James Lovelock
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"Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic organism, or like the cells of a tumour or neoplasm. We have grown in numbers and disturbance to Gaia, to the point where our presence is perceptibly disturbing ... the human species is now so numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady. Gaia is suffering from Disseminated Primatemaia, a plague of people." --Healing Gaia (1991) by James Lovelock, p. 153 "When you ask about 20 to 30 years ahead -- I can speak not just from my own view but from the expressed opinions of senior climatologists who have represented their thoughts in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's great reports [...] the most recent was in 2001 but one is due next year [...] and I've seen it and what it says is this, quite simply, and it's very stark -- that by something like 2040 to 2050 the European excessive summer of 2003 when over 20,000 people died of overheating will be the norm. Every year will be as hot as that nearly. Now the consequences for people might be dealt with: they may go away for the summer to cooler places or they can turn up the air-conditioning but for the plants and the ecosystems there's no such relief and the probability is that European agriculture will cease to produce food by then. It'll become a desert and scrub region, naturally. That's not very far ahead so where do the European people get their food because the rest of the world will not be exempt. Asia, America will all be suffering the same consequences as will Africa and [...] other nations of the southern hemisphere. We will be entering a world where supplies of food becomes more and more scarce and there will be mass migrations. Anyone with an imagination can see the awful human consequences of that and we're talking about something which is only about 30 years ahead."--James Lovelock interviewed on Naked Science in 2007 |
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James Lovelock (1919 – 2022) was an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.
With a PhD in medicine, Lovelock began his career performing cryopreservation experiments on rodents, including successfully thawing frozen specimens. His methods were influential in the theories of cryonics (the cryopreservation of humans). He invented the electron capture detector, and using it, became the first to detect the widespread presence of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere. While designing scientific instruments for NASA, he developed the Gaia hypothesis.
In the 2000s, he proposed a method of climate engineering to restore carbon dioxide–consuming algae. He was an outspoken member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, asserting that fossil fuel interests have been behind opposition to nuclear energy, citing the effects of carbon dioxide as being harmful to the environment, and warning of global warming due to the greenhouse effect. He authored several environmental science books based upon the Gaia hypothesis from the late 1970s.
Nuclear power
Lovelock has become concerned about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 he caused a media sensation when he broke with many fellow environmentalists by pronouncing that "only nuclear power can now halt global warming". In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfill the large scale energy needs of humankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions. He is an open member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy.
In 2005, against the backdrop of renewed UK government interest in nuclear power, Lovelock again publicly announced his support for nuclear energy, stating, "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy". Although these interventions in the public debate on nuclear power are recent, his views on it are longstanding. In his 1988 book The Ages of Gaia he states:
I have never regarded nuclear radiation or nuclear power as anything other than a normal and inevitable part of the environment. Our prokaryotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of fallout from a star-sized nuclear explosion, a supernova that synthesised the elements that go to make our planet and ourselves.In The Revenge of Gaia (2006), where he puts forward the concept of sustainable retreat, Lovelock writes:
A television interviewer once asked me, "But what about nuclear waste? Will it not poison the whole biosphere and persist for millions of years?" I knew this to be a nightmare fantasy wholly without substance in the real world... One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets... I find it sad, but all too human, that there are vast bureaucracies concerned about nuclear waste, huge organisations devoted to decommissioning power stations, but nothing comparable to deal with that truly malign waste, carbon dioxide.
Linking in at time of death
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