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…but this pessimist is very likely to be right.

Somewhere in your life or lifestyle, you’ve probably come across the term Gaia. Like zen, it’s been appropriated for marketing and commercial naming convenience, but it came into my consciousness through the  Whole Earth Catalog, which in 1980 positively reviewed a book titled Gaia: A new look at life on Earth by James Lovelock, a British scientist who had invented – among other things – an instrument for measuring CFCs (which are responsible for blowing a hole in the ozone layer of our atmosphere.)

The Gaia Theory – named after the Greek goddess of the Earth – proposes (in the words of Stewart Brand) that the entire life of Earth, through its atmosphere and ocean, functions effectively as one self-regulated organism.

Observing the Earth in that way for the past three decades has been a painful experience for Lovelock because he sees our planet from a perspective that the rest of us manage to ignore. And based on that perspective, Sir James has a dismal view of our global warming future, which he describes in his new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: a Final Warning.

Not to bum your day (or your life), but here are some excerpts from a recent article on AlterNet describing the contents of the new book:

“Most of the ‘green’ stuff is verging on a gigantic scam,” Lovelock told the New Scientist shortly before the release of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. “Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning.”

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Lovelock argues that Gaia Theory offers a more holistic understanding of what’s happening to the climate than does mainstream climate science, stuck as it is in reductionist thinking and fractured into its constituent fields. Using the Gaia lens, he maintains, allows for a more comprehensive, intuitive, and ultimately more predictive approach. He spends much of Vanishing explaining why he thinks our attempts to accurately model climate change with computers is akin to the blind efforts of a 19th century doctor trying to treat diabetes.

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Of all the indicators of climate change, Lovelock maintains sea-level rise is the most important. Given the complexity of the millions of interactions within the Gaia system, Lovelock argues it is best to ignore year-to-year temperature fluctuations and instead watch the oceans. The seas, he says, are the lone trustworthy indicator of the earth’s heat balance. “Sea level rise is the best available measure of the heat absorbed by the earth because it comes from only two things,” he writes. “[These are] the melting of glaciers and the expansion of water as it warms. Sea level is the thermometer that indicates true global heating.”

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A quarter century ago, Carl Sagan issued a strange and compelling plea for nuclear disarmament. He urged the superpowers to abolish their thermonuclear arsenals for the sake of mankind’s future evolution and eventual colonization of the galaxy. Echoing Sagan, Lovelock believes it is our duty as an intelligent race, the only one in the cosmic neighborhod, to survive. Only by carrying the flame of civilization into the next century will we have a chance to evolve beyond our current tribal-carnivore brains, which are dominated by short-term thinking and thus responsible for our current predicament. Whereas Sagan dreamed of alien contact, Lovelock’s promised land is more humble: an evolved species capable of living in balance with Gaia.