James Lovelock: Another Climate Change Apostate?

Biologist James Lovelock famously conjured up the Gaia hypothesis which likens the Earth to a gigantic organism that tries to maintain current planetary conditions against various environmental perturbations. Lovelock, until recently a paid up member of the climate change catastrophist caucus, once asserted that future global warming would become so bad 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."

Lovelock has apparently now recanted his catastrophism. As MSNBC reports: 

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his "Gaia" theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being "alarmist" about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

Apparently, Lovelock's new book 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. 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," Lovelock said.

"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," he said.

"The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.

He pointed to Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers" as other examples of "alarmist" forecasts of the future…..

As "an independent and a loner," he said he did not mind saying "All right, I made a mistake." He claimed a university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding.

Go here to read the whole article. 

Hat tip Instapundit.