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James Lovelock is packing up. In one sense, the celebrated scientist and environmental author is simply moving house. Boxes and piles of unsorted papers scatter the floor of his home and "experimental station" located in a wooded valley on the Cornwall-Devon border. But, in another sense, at the age of 92, he is finally leaving his life of scientific study and invention behind; a career that included the formulation of the Gaia theory, his highly influential hypothesis that the Earth is a self-regulating, single organism. His personal effects, notebooks and equipment are being logged and archived ahead of entering London's Science Museum's collection later this year.
But leaning over a shoebox, rummaging for a cherished letter he received from Nasa in 1961 asking him to help it discover more about the Martian atmosphere, Lovelock doesn't appear to be sentimental about his past. In fact, he appears relieved to be free of the burden and responsibility of self-storage.
"Adapt and survive," he says, when asked why he has decided to move. After more than three decades living amid acres of trees he planted himself by hand, he and his wife Sandy have decided to downsize and move to an old lifeguard's cottage by the beach in Dorset. "I'm not worried about sea-level rises," he laughs. "At worst, I think it will be 2ft a century."
Given that Lovelock predicted in 2006 that by this century's end "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable", this new laissez-faire attitude to our environmental fate smells and sounds like of a screeching handbrake turn.
Indeed, earlier this year he admitted to MSNBC in an interview reported around the world with somewhat mocking headlines along the lines of "Doom-monger recants", that he had been "extrapolating too far" in reaching such a conclusion and had made a "mistake" in claiming to know with such certainty what will happen to the climate.
But Lovelock is relaxed about how this reversal might be perceived. He says being allowed to change your mind and follow the evidence is one of the liberating marvels of being an independent scientist, something he has revelled in since leaving Nasa, his last full-time employer, in the late 1960s.
He says it will be the topic of his latest book, due out next year, which has the working title Adventures of a Lone Scientist. He smiles: "My publisher keeps telling me: 'Can't you do a more cheery book this time?'"
Moving house has handed Lovelock the chance to pore over the everyday objects resulting from his life's work, most of which have been in the attic for decades. He picks up an undated invitation to MI5's Christmas dinner at a restaurant in London. In his other hand, he holds an old envelope stamped: "On Her Majesty's Service: Top secret." (As a freelance scientist, he's worked for many organisations.) There are get-well cards from the likes of the astronomer Carl Sagan, sent when he had heart problems in the early 1980s.
He finally finds the letter from Nasa: "I'd read science-fiction since I was a small kid, so when I got a letter from the director of space flight at Nasa I was gobsmacked. I realised I didn't want to spend the rest of my life as a civil servant, and I didn't like the idea of having everything planned right up to my retirement. My boss [at the National Institute for Medical Research in London] said I'd be a fool to ignore it and out of all that, ultimately, came Gaia."
Lovelock is donating much of his archive, equipment and inventions – including the electron capture detector he made in the 60s that helped him to record CFC levels in the atmosphere, which later led to the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer – to the Science Museum, in time for an exhibition next year showing the working conditions of scientists through the ages.
He says he largely dismantled his home laboratory 10 years ago when he ended his life as a practising scientist: "I have become a thinker since then. There is so much more to do. I think retirement means death."
The move, he says, has been forced on him. Three years ago, he received a heating bill for the winter totalling £6,000. His age means he has to have the heating on full in his poorly insulted home and, with his disabled son, Tom, living in a house next door, his outgoings on fuel rocketed. Damp winters on the edge of Dartmoor were taking their toll, so in recent years he has overwintered in St Louis, his wife's hometown in Missouri. The experience altered his attitude to the politics and economics of energy. Having already upset many environmentalists – for whom he is something of a guru – with his long-time support for nuclear power and his hatred of wind power (he has a picture of a wind turbine on the wall of his study to remind him how "ugly and useless they are"), he is now coming out in favour of "fracking", the controversial technique for extracting natural gas from the ground. He argues that, while not perfect, it produces far less CO2 than burning coal: "Gas is almost a give-away in the US at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it."
