Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Superpower Canada - A Sure Thing?

What is a superpower except a nation that enjoys dominance over most other nations? If that's close to right, Canada may be on a path to superpower glory.

How's that you say? Well, according to climate change guru and creator of the Gaia Theory, James Lovelock, we may be headed for a world in which the population of earth will drop to around 500-million, all of them living in the Arctic:

"'We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out,' he told a news conference.'A hot earth couldn’t support much over 500 million.'

“'Almost all of the systems that have been looked at are in positive feedback ... and soon those effects will be larger than any of the effects of carbon dioxide emissions from industry and so on around the world,' he added.

"Lovelock said temperature rises of up to 8C were already built in and while efforts to curb it were morally commendable, they were wasted.'It is a bit like if your kidneys fail you can go on dialysis -- and who would refuse dialysis if death is the alternative. We should think of it in that context,' he said. 'But remember that all they are doing is buying us time, no more. The problems go on,' he added.

"In London to give a lecture on the environment to the Institution of Chemical Engineers, he said the planet had survived dramatic climate change at least seven times.

“'In the change from the last Ice Age to now we lost land equivalent to the continent of Africa beneath the sea,' he said.

“'We are facing things just as bad or worse than that during this century. There are refuges, plenty of them. 55 million years ago ... life moved up to the Arctic, stayed there during the course of it and then moved back again as things improved. I fear that this is what we may have to do,' he added.

"Lovelock said the United States, which has rejected the Kyoto Protocol on cutting carbon emissions, wrongly believed there was a technological solution, while booming economies China and India were out of control."

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