GAIA is not “intelligent” – it is a highly complex, highly-interacting system, slowly built up over 4.6 billion years. GAIA’s only “job” is to try and maintain an overall equilibrium of the system. So if something crops up that severely disrupts the equilibrium then GAIA “acts” by neutralising the disruption. It doesn’t do this “consciously” after all it is not intelligent, it does this by making environmental changes that act to minimise the disruption. In fact you can remove GAIA altogether and just realise that any highly complex system that has evolved over time into a state of quasi-equilibrium will maintain that equilibrium by “jiggling around” with the free-parameters that it is able to alter in order to regain equilibrium.
A whole bunch of parameter jiggling is manifesting itself in what we call climate change, but this is just a buzzword for a hugely complex mix of many other rapidly varying parameters including ocean acidity, atmospheric CO2 and methane concentration, total tree and plankton population, and of course the one thing that is screwing up the equilibrium in the first place – the Homo Sapiens population.
So what you are going to see in the next few decades is a fairly swift reduction in the things that are causing this massive disruption to the equilibrium (that’s us by the way) – and unfortunately because of the rather sledgehammer approach GAIA takes, it will also include bird, mammal, fish, insect and every other living creature as well. But don’t worry – once the main culprit (us) has been removed, it will only take a few million years for GAIA to get back to some sort of normality.
