WhiteMoose

[Joel@WhiteMoose.Ca]

Jan 2, 2007

CBC Radio

Ideas: How to Think About Science
Episode Six - James Lovelock

Forty years ago, British scientist James Lovelock put forward the first elements of what he would come to call the Gaia theory. At first many biologists scoffed. Today, Lovelock’s ideas are more widely accepted, even in circles where he was initially scorned. Last year, he published "The Revenge of Gaia", and in this week's podcast, we present a profile of James Lovelock.
Right click to Download Episode Six - James Lovelock
[mp3 file: runs 52:41]

http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/pastpodcasts.html?43#ref45

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James Lovelock, an outstanding scientist & pioneer in the development of environmental awareness
http://www.ecolo.org/lovelock/lovebioen.htm

Gaia hypothesis
From Wikipedia,.

The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis that proposes that living and nonliving parts of the earth are viewed as a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek earth goddess, this hypothesis postulates that all living things have a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that promotes life overall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

The Revenge of Gaia

In James Lovelock's latest book, "The Revenge of Gaia", he argues that the lack of respect humans have had for Gaia, through the damage done to rainforests and the reduction in planetary biodiversity, is testing Gaia's capacity to minimize the effects of the addition of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This eliminates the planet's homeostatic negative feedback potential and increases the likelihood of positive feedbacks associated with runaway global warming. Similarly the warming of the oceans is extending the oceanic thermocline layer of tropical oceans into the Arctic and Antarctic waters, preventing the rise of oceanic nutrients into the surface waters and eliminating the algal blooms of phytoplankton on which oceanic foodchains depend. As phytoplankton and forests are the main ways in which Gaia draws down greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, taking it out of the atmosphere, the elimination of this environmental buffering will see, according to Lovelock, most of the earth becoming uninhabitable for humans and other life-forms by the middle of next century, with a massive extension of tropical deserts.

Given these conditions, Lovelock expects human civilization will be hard pressed to survive. He expects the change to be similar to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum when atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 450 ppm. At that point the Arctic Ocean was 23 degrees Celsius and had crocodiles in it, with the rest of the world mostly scrub and desert. He says of sustainable development and renewable energy that it came "200 years too late" and that more effort should go into adaptation, including more use of fission. He likens the Kyoto Protocol to the Munich conferences that failed to prevent World War II, including the likelihood that the disaster will cause people to come together in common cause. "We have been through no less than seven of these events as humans...comparable in extent to the change" likely to be wrought by global warming.

He claims that Gaia's self-regulation will likely prevent any extraordinary runaway effects that wipe out life itself, but that humans will survive and be "culled and, I hope, refined."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis#The_Revenge_of_Gaia

The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity
by James Lovelock, Hardcover: 176 pages, Basic Books (July 3, 2006)
# ISBN-10: 046504168X

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CBC Dispatches

Some Scientists are reporting that we've reached the tipping point -- where global warming is no longer preventable, no matter what we do.

No surprise there for Dr. James Lovelock. Thirty years ago, he advanced the theory that earth had its own control system -- he called it "Gaia." It won him global criticism, and global acclaim.

But in his new book, The Revenge Of Gaia, he warns that we've broken it.

Dr. Lovelock joined Rick from Oxford, England.

Listen to Rick's conversation with Dr. Lovelock

Dr. James Lovelock researches climate change at Britain's Hadley Centre. The Revenge Of Gaia is published by Allen Lane.

http://www.cbc.ca/dispatches/summer2006.html

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James Lovelock: The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years
Each nation must find the best use of its resources to sustain civilisation for as long as they can
Published: 16 January 2006

Imagine a young policewoman delighted in the fulfilment of her vocation; then imagine her having to tell a family whose child had strayed that he had been found dead, murdered in a nearby wood. Or think of a young physician newly appointed who has to tell you that the biopsy revealed invasion by an aggressive metastasising tumour. Doctors and the police know that many accept the simple awful truth with dignity but others try in vain to deny it.

Whatever the response, the bringers of such bad news rarely become hardened to their task and some dread it. We have relieved judges of the awesome responsibility of passing the death sentence, but at least they had some comfort from its frequent moral justification. Physicians and the police have no escape from their duty.

This article is the most difficult I have written and for the same reasons. My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 per cent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

By failing to see that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we have blundered into trying to do it ourselves, acting as if we were in charge. By doing this, we condemn ourselves to the worst form of slavery. If we chose to be the stewards of the Earth, then we are responsible for keeping the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface right for life. A task we would soon find impossible - and something before we treated Gaia so badly, she had freely done for us.

