Prophet of climate doom a scientific black sheep

Researchers from a broad swathe of disciplines are strangely ill at ease when asked about fellow scientist James Lovelock, whose improbable career has just entered its seventh decade. Chemists, biologists, climatologists and physicists are all quick to reach for superlatives: "brilliant", "ahead of his time", a "renaissance scientist" in an age of ultra-specialisation. But even as the scientific community sings Lovelock's praises, one waits for the other shoe to drop. When it comes to climate change -- the issue that has consumed Lovelock's interest more than any other over the last decade -- the old man has got it wrong, they say. At least they hope he is wrong. Five years ago, Lovelock's "The Revenge of Gaia" issued a terrifying warning: if humankind didn't radically curtail greenhouse-gas emissions, there would, quite literally, be hell to pay. His new book out this year, "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," says it has now become bleakly apparent that we blew our chance. "We have left it far, far too late to save the planet as we know it," Lovelock said. Lovelock's grim conviction that we cannot prevent a global warming apocalypse in which billions of people will perish is rooted not in what we will fail to do in the future, but what we have already done in the past. For even if we stop spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere tomorrow, he says, the carbon dioxide (CO2) already there has triggered natural events -- the shrinking Arctic ice cap, the decay of the Greenland ice sheet, methane release from permafrost -- that will continue to drive global warming on their own...EconomicTimes