Lovelock says the political fallout from the Fukushima disaster in Japan last year means that the chances of a surge in nuclear power generation are dramatically reduced. "The fear of nuclear is too great after Fukushima and the cost of building plants is very expensive and impractical. And it takes a long time to get them running. It is very obvious in America that fracking took almost no time to get going. There's only a finite amount of it [in the UK] so before it runs out, we should really be thinking sensibly about what to do next. We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. Fracking buys us some time, and we can learn to adapt."
The reaction in Germany to Fukushima – which announced within weeks of the disaster that it was to shut down all its nuclear power plants by 2022 – particularly infuriates Lovelock: "Germany is a great country and has always been a natural leader of Europe, and so many great ideas, music, art, etc, come out of it, but they have this fatal flaw that they always fall for an ideologue, and Europe has suffered intensely from the last two episodes of that. It looks to me as if the green ideas they have picked up now could be just as damaging. They are burning lignite now to try to make up for switching off nuclear. They call themselves green, but to me this is utter madness."
Nestled deep into an armchair, Lovelock brushes a biscuit crumb from his lips, and lowers his cup of tea on to the table: "I'm neither strongly left nor right, but I detest the Liberal Democrats."
He delivers his mischievous bombshells with such rapidity and meekness that there is a danger one can miss the all-important clarification and context.
"They are all well-meaning, but they have mostly had little experience of power," he adds. "The coalition has behaved disgracefully on environmental and energy policies. It would have been much better if they had been properly rightwing. I don't mean something like Thatcher; that was a revolutionary Conservative government. Just a regular one. Our political system works because they tend to self-correct each other."
Even with politics, it seems, Lovelock's celebrated idea of a self-regulating organism applies. "We get to our stable position through checks and balances. The whole of nature does that through natural selection. Proportional representation is a very bad idea and an absolute gift to ideologues."
Lovelock does not miss a chance to criticise the green movement that has long paid heed to his views. "It's just the way the humans are that if there's a cause of some sort, a religion starts forming around it. It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don't think people have noticed that, but it's got all the sort of terms that religions use. The greens use guilt. You can't win people round by saying they are guilty for putting CO2 in the air."
He displays equal disdain for those who do not accept science on climate change: "They've got their own religion. They believe that the world was right before these damn people [the greens] came along and want to go back to where we were 20 years ago. That's also silly in its own way."
At times, Lovelock can cut something of an unsympathetic, cold figure. He talks about how, as animals, we're all "naturally racist", but how "we try to curb it and be sensible". So much of his talk seems to be underscored by the often brutal reality of natural selection and the self-correcting omnipotence of Gaia, with the result that there is little apparent concern for those – in the developing world, perhaps – who might not be able to adapt successfully to future environmental changes. But he also applies his strictly scientific outlook to his theorising about solutions, too.
Lovelock is influenced at present by US biologist EO Wilson and his study of social insects. "He's come up with an extraordinary theory that the nest is the unit of selection, not the individual insects. That has enormous consequences. Now consider that applied to humans. If we all move into cities, they become the equivalent of a nest. Then another thought comes immediately from that: if that's the way the flow is going, don't stop it, let's encourage it. Instead of trying to save the planet by geo-engineering or whatever, you merely have to air-condition the cities."
This Logan's Run vision of the future – where we all live in megacities to better manage dwindling resources – might not appeal to all, he admits. "But you don't even have to do the experiment. You only have to go to Singapore. You could not have chosen a worse climate in which to build a city. It's a swamp with temperatures in the 90s every day, and very humid. But it is one of the most successful cities in the world. It seems to me that they are treading the path that we are all going to go. It's so much cheaper to air-condition the cities and let Gaia take care of the world. It's a much better route to go than so-called 'sustainable development', which is meaningless drivel."
Such talk will not comfort the global leaders gathering in Rio next week for yet another international conference aiming to fix our environmental woes and where calls for "sustainable development" are sure to still be in vogue.
