Don’t worry, be happy

James Lovelock, who initially proposed the Gaia Hypothesis, recently spoke about the destiny of our species:

I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll [the human species] survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.

I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.

Alexander Zaitchick continues by pointing to the 'silver lining':

But Lovelock's "final warning" is more than a long and hectoring doctor's talk about an advanced and inoperable cancer. He brightens up considerably when looking beyond the coming die-off. And once we assume the author's Darwinian and planetary long view, it's easy to share Lovelock's cosmic wonder and long-term optimism. He is cautiously hopeful that as many as several hundred million humans will survive the century and carve pockets of civilization into the coming hot state. Our current global civilization is about to end, but there is every reason to "take hope from the fact that our species is unusually tough and is unlikely to go extinct in the coming climate catastrophe."

Dare to be wise!