like a sledgehammer over the head

So, all I can think about this morning is climate change. I’ve had that fear in the back and sometimes front of my head like everyone else. But today is the first day when it is the #1 fact in my conscious mind for hours at a time. An 89-year-old man hit me over the head with a sledgehammer. I didn’t speak to any other humans after that lecture except to ask for directions on the street a few times. Just went to a pub and kept reading more.

What was the really chilling part for me about last night’s lecture? I think previously I allowed myself a bit of agnosticism about temperature fluctuations and the like. But if Lovelock is right, then what really dooms us is the disappearing ice cap. Once that is gone, the oceans automatically turn into a big heat sucker taking in 80% of solar energy. So the earth itself is now not on our side, but becomes as big a problem as thousands of coal-burning factories would be.

I’ll try not to post overly much about these things, but they’ll probably be on my mind a great deal in the coming months.

I forgot to mention one helpful technology he was really promoting last night… Some sort of device that allows farmers worldwide to turn bio-waste into charcoal, which can then be buried. This takes a lot of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, apparently. Better yet, farmers would do this voluntarily, because the device produces salable bio-fuel as a biproduct. The profit motive would make them do it even if responsibility would not.

Last night, he made it sound like Ireland and New Zealand are the only safe places for the year 2100. In the book there’s actually a slightly larger variety of options (he obviously likes large islands).

*very good places to live= Ireland, New Zealand, Tasmania, Taiwan. He didn’t mention Iceland, though I’ll bet it makes the list, especially since they are energy self-sufficient. If memory serves he also said Hawaii. Note: I still don’t quite get why all these island nations will supposedly not be ruined by rising sea levels, but Lovelock is obsessed with sea levels, so I assume he must have figured out that these islands won’t lose a significant portion of land mass to flooding.

*pretty good places to live= Japan, England/Scotland/Wales. In principle these are good as the ones listed above, but in practice they are carrying more people than they can handle.

*totally screwed= continental Europe, China, India

*moderately screwed= USA, Russia. These will suffer gigantic dust bowl conditions, but lower population density in these countries compared with the three just listed gives far greater margin for error

Northern Canada and Siberia should be good places to live.

Egypt would surely be totally screwed. The only reason our desert country can support –what, 75 million people despite being 98% desert? Is because of the Nile. This is why it is official Egyptian foreign policy to bomb any Nile dams constructed by countries such as Ethiopia or Sudan. The Egyptian public still feels a lot of rage toward Israel, but in a couple of decades they may not have that luxury, with water becoming a more immediate issue than Palestine. In my opinion there’s a far greater chance of a war between Egypt and its southern neighbors than between Egypt and Israel, at least over the medium term.