Lovelock says he's doubtful that internationalist efforts of this sort achieve much: "Whenever the UN puts its finger in, it seems to become a mess. The burden of my thoughts are very much that the climate situation is more complex than we at present are capable of handling, or possibly even in the future. You can't treat it as a scientific problem alone. You have to involve the whole world, and then there's the time constant of human activity. Look at how long ago the Kyoto treaty was – 15 years ago – and damn all has been done. The human time constant is very slow. You don't get major changes in under 50-100 years, and climate doesn't wait for that."
Comments
15 June 2012 5:59PM
> ...at the age of 92, he is finally leaving his life of scientific study and invention behind...
Let's hope he soon retires from making ridiculous, sensational claims - e.g. "We should be going mad on [fracking]." - that get lapped up by journos and newspapers eager for clicks.
> ... Gaia theory, his highly influential hypothesis that the Earth is a self-regulating, single organism.
It seems that it has only been influential in the popular press and a few kooky websites. Real earth scientists seem to have largely ignored it apart from a handful who could be bothered to explain why it was mostly flawed or worthless.
15 June 2012 6:03PM
He makes interesting points, and seems by and large correct. I've always liked Lovelock - a bit mad, but usually astute.
15 June 2012 6:14PM
Full disclosure. I"m Nick Grealy who has been promoting shale for four years here in the UK. The Guardian makes it either impossible or impenetrable as to how to change my screen name.
Obviously I welcome Professor Lovelock's entry into the debate. Thanks to Leo for putting the full version in the blog, it make a welcome change from a paper that has been very selective in informing it's readers.
This isn't entirely surprising, since the Guardian, a paper whose politics I generally otherwise support, has fallen into the Lib Dem trap of equating shale supporters with CC deniers or Koch sucking right wing apologists. I voted LibDem last election and I find their support of the austerity attack upon working people of Cameron all the more pointless given that the a large part of the solution to economic problems lies beneath our feet. Voting Labour where I am is fairly pointless, but I'll do it nonetheless, unless Respect put up a candidate for whom I can register a protest vote with.
Thus I can feel some great sympathy with Lovelock. To support shale and progressive politics has been a long and lonely exercise, something I would think the Professor could relate to, being stuck in the middle of the two extremes on climate.
I was particularly taken with his views on greens and climates change deniers. I often refer to the two wings as the Tea Party, and the Green Tea Party. Unlike them I believe that both climate change and safe shale energy exploitation are scientifically proven concepts. Unfortunately, both are also open to misinterpretation by those who are prone to conspiracy theories, selectively choose the contradictory data that naturally occurs in any large data-sets, and have completely unconnected political agendas.
Shale gas is not perfect. But it's not perfectly evil either. Thanks to Professor Lovelock for making another valuable addition to the debate, and thanks to Leo for being a bit more open minded than his colleagues!
15 June 2012 6:29PM
if he likes fracking so much, let him drink and use the water
15 June 2012 6:29PM
Gaia Theory is interesting.
It is very true that it has been seized by New-Agey people as a sort of Religion, which is odd, seeing as it is nothing of the sort.
That said, I suppose Lovelock's statements such as
didn't help - though they are from a layman science book and I'm a little surprised they were taken literally.
However, it does provide a decent metaphor/description of how the Earth reacts to changes and models/predictions based off it have been fairly successful.
As for the criticisms, nobody has explained why it is "flawed or worthless", most of it stems from the way Lovelock's books were not written for a scientific audience and so misinterpretations were to be expected.
I've always seen Gaia Theory as being in roughly the same category as Evolution - the best explanation for what we see in nature, but not particularly useful for making precise predictions.
15 June 2012 6:32PM
It's a Gaia hypothesis, not a theory. It's also a total joke and he shouldn't be allowed to call himself a scientist.
15 June 2012 6:33PM
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15 June 2012 6:35PM
Does fracking cause earthquakes?. Does fracking cause contamination of water courses?
Does fracking cause polution of any kind? Does fracking make a noise? Does fracking create danger?
If I could just get the real story about fracking then I would know how to vote.