To understand how impossible it is, think about how you would regulate your own temperature or the composition of your blood. Those with failing kidneys know the never-ending daily difficulty of adjusting water, salt and protein intake. The technological fix of dialysis helps, but is no replacement for living healthy kidneys.

My new book The Revenge of Gaia expands these thoughts, but you still may ask why science took so long to recognise the true nature of the Earth. I think it is because Darwin's vision was so good and clear that it has taken until now to digest it. In his time, little was known about the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, and there would have been little reason for him to wonder if organisms changed their environment as well as adapting to it.

Had it been known then that life and the environment are closely coupled, Darwin would have seen that evolution involved not just the organisms, but the whole planetary surface. We might then have looked upon the Earth as if it were alive, and known that we cannot pollute the air or use the Earth's skin - its forest and ocean ecosystems - as a mere source of products to feed ourselves and furnish our homes. We would have felt instinctively that those ecosystems must be left untouched because they were part of the living Earth.

So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent. On these British Isles, we are used to thinking of all humanity and not just ourselves; environmental change is global, but we have to deal with the consequences here in the UK.

Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanised as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilisation the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.

We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.

The writer is an independent environmental scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society. 'The Revenge of Gaia' is published by Penguin on 2 February

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article338830.ece

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Science and nature

The Sunday Times January 29, 2006

Richard Mabey reviews The revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock
RICHARD MABEY
THE REVENGE OF GAIA
by James Lovelock

Allen Lane £16.99 pp177

After Hurricane Katrina, a black Gaian joke went the rounds, couched in White House newspeak: “Successful mission against the Gulf of Mexico oilfields. Some collateral damage in New Orleans.” The widespread hunch that we’ll eventually get our comeuppance from a long-suffering nature has never been quite so precisely located, or quite that misanthropic. Nor is James Lovelock’s book about the coming crisis of global heating. Although it reads at times like the Book of Revelation, his vision of the planet’s “revenge” isn’t one of a spiteful, smart attack against homo sapiens, but of a comprehensive collapse of the systems that have kept earth habitable for billions of years. If Gaia means the interdependence of all organisms on earth, then its breakdown implicates all organisms, though it is our fault, exclusively.

In that sense, The Revenge of Gaia doesn’t represent any new thinking on the author’s part so much as a deepening pessimism about climate change and our reluctance to confront it. Global heating was not much more than a rumour in 1979 when Lovelock launched the Gaia hypothesis, an audacious vision of the living earth as an organism, whose geology and life-forms had together evolved ways of maintaining a climate and an atmosphere congenial to life. He seemed confident that Gaia’s intricate connections, linking forests and oceanic algae to cloud formation, would be able to counter the earth’s warming from man-made carbon dioxide. Now, as global temperatures creep relentlessly higher and climatic disasters proliferate, he believes we may have already gone beyond the point of recovery.

His luminous insights into life’s interconnectedness are the most effective part of his argument. Pondering how something like Gaia could have “evolved” according Darwinian laws (he’s fond of metaphors), he asks “What has peeing to do with the selfish gene?” Getting rid of toxic urea is an extravagant use of water and energy, when it might much more easily be metabolised into gaseous nitrogen. But that would make nitrogen less available to many species of plant. Perhaps they co-evolved with urinating mammals, which benefited from their increased growth. Orthodox Darwinism didn’t often consider that evolving organisms are part of each other’s environments. Those that diminish the habitability of their shared environment reduce their chances of survival. Gaia can be seen as the sum of all these mutually dependent networks.

But the impending storm is the book’s crux. What affects Lovelock profoundly is evidence that we may be approaching “tipping points”, when heating suddenly escalates because of feedback. At the current rate, global temperatures will rise by nearly three degrees in the next 50 years. At this point, the rainforests begin to die, releasing vast new amounts of carbon dioxide. Algae fail in the ocean and stop generating cooling clouds and absorbing carbon. The Greenland glacier goes into meltdown, releasing enough water to flood many of the world’s cities. Crop failures, human migrations, the emergence of “brutal war-lords” follow. We know the story, but not in our “real world” minds. Global heating is not yet part of our collective unconscious in the way the bomb was.

