2 - The end of life as we know it?

How can we avoid the fate of being reduced to a few breeding pairs in the Arctic? Lord Martin Rees is President of the Royal Society, Master of Trinity College, and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He was appointed Astronomer Royal in 1995 and nominated to the House of Lords in 2005. Lord Rees's current research deals with high energy astrophysics, especially gamma ray bursts, galactic nucleii, black hole formation and radiative processes. Other research projects include cosmic structure formation and the early generation of stars and galaxies that formed over 12,000,000 years ago soon after the "Big Bang". Dr James Lovelock is a scientist, author and environmentalist. He is most famous for popularising the controversial Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a superorganism. His primary current concern is the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. He claims that by the end of the century, the average temperature in temperate regions will increase by as much as 8°C and by up to 5°C in the tropics, leaving much of the world's land uninhabitable and unsuitable for farming. He sees nuclear energy as the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels.