New Zealand to reach 5 million

NZ's population: 5 million in 2020

NZ Herald,

11 January, 2018

_{New Zealand's population is predicted to hit 5 million in about 2020 and could reach this milestone sooner.}

In the year to June 2016, the population grew by 97000, its fastest rate since the 1960s.

Statistics NZ senior demographer Kim Dunstan said both immigration numbers and population growth had exceeded their predication.

"Our population was estimated to be 4.69 million at 30 June 2016, with net migration being 69,100 over the June year."

The latest figures made it likely that the population would rise to between 4.9 and 5.1 million by 2020.

By 2025 the population could rise by a further half a million to 5.5 million.

Based on an average migration of 30,000 a year and much higher fertility rates, New Zealand Statistics predicts that the population could grow to nearly 8 million by 2068.

If there was no migration, the population would peak at 5.3 million around 2050 and then slowly decline.

A timely warning from James Lovelock unheeded

Back in 2008 James Lovelock warned New Zealand against the emissions trading scheme and said the country should not let its population increase too much.



That would give the country a chance of surviving

Listen to podcast HERE

"Based on an average migration of 30,000 a year ...."

No report in the media will ever acknowledge the truth of the following: that John Key added 500,000 people to the population as part of a policy to give the ILLUSION of economic growth while not adding any new infrastructure apart from roads.

One liberal friend who was previously anti-Key was offended by the following piece saying we should take in unlimited numbers of refugees and it was justified by treatment of Maori. He denied there is a population problems - the more the merrier.

It did not occur to him to ask Maori what they think.

JOHN KEY AND THE 170 BILLION DOLLAR KNIGHTHOOD.

Via Facebook

MORE FAKE NEWS ( or outright lies ) FROM TVNZ.

- OUR CURRENT ACCOUNT SURPLUS.

After 9 years, New Zealand's largest TV channel is still lying to the public of NZ about the state of our economy.

They continue to report economic growth when we DO NOT have economic growth just massive population growth! ( just look at the per capita GDP numbers)

The government are 60 billion in debt and climbing every day.

Jacinda Ardern has openly stated that she is going to borrow billions to pay for her spending over the next 2 years.

New Zealand as a whole is now a record 500 billion dollars in debt with over 200 billion borrowed ( by way of the private sector) under John Key to keep our economy going.

What New Zealand's mainstream media do not understand is that NZ DOES NOT have economic growth, we have massive immigration deliberately set up by John Key to lie about the state of our economy to get votes.

The media continue to perpetuate the lie as they simply do not understand the difference between economic growth that creates wealth and prosperity through foreign exchange earnings, and population growth that creates homelessness, poverty, congestion, pollution and is primarily debt funded through massive mortgage debt.

In US dollars

JOHN KEY AND THE 170 BILLION DOLLAR KNIGHTHOOD.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=583977182036330&id=522251814875534

The most poignant comment of John Key's political career came on his last day in government.

As Key walked down the steps of the beehive for the final time, he was met by a reporter from TVNZ who asked how important it had been that he was seen as popular. Key's predefined answer was, of course it was important that he was popular in the publics eyes.

(Unfortunately, good leaders cannot always be popular, especially when tough decisions need to be made.)

In that one sentence, John Key summed up the objectives and policies of the National government between 2008 and 2016.

John Key never entered politics to help the poor or the homeless. He never set out to save our environment. His policies weren't to alleviate congestion on the roads or waiting lists in our hospitals, and Key never intended to help young Kiwis into their first homes.

John Key entered politics to fulfil a boyhood dream. He was drawn to the limelight and dreamt of rubbing shoulders with the All Blacks, playing golf with President Obama, visiting the Royals, and the other unique opportunities offered by the office of Prime Minister.

Once in government, John Key had one simple priority - take whatever steps were needed to keep the National party ( and himself) in government.

So what was his plan?

Governments everywhere have always lived and died on one thing - employment, not the economy.

This is a strange thing to say because the public associate strong employment with a healthy economy.

This is true, but with one important exception, that is when you are funding the economy with debt !!

John Key knew he couldn't grow our economy the proper way with exports. He didn't have the time or dedication. He entered politics for the rewards of office not to get bogged down in the mundane rigours of running a country.

So Key turned to debt to fund the economy.

But he couldn't use government debt as the media would have reported this quickly and it would have been political suicide.

So he turned to private debt using immigration to create a massive building and consumption boom.

