Gaia

We've had a slew of high-profile warnings on the environment recently. First there was the incoming President of the AAAS, John Holdren, who warned that the pace of change seems to be happening much faster than predicted (remember I made a similar but even more emphatic point here myself) and that in particular the Greenland Ice sheet, if melted away, would swamp many areas. Then his British counterpart, Frances Cairncross, opined that it's too late to stop major climate change so we should do more in the way of planning for adaptation while we can. Adding to the angst, the latest ice core studies indicate that carbon dioxide levels are substantially higher now than they've been at any time in the past 800,000 years. And, of course, Dr. James Lovelock reckons in his new book that Gaia, throwing off the human infection, has developed a fever that will take thousands of years to break. If we're lucky, he says, some humans may successfully migrate to the arctic and start over.