The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Guy Goes From Gaia to Pariah
“James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his ‘Gaia’ theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being ‘alarmist’ about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too,” MSNBC.com reports:
Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared.
He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
However, the professor admitted in a telephone interview with msnbc.com that he now thinks he had been “extrapolating too far.”
Lovelock hasn’t abandoned global warmism altogether, but he now admits it “has not occurred as he had expected”:
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books–mine included–because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.
“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.
“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time . . . it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising–carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added. . . .
Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.”
But that’s just what a denier would say, isn’t it?
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