Canadians, brace yourselves: One day soon, something unusual may be showing up on the border - climate refugees trying to stream into the country from the United States.
If global warming really starts to unfold, according to well-known British scientist and author James Lovelock, it will lay such waste to the U.S. that millions of desperate people will be fleeing a country no longer suitable for human habitation in favour of the newly temperate regions of Northern Canada.
It may seem far-fetched that Americans - people obsessed, as Canadians subjected to the latest passport requirements know, with the security of their own borders - might turn into illegal immigrants. But not to Mr. Lovelock, who says global warming will get so bad in the years ahead that he "can assure you" that we'll be facing an influx of unwelcome Americans in search of greener pastures.
In the 1970s, Dr. Lovelock gained worldwide renown for his Gaia hypothesis, the New Age-sounding idea that the entire Earth should be viewed as a kind of living organism, with a system of interactions that make it a Goldilocks planet - not too hot or too cold, but just right for living things. It was a scientific foundation for the idea that there really is a Mother Earth.
But these days he is fretting that Mother Earth is ready to whack us, big-time. In one of the gloomiest forecasts yet by a respected mainstream scientist or academic, he thinks nothing less than that the environmental apocalypse is at hand.
And he's not alone. In the past year, amid financial panics, wild fluctuations in oil prices and reports on global warming happening faster than anyone expected, there's a spate of books making the case that something monumentally bad is about to unfold.
There are books warning that climate change will soon cause wars or will so alter the environment that we are approaching another major age of extinctions. Some have dwelled on the idea that the threat may be extraterrestrial, with asteroids plowing into the planet. Still others have contended that oil shortages are going to snuff out civilization.
The idea of End Times, or apocalypses, has been around as long as religion. Until recently, it has been a mainstay of Christian fundamentalism. But the notion that the world as we know it is about to end - this time with an environmental rather than a religious-inspired bang - lately has been making inroads in more mainstream and progressive-leaning circles, including activists, scientists and pundits.
It isn't just intellectual lightweights crying wolf, but high-forehead types such as the octogenarian Mr. Lovelock, who has more than 200 scientific papers to his credit. Also among the throng is Gwynne Dyer, the Canadian author and military security pundit, who recently penned a book and did a CBC radio series asserting that wars will soon be caused by climate change.
British science writer Fred Pearce calls his latest book The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change. And Lester Brown, who founded the Washington D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute, one of the globe's first environmental think tanks, frets that crop failures could start to unravel civilization.
Mr. Lovelock has penned one of the darkest outlooks with his book The Vanishing Face of Gaia, which warns that climate change might kill most of us in a catastrophe just short of biblical-flood proportions. He forecasts that humanity's numbers may drop from the current seven billion to a billion - perhaps no more than 100 million.
He also predicts that climate change won't be a century-long process allowing lots of time to safely adjust. The transformation to a hothouse world will be abrupt. Temperatures will jump over the course of a couple of years to a dangerous new normal that is four or five degrees higher than today.
