Man who invents Gaia backtracks on warmism: I was too ‘alarmist,’ says Lovelock.

It was in the 1960s that chemist James Lovelock first offered up the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, i.e., the notion suggesting “all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.” A notion that in hippier hands became the speculation that “Mother Earth” isn’t just a metaphor but a reality, and she is out for revenge.

Despite his impeccable scientific credentials, Lovelock went on to embrace any amount of silliness himself. In his 2006 book, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back, he turned full-on catastrophist, arguing  our “lack of respect” for Gaia is already testing her capacity to minimise the effects of our addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, making it inevitable that most of the earth will rapidly become uninhabitable.  (In his most recent book, "The Vanishing Face of Gaia", he reckoned human civilisation will be hard pressed to survive at all.)

In that same year he told The Independent newspaper “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”  In 2008 he told The Guardian “By 2040, parts of the Sahara desert will have moved into middle Europe.”  And in 2010 interview he told The Guardian that democracy would have to be "put on hold" to prevent the coming calamity:

Even the best democracies agree [sic] that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

In short, Lovelock was your regulation big-government, deep-ecology, celebrity climate alarmist talking up catastrophe and hanging out with the Al Gores, James Hansens and Tim Flannerys of the celebrity warmist world .

But that was then.

Now he’s saying something more inconvenient for them.

In a telephone interview with msnbc.com says he now thinks he and the other “alarmists” (his word) had been “extrapolating too far.":

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. 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... it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added...

Asked if he was now “a climate skeptic,” Lovelock said:

“It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I'm not a denier.” He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role. “It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said…
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.”

James Lovelock has had an epiphany.

Time for those administering our Emissions Trading Scam and doing out the funds to fellow warmists to do the same.

[Hat tip Climate Depot and Leighton Smith]