 Essential Reading, 2008-04-11
We should salute the (now) 89 -year-old author, James Ephraim Lovelock (Ephraim is Hebrew for fruitful): an independent, dissenting voice in science. Rebelling against reductionist philosophies, he took an inclusive, systems view of the planet, publishing his Gaia Hypothesis in 1970. It took over 30 years for the international scientific community to come round.
Having studied chemistry at Manchester U and received his PhD in medicine at London U, Lovelock was engaged in the 1960s by NASA to find ways to detect life on Mars. He realized that life would influence the atmosphere and designed an instrument to detect trace gases. Thinking about the reason why Mars is so barren and Earth so fruitful, he arrived at his Hypothesis.
In brief the Hypothesis stated that the Earth is not just a rock that happens to have things living on it: it is a complex interacting system of soil, sea, atmosphere and living things that shows a tendency to keep itself stable in a way that supports life. In particular this complex web has acted to hold temperature within a narrow range over hundreds of millions of years even as the sun warms and the planet wobbles in its orbit.
Lovelock calls this system Gaia after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth and persists in referring to Gaia as a person who acts with intent. Some find this annoying and unscientific. This reader accepts it as poetry and metaphor.
In summary, in his latest book, Lovelock revisits his Hypothesis and argues that:
1. Not only is climate change an impending disaster but an irreversible tipping point may already have been reached
2. The single most important step to take now is a major switch to nuclear power
3. Too many people simply do not understand the issues correctly: the well-meaning Greens are also at fault
4. Gaia's revenge will be to restore the equilibrium of the planet by removing most of the human population
On page 1 he states bluntly: `we are now so abusing the Earth that it may..move back to the hot state it was in 55 m years ago and most of us and our descendants will die.'
He starts with a by-now familiar history of the issue of climate change and goes on to say: ` we are now approaching one of those tipping points and (are) like passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.'
He reminds us how huge are the effects of what seem like minor temperature shifts: only 3 degrees separates us from the last ice age; the same scale of increase now seems likely this century: very rapid change indeed in geological time.
The tipping point factors of climate change are by now well-known:
1. The poles melt and less sun is reflected: this seems to be happening now
2. The bogs thaw and methane is released (a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2)
3. The seas warm and the algae stop fixing carbon and making clouds
4. The forests bake and catch fire
5. Methane clathrates are released from the deep sea bed
What makes Lovelock distinctive is his Gaian perspective. He argues that:
1. A `cold' planet' is healthier than a `hot' one. If the Earth was 5 C cooler than now (as it has often been) , there would be glaciers down to the English Channel. But the Atlantic would be teeming and Africa would be a green garden.
2. We are mistaken to think that the Earth is in a Goldilocks orbit. It started out too cold for life. The sun is slowly warming and now the Earth is becoming too hot. So Gaia keeps tilting to coldness. There have been 11 recent ice-ages in the British Isles. We are in the `fever' of a warm interglacial and would normally be heading to the `cure' of the ice-age.
3. But man has disrupted the balance, not just by burning fossil fuel but also by replacing forest with farm. Gaia will do what it must to restore the balance.
4. The underlying problem is that the sustainable human population is probably under 1 billion. Today it is 6 billion, forecast to be 11 billion by 2050.
His argument for nuclear power is simple: all the other solutions produce lots of CO2 or don't work well and/or take too long (new approaches such as carbon sequestration take 20-40 years to mature):
1. Nuclear power is tried, tested and economical and produces very little CO2
2. Wind power is unreliable and costly. It would take 56000 large wind-mills plus fossil fuel back-up just to replace current nuclear capacity (20% of our total needs)
3. Solar is poor for the UK: unreliable and 3x more expensive than conventional methods
4. Wave power apart from a Severn barrage is expensive .....
And so on.
He believes that popular misconceptions of cancer risk militate against nuclear. (It's arguably worse than that: the UK government has ducked the issue for over a decade. Only in the last few months, stampeded by the risk that (a) the lights will go off around 2012 and/or (b) we will depend on a hostile Russia for gas, has the UK government moved). Lovelock bemoans the fact that our political classes do not have any feel for nature or the planet. (They also know little of science or business and there is often a grim determination among temporary ministers to avoid difficult decisions.)
