If Britons already believe that their island is intolerably crowded today, they might well want to brace themselves -- because the country is going to become much, much more densely populated over the course of this century as millions of people flee the uninhabitable desert that ma inland Europe is doomed to turn into.
Such at least is James Lovelock's fear. The esteemed — if controversial — environmentalist and futurologist (he prefers to be called a planetary physician) also believes that by the middle of this century, the America-sized chunk of floating ice that currently covers the Arctic will melt. As a result, the current habitat of polar bears will eventually be the place where we, or our probably very fed-up descendants, live out their pitiful existences. "Most life will move up to the Arctic basin because only it and a few islands will remain habitable," says Lovelock, who is most famous for coming up with the so-called Gaia hypothesis — the idea that the Earth functions as some kind of living super-organism.
Lovelock is now seriously concerned about said super-organism. Humanity's vast output of carbon dioxide over the past two centuries has prompted the deserts to spread towards the poles at an alarming rate, he says. "The Sahara is heading north. So where's the food going to come from? Not from the European mainland. Even here things are changing: there are in Britain now scorpions and snails hitherto only seen in the Mediterranean. Recently I saw hawk moths. Something terrible is happening." On the plus side, hawk moths are very pretty, I suggest. "That's not really the point," says Lovelock.
"I think people forget that the whole world is going to be affected," he goes on. "Climate change will affect China and the US." Indeed, Lovelock envisages that the Chinese people will press to live in a newly lush Siberia before the century is out. "No wonder Putin is arming like mad. In fact, Putin is one of the more far-sighted of global leaders." In the US, even now, distinguished academics are contemplating moving north, Lovelock says. "I gave a talk at Stanford [the Californian Ivy League university] a few months ago. Professors, including Nobel prize winners, were coming up to me asking where in Canada they should buy real estate because they believed me when I said much of the US will be uninhabitable."
Are they right to think that way? "Absolutely ... we should be scared stiff. If you speak to any senior climatologists, the summer of 2003 [in which thousands of Europeans, many of them elderly, perished in the heat] will be the norm by 2050. Old people might have air conditioning, but that won't help the plants which we need to regulate temperatures. It will become a desert climate."
But what of Britain? Is this green and sometimes pleasant land doomed to become desert too? Lovelock thinks not. "We'll be a bloody lifeboat for Europe. It will be their right to come here too." Why? "Because we're all members of the European community." Good point, but one tends to forget such footling matters as the rights that go with EU membership when one is staring global catastrophe in the face.
Lovelock reckons that the British Isles will be among the few island oases in a world given over to desert, scrub and oceans devoid of life.
Lovelock may sound extreme to some, but although he is regarded as a sort of dotty uncle figure by some scientists, and his Gaia hypothesis has been criticized by the likes of Richard Dawkins, others hold him in high regard. His fans include biologist Lewis Wolpert, green thinker Jonathan Porrit, geo-grapher Jared Diamond, and philosopher John Gray. The environmentalist Fred Pearce once said Lovelock was to science what Gandhi was to politics; Prospect magazine included him in its list of the world's top 100 intellectuals.
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