Over his 8 years in power, New Zealand had the greatest increase in population, on a per capita basis, of any country in the world. And it has been funded, in the main, by debt.

Masses of debt. Over 100 billion dollars in eight short years or between 20 and 30 billion every year in mortgage debt since 2008

In 2008 when John Key took power, New Zealand had a population of 4.2 million people, and residential mortgage debt was around 130 billion. 8 years later the population had increased to 4.7 million, and mortgage debt had climbed to 247.8 billion dollars. A massive increase in 8 years.

By creating a building boom using immigration, you can keep a huge percentage of the population employed. There are very few sectors of the economy that are not affected by the demand from massive population growth.

Mortgage debt has been paying for builders and plumbers and architects and planners, it is also paying the wages of people working at Placemakers, Bunnings, Hirepool, Briscoes, Farmers, car dealers, real estate agents, lawyers, accountants and many many other professions.

But using immigration is an extremely perilous way of funding your economy. It destroys the environment, places enormous pressure on infrastructure ( because there is no wealth being created to upgrade services), and it creates a huge drop in the standard of living.

It is a short-term means of keeping unemployment low, but because it is funded with debt, is a long-term ticking time bomb.

The media have for the last nine years been reporting our 'rock star economy' and our expanding growth. None of them have been reporting the truth, which is not a growing economy just a growing population, and the only thing that is 'rockstar' is the debt!

Alongside private debt, National was also using government debt.

When Key took over in 2008 government debt was 10.3 billion, this grew to 64.4 in 2016 when he left.

The media have blamed the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes but the government's exposure to Christchurch was $18 billion, and Kaikoura cost $2 billion.

There has been minimal coverage of the effect of billions pumped into our economy from foreign insurance.

The GFC was another 'crisis' we had to deal with. The GFC was never quantified and was mostly covered over by the debt from immigration and strong tourism numbers.

New Zealand had limited exposure to the GFC, mainly from the collapse of poorly structured finance companies but we will have our real, and much worse 'GFC' when we stop immigration.

Most of the 50 billion of government debt borrowed by Key was spent trying to cope with the ever-expanding population.

Rising pressure on hospitals, schools, roading, police, etc was placing enormous cost pressures on infrastructure, but billions were needed above borrowings to retain our standard of living.

(National spent over 50 million between 2008-16 on motels for the homeless. This issue is still with us in 2018)

National was also taking money out of departments like DOC ( in 2015 $36 million came out of DOC's budget) to try to keep on top of rising costs in other departments.

But Key still ran 5 current account deficits in 8 years, mostly unreported because the media were preoccupied with employment numbers.

(An interesting statistic is the surpluses run in 2015/16/17, and the surpluses run today, are mainly taxes earnt off mortgage debt, as building houses underpins our economy.)

Even with government borrowings, infrastructure in 2018 is in semi-crisis due to population demands.

So how bad are things now?

Because the country has been funded mainly by debt for the last 9 years instead of wealth, there has been no appreciable gain in taxation, just massive cost pressure from the growing population.

Infrastructure is bursting at the seams trying to service another 500,000 'Kiwis', and there is simply no money other than more debt to bring our standard of living back to pre-Key days.

For example, Auckland has seen the greatest influx of people but has no more hospitals or substantial schools than 10 years ago.

But perhaps the most serious and damaging outcome from John Key's tenure is house prices and rents.

Houses prices in Auckland went up 91% under Keys National government due to massive demand and speculation. Immigrants and young Kiwis are now burdened with some of the biggest mortgages of any homeowners in the world!

The ramifications of all this debt are significant.

Mortgage debt will restrict lifestyles, it will affect health and education. It will hamper the ability to save for retirement and will cause enormous long-term stress.

This debt is not only going to be a huge burden for the mortgage holders but will have a massive impact on New Zealand with less discretionary spending into our economy.

The data shows that no government over an 8 year period in history has done more social, economic and environmental damage to New Zealand than the John Key and Bill English led National government.

There is no way back from the situation they have created only the possibility to make it worse if Jacinda Ardern carries on with immigration and borrows heavily at the same time to fund infrastructure upgrades.

In a lot of ways, our economy is now at the mercy of the Australian banks, being a total of over 500 billion dollars in debt.

The Labour Party need to understand the damage cannot be fixed by throwing debt at the problem. Burying the already mortgage-laden youth of New Zealand under more public debt is just wrong.

The bulk of New Zealand's wealth comes from our primary resources. Agricultural horticulture, forestry, fisheries, oil, minerals and tourism. All of these resources are capped. This means that the larger our population becomes the more the wealth from these resources is diluted.

