It has been a while since this blog ranted about destabilizing feedback. So, let’s step off-screen, shall we, and pull in James Lovelock, father of the Gaia Theory.

In an interview with the New Scientist, Lovelock explained that his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, examines five dreaded positive feedback loops. Those processes, which now are underway, will become ferocious amplifiers of global heating.

If there is any doubt that these processes are underway, one need only look at sea-level rise, maintains Lovelock. Given the complexity of the millions of interactions, it is better to ignore year-to-year temperature fluctuations. Instead, watch the oceans, says Lovelock. Sea level rise is a trustworthy indicator of the “Earth’s heat balance.”

Sea Level Rise
“Sea level rise is the best available measure of the heat absorbed by the earth because it comes from only two things,” he writes. “[These are] the melting of glaciers and the expansion of water as it warms. Sea level is the thermometer that indicates true global heating.”

Lovelock describes how the most important of these feedback loops already in motion—the loss of reflective ice cover, the death of carbon eating algae as oceans warm, and methane released by thawing permafrost—will soon accelerate the heating trend already underway, leading to sudden and dramatic shifts in global climate. Rather than the steady rise predicted by the UN’s IPCC, Lovelock is confident the change will resemble economic charts of boom and bust, full of sudden and unexpected discontinuities, dips, and jumps. “The Earth’s history and simple climate models based on the notion of a live and responsive Earth suggest that sudden change and surprise are more likely than the smooth rising curve of temperature that modelers predict for the next ninety years,” he writes.

“It’s wrong to assume we’ll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth,” asserts Lovelock, whose latest book warns that cities and farmland will be lost to rising seas. At 4 °C, with endless heatwaves, there will be a drastic reduction in carrying capacity for much of the arable land on Earth. Human population will be unable to survive even with one-tenth of our current population.

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