15 June 2012 6:38PM
A gem of an interview. Particularly the full transcript.
I reckon we'd be much better off if we had more polymaths like him. Polyglots find that once you've learned a first additional language to a high standard, picking up a good knowledge of others isn't too hard - so why not multiple sciences over a career too?
But what really stood out for me was his cross-over into the humanities. He referred to history throughout and was brave enough to offer some political theory. The big omission was economics. I'd love to hear his take. No punches pulled either.
15 June 2012 6:38PM
Sad to see the support for fracking. For someone who believes in a living Earth the shattering of the crust to secure methane is abominable. Disagree with comments above. A living Earth does not need scientific proof to understand an inter-relatedness of all things, nor a shortfall in science evident in so much of the current Earth's ills. Time to pull the wool off from our eyes.
15 June 2012 6:38PM
I notice he approves of fracking as a stopgap -- to buy us time to get our house in order re energy efficiency etc. Of course this will never happen, fracking or no fracking.
15 June 2012 6:45PM
Yes, but not big enough to worry about.
Apparently, although I'm not sure how dangerous such contamination is - more research needed.
Yes, it is a fossil fuel and the fracking fluid itself can cause problems apparently.
Yes, but only if you live nearby.
Depends how you define danger. I doubt it is dangerous in the blow-up-and-kill-everyone sort of way, but contamination/CO2 emissions could well be a problem.
15 June 2012 6:46PM
Evil bastard. This man wants to poison your children's water and bring your house crashing down around your ears. Why would a man of such an age need the money?
15 June 2012 6:48PM
So, having admitted it has only made an impact amongst New Age-types as a kind of mother Earth religion / allegory, you then assert it has scientific value. You appear to be arguing with yourself. And you seem to be admitting that you're a New Age-type given that you find it so impressive!
What has it added to science?
> I've always seen Gaia Theory as being in roughly the same category as Evolution...
You really need to crack open a website that explains the basics of evolutionary theory and do some careful reading, because you are woefully ignorant of what evolution is if you think it's close to being equivalent to Lovelock's fluffy planet organism story.
15 June 2012 6:49PM
Yes, but they're about as powerful as a bus trundling down the street.
Not realistically, and not outside the mind of the zealot.
15 June 2012 6:49PM
He doesn't. "Gaia" is a metaphor. Most people are smart enough to figure this out on their own.
15 June 2012 6:50PM
Sounds like dementia. The cost of fracking is about to go through the roof, because the beans grown to produce guar gum - a main ingredient of fracking compounds - is grown in the driest region in India, and """Pakistan""". A rather important part of the world I've heard. Haliburton predicts up to 25% drop in profits for 2012.
15 June 2012 6:50PM
Well, not everybody who inhabits the largest living creature on Earth loves nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing while hating wind power and clinging to the slim hope that future sea level rise will be slower than observed rates in the geological record (during periods in which natural climate forcing was an order of magnitude weater than man-made climate forcing is right now), therefore not everyone has the same incentive to find a way to pretend Lovelock meant something other than what he wrote, when what he wrote comes off as a bit clangy.
Much as nobody has explained how wind farms are "useless". For that to be true, electricity would have to be useless. Outside of the last few remaining uncontacted tribes in the rain forests somewhere, I'd imagine most people are able to recognize electricity as useful. Even electricity having an irregular supply is more useful than no electricity at all - just ask anyone from Baghdad who continues to consume electricity when it is available.
15 June 2012 6:56PM
True enough, but equally not everyone is suckered by the hysteria. This would appear to include the world itself, which has failed to comply with projections. Look at the graph here.
Or go to Nigeria, where the epileptic grid supply means standby diesel generators produce more energy than the national utility, resulting in rather horrible pollution.
15 June 2012 6:57PM
Ah, yes, the Monbiot school of smear - he's old, therefore he has no stake, therefore we can safely say he's wrong and so ignore him.
