The website www.ecolo.org says in the description tag of its biography page about James Lovelock, “James Lovelock is the founding historical and cultural leader of environmentalism for environmentalists around the world.” He had a rapt audience when, in 2006, he sounded the alarm about global warming. In an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper he that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
Well, he’s had a change of heart. MSNBC interviewed him a couple of months ago about a new book he is writing that backtracks on his earlier alarmist views. While he still believes that humanity is causing warming, he is opposing the alarmist views he held before, and that are still being promoted by many.
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,” he said. “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.”
He went on. “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.”
In a follow-up interview with the U.K. Guardian, he went further in unraveling what he called the “green religion.”
He blasted the notion that conclusions about climate change are “settled science.” “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”
And he ridiculed the idea of powering the world with wind power and other tools of what environmentalists call “sustainable development.” He called such notions “meaningless drivel.”
Will his declarations have any impact on his former disciples? No, because, as he said, global warming is part of an environmental religion, and not subject to the constraints of reason.
In fact, I made that point in a post I wrote in October 2010, that environmentalism is a religion.
And I’d like to refer you to a page I wrote on the main website where I talk about carbon recycling – returning the carbon in fossil fuels to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, which is where it started. I think that’s a cute point.
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