He feels that the Green movement has lost its way: for example by wanting `sustainable development' when much more radical action is needed and for promoting low-productivity organic farming when this means eating up yet more of the countryside. This is putting a lifestyle choice ahead of the planet. He detests the Green wish to cover the land with tens of thousands of windmills.
He offers several examples of similarly faulty decisions: including the massive error of banning DDT. Because the vocal western middle-classes did not want pesticide in its food, Africans died. Yet the use of DDT to kill human disease vectors posed little food risk: it was abuse of DDT by farmers.
Lovelock explores some blue-sky technical fixes to global warming: planetary sun-shades, for example, but without real enthusiasm. Perhaps because it would distract from his here and now message: go nuclear.
So are his arguments complete and wholly compelling? No. The central question of power sources deserves a large book in its own right. Do you have to accept Gaia to believe that climate change is likely to destroy us? No. Do you have to accept Lovelocks' wistful argument for a countryside free of windmills? No.
But although bits of the book can be faulted, the whole seems to me to succeed. It is a well-written, lively, provocative book on a critical subject and a key idea of our times written by one our most gifted and original thinkers.
****
It's nice to know that when climate Armageddon arrives: the poles and the permafrost melt, the bogs and tropics catch fire and much of Southern Europe, Asia, Africa and the USA and Australia starve and fry, the Atlantic Conveyor will also switch off resulting in a local temperature drop. The result could well be that the UK climate remains equable. On the other hand the UK will be a shrunken archipelago, with our major cities submerged, tens of millions of people looking for a home and many millions of refugees landing on our beaches.
 Forget Windfarms - Go Nuclear!, 2008-02-11
I first read "The Revenge of Gaia" two years ago, when it was published. By early 2006, of course, we were all becoming aware of a progressively strident chorus about the imminent catastrophe that global warming was going to cause and how there was a scientific consensus on the matter. Lovelock was the first book I read on the subject.
I was suitably alarmed by Lovelock's analysis, and particularly by his identification of "tipping points", whereby a relatively modest increase in temperature would lead to positive feedbacks, e.g. from a hotter Amazon rainforest dying and releasing its stored CO2, by a greening Greenland absorbing rather than reflecting heat, and thus causing further, and unstoppable, global warming. Lovelock envisaged humanity reduced to a few million "breeding pairs" on the Arctic and Antarctic fringes.
Two years on, I have re-read in a more critical way and have a number of observations about the way Lovelock states the case for there being a major and immediate problem.
Firstly, Lovelock makes no reference to any experimental work to justify the feared quantitative relationship between a rise in "greenhouse gases" and average global temperature. There is much reference to computer modelling - Lovelock is a keen computer modeller, and the Gaia theory is supposedly validated by it - and correlations. (What experimental, as opposed to modelling, work has been done? If you have any recommendations do let me know via a "comment".)
Secondly, he makes some sweeping leaps of logic. Having stated that climatic prediction is easier than forecasting the weather on the basis that we an predict that it will be colder in Berlin on December 2010 than it was in the previous July, he states that an increase in CO2 to 500ppm will accompanied by "profound climate change".
I was struck by his personal reliance on Michael Mann's so-called "hockey stick" graph, adopted uncritically in the 2001 IPCC 3rd Report, which had been pretty thoroughly discredited by the time the book was written (and which has all but disappeared from the 2007 IPCC 4th Report). If his fear of man made global warming is based primarily on this work, then I am reassured that it is probably not as bad as it seemed.
Lovelock quotes Dick Taverne (March of Unreason) warmly for criticising the greens' "impractical romanticism". I would disagree that that is a fair synopsis of Taverne's book, but in any case in his recommendation of the adoption of the "precautionary principle" he ignores one of Taverne's principal criticisms, that overcaution without a scientific basis threatens economic progress that can lift millions out of poverty.
Finally, Lovelock's arguments encompass warming and cooling trends over a variety of timescales, from the geological epochs, the last 100,000 years and the last hundred. He states that we are in an interglacial period, then that it has been hotter in he past. I found it hard to identify a pattern in this. He talks about a gradually warming sun, but not of any other cycles that might affect the sun's warming of the Earth. Svensmark's (more recent) book provides a coherent explanation of solar and galactic effects, and I am aware of others.
That having been said, the book is evidence that, back in 2005, Lovelock and others predicted that warming was occurring, (however it was caused). He predicted the opening of the North-West Passage, which indeed did happen this year. CO2 and CH4 may be contributing to this, and (by my reading at least) science cannot reliably tell us how much and to what eventual effect. What, then, of what Lovelock recommendations as to what we do about it?