The last thing New Zealand needs if we want to look after our greatest asset, our environment, and be prosperous, is a large population.

Now more than ever we need to look at industries away from our low production cost primary industries, to find other sources of income for our population. This has never been easy due to factors like our isolation from large markets and our high costs related to manufacturing.

In an article printed in the NBR, titled " A Paradise Lost, " the author argued it will take decades to recover from John Key. I disagree. Our environment will never recover from the 2008/17 period and I do not believe we will ever have the standard of living we had pre-Key.

If you want to put a 'positive' spin on things, you could say that bringing back Knighthoods by the National party was a fortuitous move.

Because both Key and English were able to receive one.

Dire warning that humans had 40 years to make necessary changes to avoid extinction - 28 YEARS AGO

“We cannot survive a 5 per cent or 6 per cent increase in temperature or a 20 per cent erosion of the ozone layer,and everything we are doing must inevitably lead to this result.

“Today’s economic policies, if pursued, can only lead to the annihilation of the human race.”

--- Edward Goldsmith, 1989

A man ahead of his time: an appreciation of Edward Goldsmith

My first lessons on the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet came when I encountered Paul Ehrlich and the Population Bomb when I was at school in the early 70’s.

Next came an article in the Bangkok Post in 1988 which was the first mention of what was called the Greenhouse Effect (which I was already familiar with from studies in astronomy and of Venus’ atmosphere) that I came across. This had such an effect on me that I went to the NZ Embassy to check the newspapers to find the only mention was on the possible effects on the ski industry.

Fast forward to March, 1988 and my partner Pam travelled to Auckland for a seminar while I remained home bound in the midst of a terrible storm. The only high point was hearing an interview with Edward Goldsmith on NZ’s National Radio in which I heard for the first time the stark message that humanity had only 40 years to get its act together if it was to avoid inevitable extinction.

This made such an impression on me that has stayed with me through the years that I decided to go and search for the newspaper item in the public record which I eventually found.

As it turns out it made the top of the front page of the paper – for what I suspect was the first and mostly probably the last time in New Zealand media.

Looking back at all the material about him on the Net I realised Edward Goldsmith has attracted almost as much negativity and controversy as Guy McPherson, mostly, I suspect because of his strong anti-growth position. But for me he was one of the most inspiring figures I have met.

He was the publisher of the Ecologist magazine in London and winner of the Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as the alternative Nobel award. He is considered one of the fathers of the global environmental movement. 

***

Here is the item that was on the front page of the Dominion on 27 March, 1989.  Published almost 3 years before the Rio conference and before Kyoto when global warming was referred to be the mechanism, the Greenhouse Effect this was perhaps the first, and almost certainly the last time that scientific concepts such as the Gaia hypothesis were given such prominence in the mass media.

Reading this I feel a real grief,not only in terms of the 'road not taken' but for what we have lost in the last 30 years. It is a reminder that we have lost the art of journalism and proper use of language in even an ordinary newspaper article.

When was the last time you saw these concepts discussed on the front page of a national newspaper?

Mankind given 40 years

the Dominion,

27 March, 1989

Humanity has less than 40 years left unless destructive policies are halted,a leading British environmentalist said in Auckland at the weekend.

Author and lecturer Edward Goldsmith, who earlier addressed the Living Earth conference said: “In the past 40 years we have done more destruction than during the whole of man’s tenancy of this planet.

Economic and industrial policies had caused “the most terrrible” soil and erosion and deforestation and were altering the ozone layer and climates.

“We cannot survive a 5 per cent or 6 per cent increase in temperature or a 20 per cent erosion of the ozone layer,and everything we are doing must inevitably lead to this result.

“Today’s economic policies, if pursued, can only lead to the annihilation of the human race.”

He wants a global emergency declared, with energy consumption cut by 70 to 80 per cent, the world’s youth planting trees to absorb carbon dioxide and an end to development projects which destroy forests - NZPA

Scientist issue ‘last chance’ warning

Humans would have to make wide-ranging changes in attitudes and lifestyles quickly if they were to survive the changes begun by pollution and deforestation, scientists told an Auckland symposium at the weekend.

the Dominion,

27 March, 1989

Scientists and researchers said the human race might die out without a new spirit of co-operation and collectivism.

They said it was becoming increasingly likely that the planet would re-organise its systems to rid itself of pollution, the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion.

While the planet would survive, there was a fair chance the human race would not, they said.