What can be done? Lovelock is a passionate advocate of the rapid expansion of nuclear power to cut fossil-fuel emissions, which has won him few friends among his natural constituents. He’s dismissive of wind-power and biofuels as woefully inefficient and wasteful of wild land better reserved for Gaia’s ancient arts of regulation. Too dismissive, perhaps, but he’s right to berate our hubris in believing we have the knowledge to “manage” the planet. Biosphere II’s modest experiment in creating a mini-earth the size of a football pitch ended in farcical collapse. But Lovelock isn’t averse to technological fixes: giant reflectors in space, the solidification and burying of smoke emissions (the same result could be achieved by allowing huge areas of cultivated land to revert to forest, but oddly isn’t mentioned), “sustainable retreat” into cities and synthetic foods to give the planet a chance to recover. If it came to the worst, the remnants of humanity could move to a newly balmy Arctic, where the rich could sail about in solar-powered yachts and the poor amuse themselves with virtual travel.

This is the familiar, no-holds-barred territory of apocalyptic science fiction, and I fear this is how The Revenge of Gaia may be read. It’s a powerful book but disablingly depressing; although Lovelock is a scientist of brilliant prescience, he is not such a good psychologist, and his severe and spartan argument may not push the right buttons. As a tribal species we have ancient, visceral responses to trouble. Creditably, if unwisely, our compassion is stronger than our anxiety. We give generously to the victims of climate-change-driven disasters such as famines and tsunami, and do nothing to stop them happening again. We know that, on a finite planet, economic growth which involves non-renewable resources must soon come to a halt, but continue to regard it as a virtue. Would anyone dare to put on a rock concert with the slogan “Make poverty the future”? The clear and present wins over foresight, every time.

So, shackled by our reflexes, by craven and short-sighted governments, and by the hard fact that totalitarian planning simply doesn’t work for complex living systems, we seem to be stymied. But perhaps Gaia’s model of success, so eloquently described by Lovelock, might be a better spur than its impending demise. It’s a federation not a monolith, and maybe an unplanned accretion of obdurate local communities, visionary businesses, and nations prepared to act on their own rather than wait for the lowest common consensus — something truer to our organic origins and our present psychologies — might just turn things around.

Energy gap

Lovelock is fierce in his insistence on the need to embrace nuclear energy: “Renewable energy sounds good, but so far it is inefficient and expensive. It has a future, but we have no time now to experiment with visionary energy sources: civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear energy now, or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.”

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £15.29 on 0870 165 8585

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,23114-2008072,00.html

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Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist
by James Lovelock, Paperback, 480 pages, Oxford University Press, USA; New Ed edition (September 28, 2001), ISBN-10: 0198604297

Book Description
James Lovelock tells the fascinating story of his life as an independent scientist and how he came to develop his inventions and theories. He has filed more than 50 patents, including one for the electron capture detector that was important in the development of environmental awareness, in connection with both the detection of pesticide residues in the environment and the discovery of the global distribution of CFCs. He also tells us about the work he has done for organizations such as NASA, the Ministry of Defence, The Marine Biological Association, and many companies such as Shell and Hewlett Packard. From his childhood days in east London to a job as a lab assistant - his first crucial steps to becoming a scientist, from chemistry at Manchester University to the Medical Research Council during World War II, his voyage to the Arctic, taking his family to America, returning to England and fighting to save the ozone layer, his quest for gaia, then into the nineties and a stream of awards, including a CBE from the Queen. James Lovelock has led a fulfilling life and has been widely recognized by the international scientific community.

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Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, by James Lovelock, Paperback: 176 pages, Oxford University Press, USA; Subsequent edition (September 25, 2000), ISBN-10: 0192862189

Book Description
In this classic work that continues to inspire its many readers, Jim Lovelock puts forward his idea that life on earth functions as a single organism. Written for non-scientists, Gaia is a journey through time and space in search of evidence with which to support a new and radically different model of our planet. In contrast to conventional belief that living matter is passive in the face of threats to its existence, the book explores the hypothesis that the earth's living matter air, ocean, and land surfaces forms a complex system that has the capacity to keep the Earth a fit place for life. Since Gaia was first published, many of Jim Lovelock's predictions have come true and his theory has become a hotly argued topic in scientific circles. In a new Preface to this reissued title, he outlines his present state of the debate.

About the Author
James Lovelock is an independent scientist, inventor, and author. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and in 1990 was awarded the first Amsterdam Prize for the Environment by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. One of his inventions is the electron capture detector, which was important in the development of environmental awareness. It revealed for the first time the ubiquitous distribution of pesticide residues. He co-operated with NASA and some of his inventions were adopted in their programme of planetary exploration.

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