I am struck, on re-reading Lovelock, at how little notice the global scientific consensus and its British offshoots have taken of his recommendations: forget wind turbines, go nuclear. The downsides of wind turbines have been covered more recently, and extensively, by the sceptical Booker and North. Lovelock writes on the basis that we need technological solutions to manage a "sustainable retreat" to a world living within Gaia's means, ideally with just 500 to 1,000 million people - he quite clearly hankers after the "idyll" of 1800AD. (1800AD in England might have been bearable for Jane Austen, great for Mr Darcy, but for the rest of us...?) I fear he underestimates the difficulty of making nuclear fusion a viable solution, and even of using plutonium for fission reactors, but there is much to be said for trying if you think that CO2 emissions are going to destroy life on the planet. Lovelock also advocates the Severn Tidal Barrage, and one wonders why this proven and predictable technology is not being implemented instead of the plan for thousands of off-shore wind turbines. Some of his other sustainable retreat solutions are less appetising - notably the suggestion that we should synthesize our food so that more of the planet can be allowed to revert to the wild.
Lovelock's book is short and well written. The courteous way in which he refers to global warming "sceptics" and other opponents is commendable, and is quite unusual in this polarised debate between "alarmists" and "deniers". His summary of possible positive feedbacks is compelling (in a frightening way) irrespective of the extent to which warming might be being driven in the first instance by man made or other effects, and his arguments as to which alternative energy sources to pursue are delivered with scientific objectivity. As to the extent to which he represents that there is an immediate and catastrophic problem, however, the way that Lovelock rubbishes the over-reaction to the fear of acid rain is illuminating. "It is", he says, "all to easy it seems to lose our sense of proportion." Consumed by the Gaia theory that he finds difficult not to imbue with new-age spiritualism despite his rational scientific basis, it is possible that Lovelock has done so himself.
He must be fun at Dinner Parties, 2007-09-28
If Gaia must have her revenge on us, then so be it. James Lovelock just makes sure we are aware that we are wholeheartedly to blame for her wrath.
I have never read a more depressing book. If 6 billion is unsustainable and 1 billion would be more appropriate to the Gaian theory, then please explain how, in 30 years we lose the 5 billion?
I can recommend this to some people. Read this if you are poor at maths and have no children.
Visionary and controversial, 2007-10-19
This is a book that will probably inform and infuriate in equal measure. Lovelock is in no doubt as to the severity of the challenge we face from global warming, and this work can be seen as an applied version of his thesis that the earth, as a self-regulating mechanism (which he names `Gaia'), will deal with the problem - with or without human help. After leading the reader through the global warming science in lucid and logical style - which brings home the threat very dramatically - the author has some characteristically robust, visionary and sometimes iconoclastic technological solutions to the problem.
It is here that he sometimes demonstrates an overweening confidence in certain technologies, notably nuclear power. His claim that `the natural world would welcome nuclear waste' (p 116, citing the area around Chernobyl as an example) is overly optimistic - see for example the article by A.P. Moller & T.A Mousseau (2007) 'Species richness and abundance of forest birds in relation to radiation at Chernobyl', Biology Letters of the Royal Society; he seriously underestimates nuclear waste problems by leaving low-level waste out of his calculations about volumes requiring disposal; and ignores issues connected with nuclear proliferation, security of fuel sources and carbon dioxide emissions during nuclear fuel refining/processing. On a different topic, he's also dismissive of the science that led to the banning of DDT - displaying little time for the animal welfare issues that the ban addressed. Blinkered and occasionally tendentious he may be, but Lovelock still has an impressive grasp of the scale of the problems facing our planet. Argue with his conclusions, but don't miss out on essential reading as the world gears up (or not) to tackle the major challenge of the 21st century.
Forget Windfarms - Go Nuclear!, 2007-12-30
I first read "The Revenge of Gaia" two years ago, when it was published. By early 2006, of course, we were all becoming aware of a progressively strident chorus about the imminent catastrophe that global warming was going to cause and how there was a scientific consensus on the matter. Lovelock was the first book I read on the subject.
