James Lovelock has been warning us that the weather is going to get bad for about as long as I’ve been alive. About 50 years. His predictions, far-sighted though they were, have come true.
He even invented the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ that, although poo-pooed and bah-humbugged at the time, has come to form the basis of “almost all climate science today.”
The Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. And it’s about to run a temperature to clear itself of an infection.
Lovelock’s latest prediction is that we have at most twenty years until the weather gets really bad. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation. Just six years from now.
His optimism is that once the crisis becomes clear, we will all mobilise to do what needs to be done. (We are currently in a ‘phoney’ period similar to 1938-9 when everyone knew that war was coming, but nobody quite knew when.) The crisis will then “sort the wheat from the chaff”, as has happened before in history, and we will then have humans on the planet who understand it properly and can live on it properly.
Permabusiness shares that view. We need to do what we can, now.