The Dire Climate Change Wakeup Call
British climate change expert James Lovelock says Earth is under a more dire threat than even most environmentalists imagine.
Published September 6, 2006
By Adrienne Burke
Academy Contributor
British climate change expert James Lovelock says Earth is under a more dire threat than even most environmentalists imagine. He spoke with the Academy prior to his lecture on September 7, 2005, where he’ll discuss his new book, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & the Fate of Humanity.
*some quotes have been lightly edited for length and clarity*
You’ve got a gloomy view of our future here on Earth!
You’re right, but it’s primarily a wake-up call. When I spoke to a whole group of climate scientists here in the UK, it was amazing how almost all of them viewed [climate change] almost as an academic exercise — not something that would affect our lives immediately.
And each of them was looking at more or less a single picture of the earth: some were looking at the melting ice in the arctic and others were looking at the disappearance of the forests in the tropical regions. They knew about each other’s work, but they didn’t seem to make it up into one single view of the planet. This worried me a lot, and since I had a kind of top-down view of the Earth as a result of Gaia theory, it seemed a lot worse than any of them were saying. That’s why I wrote the book.
You say that even the people who are talking about sustainable development right now are not even going far enough. You talk about sustainable retreat instead.
Exactly. I think — and so do many of my colleagues — that we may have passed the point of no return and that sustainable development as a program is probably too late. This means that change will take place more or less whatever we do, and therefore our prime tasks are both amelioration, if we can do it, and defense and preparing for the climate damage that will be inevitable.
How hopeful or optimistic are you that technologically developed nations will start to initiate a retreat like that?
Well, I have a feeling that when you in the US really start noticing or believing in climate change — I think it’s been denied for quite a while — you’ll almost certainly say, “but we can fix it,” and try to think of technological solutions.
Already several have been proposed. Perhaps the most intriguing is the idea of sun shades in space. Other ones, much simpler and probably more practical, like putting an aerosol in the stratosphere, are well worth considering because they may buy us time. But, they are not a long-term answer to the problem any more than going on dialysis is a long term solution for one of us if one of our kidneys fail.
A lot of environmentalists might be surprised to read your position on things like wind energy, biofuel, and organic farming: they are not necessarily solutions let alone good directions to be headed, according to your book.
Well I’m afraid you’re right. My reason for that is that, by and large, environmentalists are not scientists; they’re well-intentioned people, usually fairly wealthy, who think of remedies to get back to what they would think of as a natural world. I’m very sympathetic with their desires for things like organic food and so on, but I think we’ve reached such a state now that they’re not very practical.
… I am concerned about waking them up from their very strange objection to nuclear energy, which is one of the very useful ways that we can get energy for our needs — and we do need it to keep civilization going — without adding all these greenhouse gasses or doing anything in particular to the climate. That was my purpose really, in, if you like, chasing the environmentalists.
[Nuclear power] is one of the most useful answers we have — not the only one, but one of the many — whereas the things the environmentalists suggest, like biofuels, could be even more dangerous than doing nothing. If you think about it, the average car produces 10 times as much carbon dioxide as its driver. Now, we’re having trouble getting enough land to feed all the people in the world, how on Earth could we possibly feed all the cars?
And not only that, but the land surface that would be used to produce the food also exists as part of the greater system that regulates the climate and keeps it comfortable. We’ve taken about 40 percent [of the land] for food and forestry products for ourselves, and that’s a big loss of ability of the planet to keep things as comfortable as we’d like.
For the background of our readers, would you describe in a nutshell Gaia Theory, which you originated?
That’s always one of the most difficult questions. There are lots of ways of looking at it. The one I prefer, really, is … try to look at the earth as an evolving system, on which it isn’t just the organisms that evolve by natural selection, but the whole planet. The organisms and the world around them are so tightly coupled that they evolve as a single system.
In other words, organisms don’t just adapt to a geology which is described in another building in the university. They adapt to, what is in effect, the blood and the breath and the bones of their ancestors. The whole thing is tied together so tightly that it is ridiculous to try to separate the earth from the organisms that are on it, in systems terms.
You’ve merged Darwinian evolution with geological evolution?
Exactly. You couldn’t have put it better.
About the Author
James Lovelock, PhD, Dsc, is the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory), on which he has written several books. He is also the author of more than two hundred scientific papers. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and has received numerous awards, including the American Chemical Society’s award for Chromatography, the Norbert Gerbier Prize of the World Meteorological Organization, and in the Amsterdam Prize for the Environment by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006, he received the Wollaston medal from the Geological Society of the United Kingdom.
He has received honorary Doctorates in Science from seven universities in England, Sweden and the United States. He was made a Commander of Order of the British Empire in 1990, and in 2003 a Companion of Honour by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
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