Braying Ninny - James Lovelock and Climate Change

James Lovelock had some fantastic ideas 30 years ago with his Gaia theories -- the various systems on this planet are heavily interlinked. Unfortunately, he is still clinging to the limelight and is currently espousing a very Malthusian doom and gloom while promoting his new book. From the UK Daily Mail:

We're all doomed! 40 years from global catastrophe - and there's NOTHING we can do about it, says climate change expert
The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it.

According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.

By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine.

The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain.

We will, he says, have to set up encampments in this country, like those established for the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict in East Africa.

Lovelock believes the subsequent ethnic tensions could lead to civil war.

For those unfamiliar with Thomas Malthus, Wikipedia has a nice article A perfect example of modern Malthusian thought can be found in the Club of Rome's 1972 book: Limits to Growth. It was a bombshell when it hit but evolved into more of a damp thud as people started looking at the models used and as time started revealing that their dire predictions were just plain wrong. There will always be people predicting doom and gloom. It's one of the best ways to get attention and nobody really remembers, twenty years later, what all the big fuss was all about.