They believe a theory known as the Gaia hypothesis may be the key to our survival.

Gaia is the classical Greek word for earth.

The hypothesis was developed by Dr. James Lovelock, who worked for the American space programme searching for signs of lie on Mars.

He suggested the earth was one complex organism, with an underlying organisation between every species ans system on the planet.

The human race was only one of that organism, scientists said, and there was a chance the planet was already organising itself to counteract the greenhouse warming, pollution, deforestation and ozone depeltion, by effectively kicking the human race out, moving into a diferent state in which humanity could not survive.

Ecologist Dr. Warwick Fox, a national research fellow at the centre for environmental studies at the University of Tasmania said the planet’s geological, chemical and biological cycles were so closely linked that scientists had to view the system as a single organism.

Professor John Morton said it looked as if humanity was likely to fail.

“We have to as ourselves if Gaia will at last become impatient and restructure itself to survive, making one of its species, humanity, redundant”, he said.

Scientists warned that when the global system was disturbed, it reached a critical threshold after a time and took on a completely different state.

Dr. Fox said people saw this every day when they heated water.

“The water in the pot quietly gets hotter and hotter, and suddenly its temperature reaches a critical threshold.

“And you’ve got turbulence and big bubbles of air and the water is boiling.

“A very different state from when you put it into the pot.”

What worried scientists so much was that the human species had introduced many disturbances in the past century and there was no way of telling when the earth would reach its critical threshold and flip into a different state which might or might not include humans.

That’s the double-edged sword. We’re playing with fire if we muck around with a highly-ordered system. And we’ve already done a great deal of mucking around with this planet in the past century or so,” Dr. Fox said.

Scientists involved in biological and microbial research said their research was starting to yield proof the Gaia hypothesis was correct.

Michael Crofoot, a researcher and writer on microbial symbiosis said scientists agreed that virtually all land plants had a symbiotic relationship with the fungi attached to their roots.

These fungi fed water and nutrients into the root and the extent of this assistance had astonished forest scientists.

“Up to four years ago, carefully controlled experiments found plant communities share nitrogen and other nutrients through the mycorrhizal fungi attached to their roots,” Mr. Crofoot said.

“Someone pointed out that in that case, you could say the tree was an appendage of the fungi.

“That means the forest is in fact one living organism. It’s the best physical evidence we’ve got of the truth of the Gaia hypothesis. We’re being taught a most amazing lesson, one we could perhaps only have learned now, when we are on our deathbed,” he said.

Here is a documentary made by Teddy Goldsmith

"Edward Goldsmith - The Green Revolutionary" 

Edward 'Teddy' Goldsmith, the grandfather of the modern environmental movement argues that the planetary crisis facing us today cannot be solved by further economic progress and technological innovation but only through the cooperative efforts of ordinary people guided by their faith in traditional wisdom

Part 1 - The Problem: industrial society

Part 2 - The Solution: people and planet

Publisher of the Ecologist Speaks About Biotechnology and Global Warming

Democracy Now!

30 April, 1999

Listen to the podcast HERE

And a discussion between Goldsmith and Jack Shallcrass. There are 

6 parts to this discussion.

James Lovelock on 'saving the planet'

James Lovelock: 'Saving the planet is a foolish, romantic extravagance'

Harry Borden for Newsweek

Newsweek,

31 May, 2015

Jim Lovelock, environmentalist, scientist, and celebrated proposer of the Gaia hypothesis, has always taken the long view of Earth's future. So it feels appropriate that he should have retired to a coastguard's cottage perched above Chesil Beach on Dorset's Jurassic Coast – so called because 180 million years of geological history lie exposed along its cliffs and coves.

This shoreline is constantly eroding. In the winter storms of 2013, Lovelock's cottage was cut off for four days when the road leading to it was washed into the sea – not that Lovelock, whose latest book is entitled A Rough Ride to the Future, needed any reminder of the precariousness of our world. A decade ago, he predicted that billions would be wiped out by floods, drought and famine by 2040. He is more circumspect about that date these days, but he has not changed his underlying belief that the consequences of global warming will catch up with us eventually. His conviction that humans are incapable of reversing them – and that it is in any case too late to try – is also unaltered. In the week when the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change reported that the world is still miles off meeting its 2030 carbon emission targets, Lovelock cannot easily be dismissed.

