Is three instances enough to constitute a trend? First we had Peter Preston yearning for a prophet and true believer to make the case about climate change. Then there was George Monbiot saying a prophet wouldn't be enough, and giving reasons why persuasion was unlikely to work. And now it's James Lovelock offering the hypothesis that humans aren't 'yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a[s] complex a situation as climate change'.
This reminds me of a meeting I attended some time in the 1970s, at which leading figures in the far-left organization to which I then belonged were trying to win over members to vote for the 'political tendency' for which they were speaking. Vexed by something said to him from the floor, one speaker denounced the partisans of the main opposing tendency as being 'a petty-bourgeois rabble'. He failed to win anyone with this observation.
It is not a matter for scandal that Lovelock should doubt the collective intelligence of the human species as thus far evolved. If this is his hypothesis, then so be it; he is free to articulate it. However, he cannot know for sure that our intelligence such as it is, and the force of relevant evidence, and the skills of persuasive advocacy, won't in due course prevail over opposing impulses. So it might be a better idea not to insult the intelligence of his potential audience, but rather to appeal to it. Unless, thinking that it 'may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while', he's already given up on democracy in this matter for the time being. Is that now a trend within the argument for climate change?