Global Warming

[sumisu]

Lovelock: Humans Can't Fix Global Warming

Posted on: Wednesday, 31 March 2010, 06:09 CDT

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1843600/lovelock_humans_cant_fix_global_warming/



A scientist and environmentalist who gained notoriety for proposing that the Earth behaved like an organism now claims that mankind isn't smart enough to deal with global climate change.

British researcher James Lovelock--the man who four decades ago formulated the Gaia hypothesis, which asserts that the living and nonliving systems of the Earth work together like the various parts of a living organism--told Leo Hickman of The Guardian, "I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change."

Also during the Monday interview, Lovelock told Hickman that "modern democracy" was partially to blame for the lack of legitimate response to the global warming issue, and that it should be "put… on hold for a while" in order to formulate a strategy to deal with climate change. He also addressed the "Climategate" scandal, admitting that he had not read the leaked emails but that the alleged content "utterly disgusted" him and that falsifying data was "a sin against the holy ghost of science."

When asked about the United Nations' 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, Lovelock said that it was "doomed to fail… A lot of people put their hearts into it. But I've never felt entirely happy with that sort of environmental wing-ding… It just shows how hopeless humans are… You just can't get all those people to agree."

On Tuesday, Lovelock spoke out again, this time discussing the climate change issue with British television host John Humphrys. During the interview, Humphrys said that the future of humanity was uncertain, but that mankind was "not really guilty… We didn't deliberately set out to heat the world". He also claimed that the only thing that could save the Earth at this point was the Earth itself.

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