There are other doomsayers. What makes this one so unusual is his confounding cheerfulness about the approaching apocalypse. His optimism rests on his faith in Gaia – his revolutionary theory, first formulated in the 1970s, that our planet is not just a rock but a complex, self-regulating organism geared to the long-term sustenance of life. This means, among other things, that if there are too many people for the Earth to support, Gaia – Earth – will find a way to get rid of the excess, and carry on.

Lovelock's concern is less with the survival of humanity than with the continuation of life itself. Against that imperative, the decimation of nations is almost inconsequential to him. "You know, I look with a great deal of equanimity on some sort of happening – not too rapid – that reduces our population down to about a billion," he says, five minutes into our meeting. "I think the Earth would be happier ... A population in England of five or 10 million? Yes, I think that sounds about right." To him, even the prospect of nuclear holocaust has its upside. "The civilisations of the northern hemisphere would be utterly destroyed, no doubt about it," he says, "but it would give life elsewhere a chance to recover. I think actually that Gaia might heave a sigh of relief."

He is driven, at least in part, by a deep affinity for the English countryside. When he warns that sea levels are rising three times faster than the first climatology models predicted, and that this threatens "an awful lot of land north of Cambridge that is one or two meters below sea level", you sense that he really cares about that landscape's fate. No doubt he inherited this affection, along perhaps with a certain independence of spirit and thought, from his father. Born in West Berkshire in 1872, Lovelock senior grew up as a "hunter-gatherer" in support of his impoverished family, until, aged 14, he was caught poaching and imprisoned in Reading for six months. "I am very proud of that first part of my father's life," he says.

Like others of his generation, Lovelock mourns the changes to the countryside wrought by the post-War agricultural revolution. As a young man in the 1930s, he recalls, he cycled from Kent to the West Country, when England was "unbelievably beautiful". "It all looks very green and pleasant around here," he adds, waving at the gentle downland beyond his kitchen window, "but it's nothing compared to what it used to be".

Like Gaia, he has evidently developed certain stratagems for the sustenance of life. One would not guess from his appearance that he will be 96 this year. With his American wife Sandy, who is 20 years his junior, he still walks to the village shops each Saturday, a round-trip of six miles; and his intellectual vigour is so unimpaired that conversing with him soon makes the head spin.

""While the 2011 Japan earthquake caused devastation, Lovelock observes that "zero" have died of radiation from FukushimaThe Asahi Shimbun via Getty

He contends that the end of the world as we know it began in 1712, the year the Devonshire blacksmith Thomas Newcomen invented the coal-powered steam engine. It was the first time that stored solar energy had been harnessed in any serious way, with effects that now "grip us and our world in a series of unstoppable events. We are like the sorcerer's apprentice, trapped in the consequences of our meddling". Newcomen's discovery set in train more than just the era of industrial development. It also marked the start of a new geological epoch, the "Anthropocene", the most significant characteristic of which, Lovelock believes, has been the emergence of "an entirely new form of evolution" that is one million times faster than the old process of Darwinian natural selection.

He points out that for half a century now, computing power has roughly doubled every two years – a trajectory of growth known as Moore's Law – and that computers are already capable of many actions far beyond what humans can do. In his scariest scenario, which sounds disturbingly close to the premise of the Arnie Schwarzenegger Terminator movies, he warns that computers could morph into an autarkic life form powerful enough to "destroy us, our carbon life forms, and inherit the Earth". Luckily he thinks this outcome unlikely, and in the end has no fear of the Rise of the Machines. "Computers are entirely rational creations. But true intelligence, the ability to create and to invent, is intuitive – and you can't do rational intuition."

On the other hand, his preferred prediction for humanity is scarcely less disturbing. He foresees the evolution of a man-machine hybrid by a process of endosymbiosis that, he argues, has already begun. "I am already endosymbiotic. I'm fitted with a pacemaker. It runs on a 10-year lithium battery, but the next generation will have its own power supply drawn from the body. I'm already worried about being hacked ... Fairly soon, I think, the internet is going to be fully embedded in our bodies."

Looking further still into the future, he says that life on Earth, based as it presently is on carbon, cannot last beyond 100 million years, because by then it will be too hot. The evolution of a different life form based on some more heat-resistant element – such as electronic silicon – could potentially extend life by another 500 million or even a billion years.

But first, of course, mankind has to survive the immediate global warming crisis. Lovelock is a famously outspoken critic of the green energy revolution, especially wind power, which he describes as "an absolute scam. A great big German scam". The purveyors of wind turbines and solar panels, he says, are like 18th-century doctors trying to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury. Instead he wants us to embrace nuclear fission, a completely clean energy source that he regards as a "gift". The Western world's prejudice against nuclear – underscored earlier this year when the number of reactors in the US dipped below a hundred for the first time in decades – is "tragic".

