James Lovelock, whose influential Gaia theory views the entire Earth as a living meta-organism, provides a serious look at the imminent global crisis in The Revenge of Gaia. In this disturbing book, Lovelock guides readers toward a hard reality: soon, humans may not be able to alter the oncoming climate crisis. Lovelock’s Gaia theory, widely engaged by modern climate science, conceives of the Earth, including the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere and upper layers of rock, as a single living superorganism, regulating its internal environment much as an animal regulates its body temperature and chemical balance. But now, says Lovelock, that organism is sick. It is running a fever born of the combination of a sun whose intensity is slowly growing over millions of years, and an atmosphere whose greenhouse gasses have recently spiked due to human activity. Earth will adjust to these stresses, but on time scales measured in the hundreds of millennia. It is already too late, Lovelock says, to prevent the global climate from “flipping” into an entirely new equilibrium state that will leave the tropics uninhabitable, and force migration to the poles. The Revenge of Gaia explains the stress the planetary system is under and how humans are contributing to it, what the consequences will be, and what humanity must do to rescue itself.