Build Nuclear Plants As Fast As You Can, Says Mr Gaia

James Lovelock commits heresy. It's as if the Pope became a Wiccan.

"Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen. If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real danger, which is global warming, we may die even sooner, as did more than 20,000 unfortunates from overheating in Europe last summer.

I find it sad and ironic that the UK, which leads the world in the quality of its Earth and climate scientists, rejects their warnings and advice, and prefers to listen to the Greens. But I am a Green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.

Even if they were right about its dangers, and they are not, its worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear - the one safe, available, energy source - now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet."

My bet is that the "Green" movement will ignore him completely. After all, we're talking about religion, not science.

If he's right that London could disappear underwater, maybe climate change isn't so bad after all. And if the Gulf Stream disappeared as ocean currents changed, Cotswold skiing would be fabulous. London is on the latitude of Winnipeg. Scotland could see polar bears.

Admittedly a four-month winter would affect agriculture and we might have difficulty feeding sixty million people in a tiny semi-Arctic country - but you can't make an omelette etc.