Lovelock says wind power is a "great big German scam"Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

"What gets my goat are the lies peddled about Fukushima [the Japanese nuclear reactor disaster of 2011]. Do you know how many people died of radiation? Zero. Not one – although there were 50-odd suicides among people driven to it by fear. Nuclear energy is actually 10 times safer, per GigaWatt hour of production, than wind power. Yet France and Germany responded to Fukushima by temporarily shutting down their entire nuclear industries. It makes no sense." The reason, he thinks, is public ignorance, combined with a form of green politics that amounts to a "new religion – the same force that drives jihadists in Syria". It is, he agrees, a paradox that the new accessibility of information brought about by the internet revolution has intensified, not diminished, the old battle between science and superstition. "There's a campaign in our village to stop a new mobile phone mast. The electromagnetic radiation it will emit is trivial. It's comparable to a household television. Yet the campaigners say it can give you cancer. This is about fear – not facts."

With one or two exceptions such as Margaret Thatcher and Germany's Angela Merkel, both of whom studied chemistry, he thinks our leaders are just as bad. "If you talk to any politician, American or British or European, they are absolutely blind on matters of science," he says. He reserves special ire for Tony Blair, "the really mad prime minister" who, swayed by green ideology and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, passed legislation subsidising the renewable energy sector, which made fresh investment in the nuclear industry almost impossible. (This, he argues, is one reason why the heating costs of an average house in the UK are up to 10 times greater than in America, which, overall, has a colder climate. For many years, he asserts, the Lovelocks wintered in St Louis, Missouri, purely in order to avoid British heating bills.)

But even a wholesale switch to nuclear power, in his view, would come too late to solve humanity's principal problem, which is overpopulation. The old post-war goal of sustainable development, he says, has become an oxymoron and should be abandoned in favour of a strategy of sustainable retreat. He is scathing about the very idea of "saving the planet", which he calls "the foolish extravagance of romantic Northern ideologues". The vast sums of money being invested in renewable energy would be much better spent on strategies designed to help us survive and adapt, such as flood defences.

Above all, he thinks that we should embrace the ongoing global shift towards urban living. It would, he insists, be far easier and more economic to regulate the climate of cities than our current strategy of attempting to control the temperature of an entire planet. The regions beyond the cities would then be left to Gaia to regulate for herself. It seems a sci-fi fantasy, rather like Mega-City One from the pages of Judge Dredd, a post-apocalypse megalopolis shielded from the "Cursed Earth" beyond by massive boundary walls. But, in fact, the concept is not so futuristic. Noah, arguably, had a similar idea when he built the ark.

It is certainly not a new concept to Lovelock, who wrote a paper for the oil multinational, Shell, as far back as 1966 in which he predicted that the cities of the future would become much denser, and that Shell would be making plenty of money out of "the avoidance of ecological disaster". The fictional Mega-City One held 800 million citizens, and incorporated the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. Lovelock points that the average population density of England is higher than that of greater Boston. His 1966 paper, which was recently reprinted by Shell, no longer looks as fantastical as it once did.

Singapore, he suggests, shows us how a city can succeed in an overheated climate. The trend there for building underground, as well as in places like Japan and even London (albeit for different reasons), might be part of the same process of adaptation. Architectural practices from the past might also offer clues to a sustainable retreat in the future. The streets of the medieval Dalmatian island town of Korcula, for instance, follow a unique herringbone plan designed to capture and channel the prevailing, cooling sea breeze.

Nature offers models for future city architecture, too. Lovelock is much taken at the moment with termites. Their mounds, he says, are built like the cities of the future might be. Like Korcula, they are oriented towards the prevailing wind. They also tend to lean towards the zenith of the sun, to minimise exposure to its rays at the hottest time of the day – a stratagem that perhaps has its analogue in a recent suggestion by the Scottish nationalist politician Rob Gibson, who wants all new housing estates to be orientated towards the south in order to maximise the efficiency of rooftop solar panels.

(In London, meanwhile, the architects NBBJ recently proposed building the world's first "shadowless skyscraper" by building two towers – one to block out the sun, the other to reflect light down into the shadow of the first).

