Apparently on the theory that misery always appreciates good company, several readers have directed me to this article about British scientist James Lovelock and his warning that catastrophic global climate change is both imminent and unstoppable:

Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.

"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover."

C'mon Jim, give it to us without the sugar coating. We can take it.

It would be easy to view this as just another kooky end-of-the-world theory, if it weren't for the history of some of Lovelock's other kooky theories -- like the time in the late '70s when he hypothesized that chlorofluorocarbons wafted high into the stratosphere would eat great big holes in the ozone layer, exposing first the polar regions and then the rest of the earth's surface to increasingly harmful ultraviolet radiation. What a nut.

...

Of course, if Lovelock is right, Greenland could end up being the Florida of the 22nd century -- in which case I'm sure future generations of the Bush family will find a way to screw it up, too.

Actually, if Lovelock's "Gaia Hypothesis" is correct, and the planet really does act like one big self-regulating organism, then what's coming won't be the end of life on earth, but rather the fever that kills the germs (think of the human race as a particularly nasty yeast infection) and restores the patient to her former health.