From a Gaian point of view, when we first started interfering with the atmosphere nothing much happened. It was encompassing it by its ordinary regulating mechanisms. But when it gets too much, Gaia can't cope with it, and this is why I'm afraid, I think its going to play absolute mayhem with our civilization in the next 10 or a 100 years.
When you see the whole picture, it is really fearsomely bad. I mean things like the very rapid melting of the floating ice near the North Pole. As the floating ice melts, so less sunlight is reflected back to space by the dazzlingly white ice, and more and more sunlight is absorbed by the ocean. Just the melting of the floating ice in the arctic ocean will add as much heat to the earth as all of the CO2 we have put in the atmosphere to date. And this is why I'm afraid, I think, there is very little we can do about it.
All of our efforts to reduce emissions are as nothing. There is no morality about it. If the Earth improves as a result of our presence, then we will flourish. If it doesn't, then we'll die off. I fear that not many of us will survive - at best perhaps a billion, perhaps a lot less than that. Now how they will die - it will be by starvation, by war, by disease; who knows. The four horseman really ride when conditions like that happen.
It isn't an easy subject is it? People say to me, well you can say that kind of thing easily because at you age, its not going to effect you. You'll be dead before it all happens. And that's true, although I'm not so sure. If I live to a 100, I think many things can happen before then. But I do have great grandchildren, and progeny is the name of the game here.
