Climate Prophet's Excess
Jan 25 2009, 12:12 EST
New Scientist mag interviews James Lovelock. Lovelock is not very upbeat about the coming Global Warming Apocalypse [emphasis mine]
Q: Do you think we will survive?Thankfully Lovelock is doing his own part to limit carbon emissions
A: I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less.
Q: Are you looking forward to your trip into space this year?I'm speechless.
A: Very much. I've got my camera ready!
Thankfully Lovelock has a plan to save us [emphasis mine]
.. by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won't do it.If farmer's could do it at a profit they would already being doing it (or Lovelock needs to take out an ad in the Farmer's Almanac).