Baked Alaska
If you hate shoveling snow, I’ve got good news. Dr. James Lovelock, who brought us the Gaia Hypothesis (a theory in which the biosphere is responsible for both the creation and regulation of Earth’s climate), has announced that our little blue orb, as a result of Mankind’s environmental rapacity, is about to enter a rapid phase of warming that he likens to a global fever. By the end of this century, according to his sunny prognosis, the climate in temperate regions will have heated up by 8° C. (that’s 14.4° F.), most of the tropics will have become scrub and desert, billions of humans will have died, and “the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” And it’s too late to do anything about it, by the way.
You can read the article here.
Oh well, que sera sera, I always say. See you on the boardwalk in Toktoyaktuk! Don’t forget your sunscreen.
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January 20th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
I’d love to see the evidence for this before I start packing to move back to Alaska. I suppose it will be presented in the forthcoming book.
I’m a bit jaded at this point–seems that I’ve been hearing predictions of disaster all my life. Remember The Population Bomb?
January 20th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Hi Robert,
Right you are, people have been predicting imminent disaster all along. What is often not factored in is the extent to which human ingenuity, faced with critical challenges, rises to the occasion in unforeseeable ways. For example the pan-global famine predicted by Thomas Malthus never came to pass, thanks to the advance of agricultural technology.