Wednesday, January 27, 2010

One last chance to save mankind - opinion - 23 January 2009 - New Scientist

One last chance to save mankind - opinion - 23 January 2009 - New Scientist

The New Scientist interviewed James Lovelock and he has an interesting take.

"James Lovelock is a British chemist, inventor and environmentalist. He is best known for formulating the controversial Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s, which states that organisms interact with and regulate Earth's surface and atmosphere."

During the interview he says:

"We have the example of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 55 million years ago. About the same amount of CO2 was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years."

"There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast."

"Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning."

You can read this article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.500-one-last-chance-to-save-mankind.html?page=1

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