I was suitably alarmed by Lovelock's analysis, and particularly by his identification of "tipping points", whereby a relatively modest increase in temperature would lead to positive feedbacks, e.g. from a hotter Amazon rainforest dying and releasing its stored CO2, by a greening Greenland absorbing rather than reflecting heat, and thus causing further, and unstoppable, global warming. Lovelock envisaged humanity reduced to a few million "breeding pairs" on the Arctic and Antarctic fringes.
Two years on, I have re-read in a more critical way and have a number of observations about the way Lovelock states the case for there being a major and immediate problem.
Firstly, Lovelock makes no reference to any experimental work to justify the feared quantitative relationship between a rise in "greenhouse gases" and average global temperature. There is much reference to computer modelling - Lovelock is a keen computer modeller, and the Gaia theory is supposedly validated by it - and correlations. (What experimental, as opposed to modelling, work has been done? If you have any recommendations do let me know via a "comment".)
Secondly, he makes some sweeping leaps of logic. Having stated that climatic prediction is easier than forecasting the weather on the basis that we an predict that it will be colder in Berlin on December 2010 than it was in the previous July, he states that an increase in CO2 to 500ppm will accompanied by "profound climate change".
I was struck by his personal reliance on Michael Mann's so-called "hockey stick" graph, adopted uncritically in the 2001 IPCC 3rd Report, which had been pretty thoroughly discredited by the time the book was written (and which has all but disappeared from the 2007 IPCC 4th Report). If his fear of man made global warming is based primarily on this work, then I am reassured that it is probably not as bad as it seemed.
Lovelock quotes Dick Taverne (March of Unreason) warmly for criticising the greens' "impractical romanticism". I would disagree that that is a fair synopsis of Taverne's book, but in any case in his recommendation of the adoption of the "precautionary principle" he ignores one of Taverne's principal criticisms, that overcaution without a scientific basis threatens economic progress that can lift millions out of poverty.
Finally, Lovelock's arguments encompass warming and cooling trends over a variety of timescales, from the geological epochs, the last 100,000 years and the last hundred. He states that we are in an interglacial period, then that it has been hotter in he past. I found it hard to identify a pattern in this. He talks about a gradually warming sun, but not of any other cycles that might affect the sun's warming of the Earth. Svensmark's (more recent) book provides a coherent explanation of solar and galactic effects, and I am aware of others.
That having been said, the book is evidence that, back in 2005, Lovelock and others predicted that warming was occurring, (however it was caused). He predicted the opening of the North-West Passage, which indeed did happen this year. CO2 and CH4 may be contributing to this, and (by my reading at least) science cannot reliably tell us how much and to what eventual effect. What, then, of what Lovelock recommendations as to what we do about it?
I am struck, on re-reading Lovelock, at how little notice the global scientific consensus and its British offshoots have taken of his recommendations: forget wind turbines, go nuclear. The downsides of wind turbines have been covered more recently, and extensively, by the sceptical Booker and North. Lovelock writes on the basis that we need technological solutions to manage a "sustainable retreat" to a world living within Gaia's means, ideally with just 500 to 1,000 million people - he quite clearly hankers after the "idyll" of 1800AD. (1800AD in England might have been bearable for Jane Austen, great for Mr Darcy, but for the rest of us...?) I fear he underestimates the difficulty of making nuclear fusion a viable solution, and even of using plutonium for fission reactors, but there is much to be said for trying if you think that CO2 emissions are going to destroy life on the planet. Lovelock also advocates the Severn Tidal Barrage, and one wonders why this proven and predictable technology is not being implemented instead of the plan for thousands of off-shore wind turbines. Some of his other sustainable retreat solutions are less appetising - notably the suggestion that we should synthesize our food so that more of the planet can be allowed to revert to the wild.
Lovelock's book is short and well written. The courteous way in which he refers to global warming "sceptics" and other opponents is commendable, and is quite unusual in this polarised debate between "alarmists" and "deniers". His summary of possible positive feedbacks is compelling (in a frightening way) irrespective of the extent to which warming might be being driven in the first instance by man made or other effects, and his arguments as to which alternative energy sources to pursue are delivered with scientific objectivity. As to the extent to which he represents that there is an immediate and catastrophic problem, however, the way that Lovelock rubbishes the over-reaction to the fear of acid rain is illuminating. "It is", he says, "all to easy it seems to lose our sense of proportion." Consumed by the Gaia theory that he finds difficult not to imbue with new-age spiritualism despite his rational scientific basis, it is possible that Lovelock has done so himself.
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