You probably won’t see this in the American papers but James Lovelock, the father of Gaia Theory, gains and shares some logic:

Given that Lovelock predicted in 2006 that by this century’s end “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”, this new laissez-faire attitude to our environmental fate smells and sounds like of a screeching handbrake turn.

Indeed, earlier this year he admitted to MSNBC in an interview reported around the world with somewhat mocking headlines along the lines of “Doom-monger recants”, that he had been “extrapolating too far” in reaching such a conclusion and had made a “mistake” in claiming to know with such certainty what will happen to the climate.

Lovelock is not too keen on the religion of climate change of High Priest AlGore:

Lovelock does not miss a chance to criticise the green movement that has long paid heed to his views. “It’s just the way the humans are that if there’s a cause of some sort, a religion starts forming around it. It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use. The greens use guilt. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting CO2 in the air.”

He displays equal disdain for those who do not accept science on climate change: “They’ve got their own religion. They believe that the world was right before these damn people [the greens] came along and want to go back to where we were 20 years ago. That’s also silly in its own way.”

Lovelock’s description misses the majority of the so called “deniers”, I think. I, like many of the folks do believe in climate change, we just don’t believe that the data supports that man is the sole cause or even a major contributor. Anthropogenic (human caused) climate change has attained a fervor equivalent to the Spanish Inquisition or the French Reign of Terror. This movement has taken on a far more dangerous persona as it has become the mask for every communist, global collectivist, anarchist and anti-capitalist in the world. They see this as a way to bring capitalism down and with it, the advancement of mankind.

Lovelock also loves him some natural gas with a side of frak:

Gas is almost a give-away in the US at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it: the amount of CO2 produced by burning gas in a good turbine gives you 60% efficiency. In a coal-fired power station, it is 30% per unit of fuel. So you get a two-to-one gain there straight away. The next two-to-one gain you get is that methane has only got half its energy in the carbon, the other half is in the hydrogen, so there’s a four-to-one gain in CO2 output from the same amount of electricity by burning methane. Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it. The fear of nuclear is now too great after Fukushima and the cost of building new build plants is very expensive and impractical. And it takes a long time to get them running. It is very obvious in America that fracking took almost no time at all to get going. It happened without any debate whatsoever. Suddenly you found there was this abundant fuel source.

I agree with this as, of course, it fits my bias – but I also think that Lovelock has reached a point of reason that is supported by fact. He’s stopped chasing the ManBearPig.