the timeline

Got caught in the rain, so I went out to get a copy of the Irish Times. Accidentally, I ran across an interview with Lovelock done at his Dublin hotel. It went into a bit more detail about the timetable he imagines.

Complete melting of the Arctic ice may take 30 years. That’s the point at which the Arctic Ocean will start absorbing extra sunlight for the first time in millennia. Ocean temperatures and thus land temperatures will rise worldwide. That will have the following disastrous feedback effects…

*The Canadian and Siberian permafrost will melt, releasing lots of extra carbon dioxide and increasing the problem all the more.

*Algae will die off from excessively hot water, eliminating a CO2 absorber.

*Tropical forests will die off from excessive heat, eliminating another major CO2 absorber.

The result will be a permanently hotter climate, with a maximum of 1 billion humans distributed much more heavily toward the Arctic. Many major areas of human population in 2009 will be vast windswept deserts in 2100, including most of Europe and Asia, though oases will still exist near mountains (so perhaps Switzerland would survive as a fertile mountain oasis surrounded by European desert).

He’s 89, but does say that he worries about his grandchildren and one great-grandchild, and counsels them on where to live. A couple of them live in Australia. Somewhat to my surprise he said that’s not a bad choice (surprising because he was harping on recent drought conditions in Australia last night). But Australia has a low population density, and he seems to think that’s a survival key.

Oddly, in the newspaper interview he seems to take the view that “hey, stuff happens; this is how evolution works; we’ll probably get through this stronger than ever, but our population is going to drop way off; it sounds horrifying to those of us who grew up with the current climate, but younger people may find it exciting, just as I found it exciting to live through WWII”.

ADDENDUM: He does think it’s probably out of our hands by now, and we’re doomed to drop to 1 billion by 2100. However, he does hold out hope for the one technology I mentioned last night, which turns farm waste into charcoal. Charcoal, he says, is as durable as gold, and if buried will keep a lot of CO2 underground and out of the atmosphere.