More interesting still, a recent paper in Science magazine has shown that termite mounds, once thought to be a sign of encroaching desertification, may actually have the ability to stabilise or even reverse the effects of climate change by trapping rainfall. "Termites are very Gaian," Lovelock enthuses. "There are these wonderful pictures of little plants growing up between the termite cities. You could look at that as a nice future for humans."

So does Lovelock really think that humanity could end up mimicking social insects? A dumbed-down world inhabited by worker drones might be environmentally efficient, but what about the surrender of privacy that would imply; isn't the sublimation of individuality too high a price to pay? How could such a society ever throw up a Beethoven, a Shakespeare, or an Einstein? "That's true, and of course it depends how far down this track we choose to go," says Lovelock, "but do you think that evolution, as a process, gives two hoots about any of that?"

This is, to be sure, a reductive view of human existence. A man in the twilight of his years, as Lovelock is, might feel a sense of futility. Instead he maintains a steady wonder at what he calls "the ineffable: a lovely word, don't you think?" while apparently seeking no earthly legacy beyond a modest hope that he will be remembered as having been consistent in his arguments.

As a man of science, he remains agnostic on the subject of God. And yet, he says, "I am beginning to swing round, to think more and more, that there's something in Barrow and Tipler's cosmic-anthropic principle – the idea that the universe was set up in such a way that the formation of intelligent life on some planet somewhere was inevitable ... The more you look at the universe, the more puzzling it is that all the figures are just right for the appearance on this planet of people like us."

For the time being our species may be, as he has written, "scared and confused, like a colony of red ants exposed when we lift the garden slab that is the lid of their nest". But he is also content to be one of those ants, because he sees a kind of beauty in that confusion – and perhaps even some sort of grand design. "Humanity may be as important to Earth, to Gaia, as the first photo-synthesisers," he thinks. "We are the first species to harvest information ... that is something very special."

Above all he is convinced that mankind can recover itself – and in this he may be a product of his vanishing generation. Some years ago, at a lecture in Edinburgh, I heard him reminisce how marvellously the British nation had pulled together when threatened by Nazi invasion, but that it had taken that existential threat to make them do so. When the climate crisis finally breaks, he believes, the world's differences will again be put aside – and our species, for all its present idiocies, will pull together in a way that will astonish the cynics among us. 

James Lovelock

James Lovelock on the end of Civilization

James Lovelock

We should give up on saving the planet - James Lovelock

the Guardian,

We should give up on saving the planet - James Lovelock James Lovelock has spent his career in science defying the mainstream, with startling results.

He accurately measured the extent of ozone depletion in the atmosphere using home-made equipment, and is most famous for the Gaia hypothesis, which suggests the Earth is a self-regulating system that enables life to exist on the planet.

The theory shaped environmental scientists' exploration of climate change.

As London's Science Museum opens a new exhibition dedicated to his life and work, Lovelock gives Ian Sample an exclusive tour

Another Positive Feedback

The astounding global warming impact on our oceans that will reduce cloud cover and bring tears to your eyes

Ocean acidification will just not kill significant ocean ecosystems, but add even more to global warming

by David Spratt

Arctic News,

26 August, 2013

Another significant global warming positive feedback that will add even more to future temperature rises has been identified by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. End result: Perhaps another half a degree of warming this century.

New research just published in Nature Climate by Katharine Six and her colleagues shows that as oceans become more acidic (by absorbing increasing volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to form carbonic acid), the amount of a compound called dimethylsulphide (DMS) in the ocean decreases.

So what? The researchers say that marine DMS emissions are the largest natural source of atmospheric sulphur, and changes in their strength have the potential to alter the Earth’s radiation budget. They establish:

… observational-based relationships between pH (acidity) changes and DMS concentrations to estimate changes in future DMS emissions …

Global DMS emissions decrease by about 18(±3)% in 2100 compared with pre-industrial times as a result of the combined effects of ocean acidification and climate change. The reduced DMS emissions induce a significant additional radiative forcing, of which 83% is attributed to the impact of ocean acidification, tantamount to an equilibrium temperature response between 0.23 and 0.48 K. Our results indicate that ocean acidification has the potential to exacerbate anthropogenic warming through a mechanism that is not considered at present in projections of future climate change.

Shorthand: by reducing DMS production in the oceans, acidification could add up to another half a degree of warming this century. And that's on top of the 4-to-6 degrees Celsius warming that is now being projected for the emissions path on which the world now seems stubbornly stuck.

Reporting on the latest finding, Eliot Barford in Nature explains that:

Acidification would lead certain marine organisms to emit less of the sulphur compounds that help to seed the formation of clouds and so keep the planet cool.

