Climate change alarmist Recants: " I made a mistake"

British environmental expert James Lovelock now admits he was an “alarmist” regarding global warming — and says Al Gore was too.

Lovelock previously worked for NASA and became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism. In 2007 Time magazine named Lovelock one of its “Heroes of the Environment,” and he won the Geological Society of London’s Wollaston Medal in 2006 for his writings on the Gaia theory.

That year he wrote an article in a British newspaper asserting that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

But in an interview this week with MSNBC, Lovelock said a book he is now writing will reflect his new opinion that global warming has not occurred as he had expected.

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,” he said. “We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time. [The temperature] has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising. Carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.

“We will have global warming, but it’s been deferred a bit.”

MSNBC reported: “He pointed to Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and Tim Flannery’s ‘The Weather Makers’ as other examples of ‘alarmist’ forecasts of the future.”

Lovelock also declared in the interview that “as an independent and a loner,” he did not mind saying, “All right, I made a mistake,” adding that university or government scientists might fear that admission of such a mistake could jeopardize their funding.

In response to Lovelock’s interview, the Climate Depot website stated: “MSNBC, perhaps the most unlikely of news sources, reports on what may be seen as the official end of the manmade global warming fear movement.”

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