Lovelock says global warming slower than predicted

James Lovelock is a well known environmentalist, and has been a loud voice proclaiming that the impact of man made global warming would be massive. In 2006 he said:

billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable

He was referring to the year 2100 – just 88 years away. He said that 80% of the world’s population will have perished due to climate change, and by 2040 parts of the Sahara desert will have moved into middle Europe, and there will be almost no food grown in Europe.

In 2010 he said “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

He is quoted on the Green Party website 24 times, including blog comments.

MSNBC reports:

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared. …

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

He pointed to Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” as other examples of “alarmist” forecasts of the future.

I’ve often said that the “alarmists” are significantly responsible for the huge levels of disbelief in greenhouse gases causing global warming. There is little dispute that increased greenhouse gases has a direct impact on the average temperature, but what is unknown is how other factors either multiply this impact, or reduce it.