Atmospheric sulphur, most of which comes from the sea, is a check against global warming. Phytoplankton — photosynthetic microbes that drift in sunlit water — produces a compound called dimethylsulphide (DMS). Some of this enters the atmosphere and reacts to make sulphuric acid, which clumps into aerosols, or microscopic airborne particles. Aerosols seed the formation of clouds, which help cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight.

But this idea that warming will have a DMS impact is not new. As far back as 1994, James Lovelock and Lee Kump published a paper in Nature on Failure of climate regulation in a geophysiological model, with conclusions far more eye-watering that this new research.

Lovelock has explained in The Revenge of Gaia that as the ocean surface temperature warms to a temperature over 12 degrees Celsius (°C), "a stable layer of warm water forms on the surface that stays unmixed with the cooler, nutrient rich waters below". This purely physical property of ocean water, he says, "denies nutrients to the life in the warm layer, and soon the upper sunlit ocean water becomes a desert".

This chlorophyll-deprived, azure-blue water is currently found predominantly in the tropics, which lacks the richness of the marine life of the darker, cooler oceans. In this nutrient-deprived water, ocean life cannot prosper and, according to Lovelock, soon "the surface layer is empty of all but a limited … population of algae". Algae (such as phytoplankton), which constitute most of the ocean’s plant life, are the world’s greatest carbon sinks, devouring carbon dioxide while releasing DMS, which is transformed into an aerosol that contributes to greater cloud formation and, hence, affects weather patterns. The warmer seas and fewer algae that Lovelock predicts are likely to reduce cloud formation and further enhance positive climate feedbacks.

This process should be distinguished from the phenomenon of green, red, or brown algal blooms, which can occur in fresh and marine environments when phytoplankton assume very dense concentrations due to an excess of nutrients in the water. The dead organic material becomes food for bacteria, which can deprive the water of oxygen, destroying the local marine life and creating a dead zone.

Because algae thrive in ocean water below 10°C, the algae population reduces as the climate warms. Lovelock says that severe disruption of the algae–DMS relation would signal spiralling climate change. Lovelock and Kump’s modelling of climate warming and regulation published in Nature in supported this view:

[A]s the carbon dioxide abundance approached 500 parts per million, regulation began to fail and there was a sudden upward jump in temperature. The cause was the failure of the ocean ecosystem. As the world grew warmer, the algae were denied nutrients by the expanding warm surface of the oceans, until eventually they became extinct. As the area of ocean covered by algae grew smaller, their cooling effect diminished and the temperature surged upwards.

Lovelock and Kump (1994) Figure 2

According to Lovelock, the end-result was a temperature rise of 8°C above pre-industrial levels, which would result in the planet being habitable only from Melbourne to the South Pole (going south), and from northern Europe, Asia, and Canada to the North Pole (going north).

On current projections and a high fossil-fuel-use pathway, 500 parts per million carbon dioxide (ppm CO2) in the atmosphere will be exceeded by mid-century. Already the concentration has just hit 400 ppm CO2 (compared to the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm CO2), greenhouse emissions are still growing each year and are currently adding more than 2 ppm CO2 annually.

And the reaction to this astounding paper? In personal correspondence, Kump says their research was generally ignored – and never refuted. I guess that's how cognitive dissonance expresses itself.

Of course reduced DMS production is not the only, or most imminent impact of global warming on our oceans.

In 2013, Frieler, Meinshausen et al. showed that “preserving more than 10% of coral reefs worldwide would require limiting warming to below +1.5°C (atmosphere–ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) range: 1.3–1.8°C) relative to pre-industrial levels”. Obviously at less than 10%, the reefs would be remnant and reef systems as we know them today would be a historical footnote. Contrast this finding of impacts at 1.5°C or warming, compared to the current, forlorn attempts to hold warming to not more tha 2°C!

Already, the data suggests the global area of reef systems has already been reduced by half. A sober discussion of coral reef prospects can be found in Roger Bradbury’s “A World Without Coral Reefs” and Gary Pearce’s “Zombie reefs as a harbinger for catastrophic future”. Bradbury’s article opening is sharp:

“It’s past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be.”

And on all of this, not one word will be uttered during Australia's current national election campaign. I mean, who in their right mind thinks elections are about our collective future?

David Spratt studied at Australian National University.

David co-authored the book Climate Code Red (2008).  

Above article was posted earlier at ClimateCodeRed.org