PEOPLE TOO OVERWHELMED TO ACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE, SAY LEADING SCIENTISTS
By Marlowe Hood in Copenhagen
Agence France-Presse
March 16, 2009
Original LinkScientists say they are haunted by the failure to convey to the world just how close Earth is to climate catastrophe.
Top researchers who gathered in Copenhagen for a climate change conference said they were worried that people could not psychologically deal with the enormity of the problem and were reverting to doing nothing.
French glaciologist Claude Lorius, one of the first scientists to publish in 1987 evidence that global warming was real, said he despaired of getting the message across.
"At first, I thought that we could convince people. But there is a terrible inertia,'' he said.
"I fear that society is not up to the challenge of a crisis like this. Today, as a human being I am pessimistic.''
John Church, an expert on sea levels at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart, took an equally dim view of our collective capacity for denial.
"Perhaps society has realised the seriousness, but it certainly hasn't realised the urgency,'' he said.
"But even if you are pessimistic -- and sometimes I am -- it does not help. What are you going to do? Chop off your hands and give up? That's not a solution either,'' he said.
But even if it is urgent to let the world know just how bad it could be, there is also a danger of frightening people into inaction, said other scientists.
"As a scientist, I deal with climate change on a time scale of hundreds of thousands of years, and even I have a hard time dealing with it,'' Williams Howard, a researcher at the University of Tasmania said.
Johan Rockstrom, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute, said: "The risk is that when science pumps out more and more evidence that we are facing dangerous tipping points'' -- triggers that would make climate change irreversible -- "that you put your head in the sand and move from denial to despair."
Hanging over the conference proceedings like an invisible cloud were the apocalyptic predictions of the monstre sacre of Earth sciences, 90-year-old British scientist James Lovelock.
Lovelock commands respect because he understood decades before his peers that Earth behaves as a single, self-regulating system composed of physical, chemical and biological components, a concept he dubbed the Gaia principle.
In his just-released book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, he basically says we have already passed a point of no return, and that it is now impossible "to save the planet as we know it.''
"Efforts to stabilise carbon dioxide and temperature are no better than planetary alternative medicine,'' he wrote.
It is perhaps telling that more than a dozen scientists interviewed could only say that they hoped Lovelock was wrong.
None could say -- based on the science -- that they knew he was wrong.
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