15 June 2012 6:57PM
A great inventive genius who spends £6,000 uselessly heating an entire house when all he really needs is to heat his body. Why doesn't he (re-)invent electrically heated clothing? That technology enabled Allied aircrews in 1943-45 to bomb Germany from high (and therefore frigid) altitudes in bombers having open windows.
15 June 2012 6:59PM
Does fracking cause earthquakes?
Yes, but they're about as powerful as a bus trundling down the street
You have absolutely no way of knowing this for certain - the bus might fall through the street for all you know.
15 June 2012 7:00PM
Well he's not going to be around to guard the radioactive waste.
15 June 2012 7:03PM
Please watch this and tell me what you think of fracking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8
15 June 2012 7:04PM
I'm not ignoring him. But perhaps he is simply stupid.
15 June 2012 7:04PM
1. Right.
2. Not sure, but irrelevant.
3. Where he's wrong, we can say he's wrong for much better reasons. For example, hook up a "useless" wind turbine to an electrical grid where it does useful work.
4. This thread is accumulating responses rather quickly for someone who is being ignored.
(I inserted numbers into your passage for convenience in referencing my replies. I did not intend to change the meaning of your excerpt.)
15 June 2012 7:07PM
Please watch this and tell me what you think of fracking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8
15 June 2012 7:09PM
And for all I know I might get struck by lightning tomorrow, or win the lottery, or any number of things. There are very few certainties in life, aside from the fact that it will end and between now and then we will pay taxes.
The reality is that the tremors caused by fraccing are extremely weak. I'd suggest it is unlikely that they could be strong, because that would mean significant faults pre-existing in the nearby area, which in turn would very likely mean the geological environment would be unlikely to hold significant deposits of methane - in essence, the type of rock you will fracture is highly unlikely to be in an area where you could get significant tremors capable of causing damage.
15 June 2012 7:10PM
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15 June 2012 7:11PM
This guys an arse. He said recently cos the planet's fckd by 2020 we may as well all live it up as much as possible! Easy for an 80 something to say eh.
He hardly invented the Gaia theory either, it's as old as mankind. Why does he still get column inches?
There's a lot more intelligent, inciteful and useful analyses out there from young people who believe in the future, and our responsibility in it starts here and now.
15 June 2012 7:12PM
Indeed, a PhD in medicine and a long lifetime of invention and innovation surely indicate the man is an idiot.
15 June 2012 7:13PM
Lovelock is little more than a golf bar bore, capable of spouting half-elbowed opinions on the basis of what he reads in the papers.
Why he gets so much attention as an 'environmentalist' baffles me, when there are plenty more real ones around.
Gaia Theory is little more than wishful thinking, even if it possibly inspired some people to think about long term geophysical processes, logically it doesn't stack up, and there's no evidence for it.
Quite frankly he's a bit of an embarrassment to environmental scientists, and has been for a long time.
15 June 2012 7:14PM
I did not say it has only made impact amongst new age types.
I said that I think it has scientific value and that the new-age types are being silly.
Less of the straw men please.
15 June 2012 7:16PM
Welsh mountain lamb has only very recently stopped being tested after a shower of rain brought Chernobyl radioactivity to this island decades ago. Imagine the potential devastation for life on this small island of one domestic accident from either the process or the waste.
Time to do a Germany.
15 June 2012 7:18PM
I just can't take Lovelock seriously any more. First nuclear and now fracking. Every time he opens his mouth he seems to slip further from "genius" towards "loony".
A lot like Fred Hoyle, he did some good work but will mostly be remembered for being spectacularly wrong (about the "Big Bang" in Hoyle's case).
15 June 2012 7:19PM
I think Lovelock is a great scientist and many of his theories make a lot of sense and I admire him a lot. But that does not mean I think he is right on everything. I think he is wrong about renewable energy and nuclear power. And I think he makes a mistake to attack people who care about the environment in the way he does.
A religion is not up for debate. People who believe in something religiously are closed to any other viewpoint. It is true to say some environmentalists are like this, but this is not something peculiar to them alone.
