at our world from space have seen
what a beautiful planet it is. I ask that we put aside our fears and our
obsession with personal and tribal rights, and be brave enough to see that
the real threat comes from the harm we ourselves do to the living Earth.
The Revenge of Gaia, by James Lovelock, is out in paperback this week.
Penguin, £8.99
