Planet in crisis

"If there were no life on Earth, it would be a giant arid desert, just like Mars and Venus" -- James Lovelock

The BBC has published a brief essay by environmental scientist James Lovelock entitled, "The illness in Planet Earth." Lovelock is the one who developed the Gaia hypothesis - the hypothesis that the earth itself is a living organism. He also recently wrote a book called The Revenge of Gaia in which he outlines a very horrifying prospect of what is going to happen to the earth. Here's part of what the article says:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in 2001, is one of the scariest documents you will ever read. It talks about changes to the Earth by the end of this century, which will be as great or greater than occurred between the end of the last Ice Age and the time when humans started changing the atmosphere; it is huge. It alarms me, and it should alarm anyone… as the world gets very hot, it will not be able to produce anything like as much food as it does now; so quite literally, billions of us are going to be faced with starvation… we cannot just go taking [life on Earth] for our convenience, cutting down forests, turning the productive oceans into the marine equivalent of deserts, and expect Gaia not to take revenge. In 100 years' time, I would expect life to be very grim… I hope that as climate change worsens that same sense of purpose, [as England found in WW II] that almost tribal pulling together, will work again, to find such solutions as are still available in Gaia's damaged state.

Lovelock says that the earth could well end up a desert like Mars or Venus with no life on it at all.