As an environmentalist I have looked seriously at nuclear power. I have looked at its pro's and cons. I have great admiration for the technology and engineering that allow us to control the splitting of atoms. But I have also looked at our island, the raw materials we have locally and the renewable energy we could harness. And I believe nuclear is the wrong road; I think it is to dirty; I think it is to expensive and I think it is to dangerous. I also think nuclear power fails to solve the underlying problems of energy security and climate change, while creating major new ones.
That is not to say life is all rosy in renewable land, because it isn't. Renewable energy also has major issues today, such as lack of technology and low efficiencies. But, only investment can address those issues, just as investment allowed us to control splitting of the atom. I agree with Lovelock that the seven barrage should have been built. But I also think if we are to make renewable technologies work we have to utilise all the energy sources we have available to us, including wind, wave, tidal, solar, biomass and energy efficiency. In my view if we are ever to gain energy security, along with tacking climate change using technology we have right now then I think renewables are the only ticket in town.
As for fracking, I simply think gas is way to valuable to burn for heating homes or generating electricity. Maybe it has a part to play, but as a technology I think there are still a lot of unknowns to be investigated.
15 June 2012 7:19PM
Lovelock is slippery about what Gaia means - when it suits him he goes for much more than a metaphor and boldly states that the Earth has the characteristics of a living organism. When he gets called out on this by people that have actually studied biology like Dawkins he pretends he didn't really mean it and was using a 'metaphor'.
Lovelock is a chemist not a biologist or environmentalist. If fact nowadays he's more a publicity-seeker than any kind of scientist at all.
15 June 2012 7:21PM
There was never any real ground to restrict its consumption. Had it been possible, I'd have eaten it without any qualms. I will be happy to eat equally "hot" lamb now. The reaction was an over-reaction, prompted by hysteria an scientific illiteracy.
Shut down the nuclear plants and replace them with coal? You sure about that?
BTW, you do know that coal plants release more radioactive matter into the atmosphere than nuclear planets, don't you?
15 June 2012 7:22PM
Stop being a hysterical fool.
15 June 2012 7:23PM
Seems to have lost sight of his own theory. (Gaia)
15 June 2012 7:24PM
There is everdance that the earth continuously creates abiotic oil via processes that are generally not well understood or only being recognized now. Fracking destroys the geological framework for the process.
15 June 2012 7:24PM
Be thankful this generation is on the way out...the mess they made....Karma..
15 June 2012 7:25PM
Sorry but Gasland has already been exposed as alarmist rubbish.
15 June 2012 7:27PM
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15 June 2012 7:27PM
In the UK over 25000 people die each year from cold weather and fuel poverty. How many people has fracking for gas killed? The only responsible and rational thing to do is reduce that 25K figure by any means possible.
15 June 2012 7:27PM
Ignoring the ad hom, he does say exactly that: "the Earth is a living organism". Obviously that is nonsense, so the watered down Gaia Theory is that "it is just a metaphor". As a metaphor, it is a useless, untestable theory. Metaphors are not science.
Earth science is fascinating, it is a great pity it got polluted with the Gaia anthropomorphic nonsense. Ironic ;)
15 June 2012 7:28PM
'Time to do a Germany.'
You mean burn more coal?
15 June 2012 7:28PM
Justify that.
15 June 2012 7:29PM
Literally, yes, BECAUSE it is a metaphor.
Metaphor, recall, consists of saying "x IS y" when it isn't really.
15 June 2012 7:32PM
I think you're being a tad hard on Lovelock - how many people of his age are capable of having lucid conversations at all? I'm actually rather glad that he is able to do so even if his conversation is a mash of misinformation, ignorance and prejudice as it gives me hope for what I might be like in only another 26 years!
I am rather astonished that such an apparently environmentally aware guy should be living in an 'insulted' (sic) home after all the years he has spent there. Insulation is scarcely something that has suddenly been turned up on one of the runs of the LHC! I'd make a pretty good guess that the £6000 he spent on heating his house last winter would have made a pretty enormous inroad into insulating the house to at least best UK standards if not the full Scandinavian. Doesn't say a lot for his grasp of the realities of life.