Hope for climate cause welcome

I have sorely missed Gwynne Dyer’s columns since the Gisborne Herald’s recent changes. Fortunately, his popular and thoughtful works can easily be found elsewhere. 

In his recent column “Technology our best hope to avoid catastrophic warming”, Gwynne said one global-scale solution for the accelerating loss of biodiversity – which “can only be achieved by returning at least half the land human beings have appropriated for agriculture back to its natural state” - had appeared almost miraculously . . . 

“It’s called ‘precision fermentation’: put the right microbe in a bioreactor, give it water, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and sunlight, and it will double its mass every three hours. Drain the resultant soup off, dry it, and you have 65% edible protein, fats or carbohydrates. 

“Half the world’s farmland is used to feed our domestic animals. We could feed them this instead and re-wild most of that land.” 

The first factory opened near Helsinki this year. The downside was that new technologies typically took 15 to 30 years to roll out at scale. 

Because of this, Gwynne said we would still need other measures like solar radiation management - reflecting sunlight back into space. 

Gwynne wrote: “Forty-five years ago James Lovelock, the scientist who realised all the Earth’s natural systems are connected and named the ensemble ‘Gaia’ (now renamed Earth System Science in the universities) saw this all coming. He knew we would be too slow in cutting our emissions because that’s how human beings are. 

“He foresaw that we would have to intervene directly in the climate to save ourselves, and predicted we would become ‘planetary maintenance engineers’. 

“I interviewed him one last time for my new book on climate change, eight months before he died in 2022 at the age of 103. ‘Are we there yet, Jim?’ I asked him. ‘Yes,’ he said, but he wasn’t in despair. We have the tools to get through this if we use them wisely.” 

I welcome Gwynne Dyer’s hope for the cause. Yet I remain resolute - we must all make it easier for life by reducing our use of fossil fuels and going easier on the planet. 

Bob Hughes