James Lovelock [wiki] is a climate scientist (he was the first to detect widespread presence of CFCs in the atmosphere) and a maverick (he proposed the Gaia Hypothesis, which proposes that earth, and everything living and non-living on it are part of a complex interacting system that can be though of as a single organism).
In 1965, James Lovelock predicted that environment will be the biggest challenge in the 21st century. And in general, he was right.
In an interview by Decca Aitkenhead of The Guardian, Lovelock explains why global warming had passes a tipping point, catastrophe is inevitable, and we are all doomed:
"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests." [...]
He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.
"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."
Link (Photo: Eamonn McCabe)