The American Pundit

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a remarkable amount of shift in the world of global warming - in an unpredictable way. First there was NASA revising its data to now show 1934 as the hottest year on record, a change from 1998. Then there was the revelation that fewer than half of published scientists actually endorse the theory of man-made global warming. There was also, less importantly, Newsweek’s editor slamming his paper’s own story on global warming, saying it over-simplified the problem.

Now we have this from Prof. James Lovelock. Lovelock is a global warming alarmist, put simply. Just one year ago, he had this to say:

GLOBAL warming is irreversible and billions of people will die over the next century, one of the world’s leading climate change scientists claimed yesterday. Professor James Lovelock, the scientist who developed the Gaia principle (that Earth is a self-regulating, interconnected system), claimed that by the year 2100 the only place where humans will be able to survive will be the Arctic.

In a forthcoming book, The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock warns that attempts to reduce levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may already be too late.

“Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence,” he writes.

“It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun was too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years.”

A year later, he has this to say:

Climate change is more serious than we can possibly imagine, but neither the Earth nor the human race is doomed, said Lovelock. The good news is that the Earth itself is in no danger, with world climate likely to stabilize some 5 degrees C warmer than current temperatures - such stable ‘hot’ states have existed in the past, including some 55 million years ago when the world’s own feedback mechanisms took 200,000 years to recover. During that phase no great extinction occurred, but life moved to cooler climes to survive.

Climate-induced migrations could, for example, see Europe’s population concentrated in cooler regions such as the British Isles, Scandinavia and western France - and this could happen within the next century. “If ever nuclear power is needed, it will be then,” said Lovelock. Nuclear is the most reliable and demonstrably safest form of energy in existence, Lovelock later told journalists.

Bryan writes:

For a scientist he talked in lots of mystical mumbo-jumbo, but largely because he was on the “right” side of the issue, the press and other alarmist scientists gave him a pass. But what will they all say now that Lovelock has changed his tune?

Good question. Gore & Co. haven’t even addressed the dramatic change in NASA’s data, now showing 1934 as the hottest year - not 1998 as much of the belief had been based on.