Reference: Warming to wipe out most life on earth, Bangkok Post, February 27, 2009

James Lovelock, of Gaia fame who rose to prominence as a guru of environmentalism in the 1960s, says that by the year 2040 carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels will turn Europe into a desert and that by the year 2100 the entire planet will be dead except for a few isolated oases that will sustain no more than one in seven of us and that the rest of us will perish (Warming to wipe out most life on earth, Bangkok Post, February 27, 2009). He further contends that global warming is now past the tipping point and the earth is hurtling its way to certain death because of the carbon dioxide we have already emitted and that there is nothing we can do about it now. In the last paragraph of the story we find that he came to these frightening conclusions by doing nothing more than reading the 2001 IPCC assessment report. That report did in fact contain the "tipping point" argument but subsequent IPCC assessments in 2005 and 2007 revised those findings and withdrew the tipping point scenario saying that there is still time to save the earth by controlling our CO2 emissions. Further research recommended for Mr Lovelock would be to read these later IPCC reports and to also consider that all of the short term forecasts in the 2001 and 2005 reports that could have been emprically tested in subsequent years have been proven to be false.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand