James Lovelock, a UK-based scientist, and author of the recently released, "The Revenge of Gaia", says that by the end of this century, the human race will be only 20% of what it is today.

The reasoning? Mass starvation due to global warming.

But his view of global warming is not the same as that of most environmentalists. Instead of green house gases, Lovelock believes the rise in global temperatures is due to the destruction of natural landscapes.

Everybody forgets the greatest damage we've done to the earth is not so much the emissions from greenhouse gases, but taking away the natural resistance from the farmland ecosystem. By doing that, we have disabled the planet's ability to regulate itself.

Personally, I've never subscribed to the theory that the burning of fossil fuels is causing the rise of temperatures. On the other hand, I don't argue that the Earth is warming, in fact, I don't really know if it is warming. The only hard evidence we have to date is that global temperatures have increased an average of 1°F since the 1890's, when the USA began recording temperatures on a consistent basis. That's the only information we have derived from a century's worth of recorded data. Therefore, that's the only reason why we can say we're going through a warming trend.

The data that's been collected over the last decade is way too short of a period to make any reasonable conclusions. I don't buy into any of the global warming alarms based on such short timeframes.

Lovelock goes on to blast environmentalists for trying to push "renewable energy" as an alternative to oil and coal. When asked what he thought about these people...

It's mostly made up of urban people, who know almost nothing about the countryside and still less about the ecosystem. Their solutions are basically urban-political solutions. They continue to insist on wanting to run their cars on bio fuels. This is one of the maddest ideas of the lot.

I tend to agree. In order to provide power to every person on the planet, we'd have to clear out almost half of the Earth's surface to either grow corn, build windmill farms, or dam up every river on Earth.

Instead, Lovelock calls for nuclear energy, citing its efficiency, its small footprint on the planet.

Read the whole interview with James Lovelock. The part about the mass exodus to the North Pole, and 80% of the population dying sounds a little crazy. The rest of what he has to say, however, makes some sense.