Lovelock's New Book Has Memorable Thesis: It's Over

[hatrack]

You may feel, as job losses soar and parts of the world descend into turmoil, that you're apocalypsed-out for February. If so, you may not immediately leap at James Lovelock's forthcoming book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. His warning that climate change is spinning us into a hot world, where billions will starve and whole ecosystems will collapse, is a horror few want to contemplate, leavened only by the faint consolation that those of us lucky enough to live in the British Isles, Siberia, Chile, Canada or New Zealand may survive. But his prophecies are plausible and they will also make you think, which are two good reasons to grit your teeth and read him.

It is human nature to prefer writers who confirm the accepted wisdom to those who speak inconvenient truths. Look at the journalists who warned two years ago that Iceland's banks were over-leveraged. Remember the late fund manager Tony Dye, who was ridiculed for predicting the dotcom bust and was fired by his employer, Phillips & Drew, only weeks before the stock market turned. The media has been similarly dismissive of scientists who fear that it is too late to avert serious climate change. We prefer those who warn that there are dangers, but that they are far off and containable. Four years ago, when Lovelock forecast widespread devastation, he was generally dismissed as a lovable “maverick”, a word that always makes me sit up because it is a favourite weapon of the Establishment to fend off difficult ideas.

Suddenly, in 2009, Lovelock's fears strike a chord. The Vanishing Face of Gaia has been hailed as “the most important book for decades” by Andrew Marr, a man not especially sympathetic to green issues or conspiracies. The book is powerful, not only because of the scary scale and speed of change that Lovelock foresees, making the first chapters as pacey as a Hollywood romp, but also because he is a serious, hands-on scientist. While working at Nasa in the 1960s he invented the electron capture detector, which enabled him to point the world to the dangers of the ozone hole and pesticides such as DDT. He has also built spy gadgets for MI6. Nor is he a conventional green. He loathes wind farms, is passionately pro-nuclear and is scathing about “saving the planet”. The planet will look after itself, he says. It's humans we need to save, and soon.

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You can question these figures. The Met Office isn't great at predicting the weather three days ahead: how can it know what will happen in 2100? There has been a steady rise in sea level for the past decade but little change - possibly even a drop - in global temperature. This must surely cast doubt on the warming-world thesis, a point made elegantly by Nigel Lawson in his book Appeal to Reason. Lovelock himself admits that there are still huge gaps in our knowledge. The Earth's system is so complex and interconnected that, he says, “we are like a 19th-century physician trying to give a sensible prognosis to a patient with diabetes”. So why is he so sure that the hot world is on its way, within decades? “Compare the Earth with an iced drink,” he says. “The drink stays cold until the last of the ice melts ...a great deal of the heat of global heating has gone into warming that huge lump of water, the ocean, and into melting ice.” This could help to explain why temperatures have not yet risen. The danger is that they will rise rapidly once the ice disappears, causing the Earth to flip into a permanently hotter state. “There is a trustworthy indicator of the Earth's heat balance, and that is the sea level. Its rise is a general and reliable indicator that cuts through arguments as to whether some glaciers are melting and others advancing. The sea level rises for two reasons only: from ice on land that melts and from the expansion of the ocean as it warms. It is like the liquid in a thermometer: as the Earth warms the sea level rises.”

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/article5725106.ece

[Birthmark]

1. Lovelock may or may not be right.

If he is right, it's a lucky guess. The science doesn't support statements like climate "change is spinning us into a hot world, where billions will starve and whole ecosystems will collapse." That's certainly a possibility (that gets better every day we fail to address our CO2 emissions), but it's hardly a forgone conclusion.

[Delphinus]

2. Sounds intriguing.

As for the Earth looking after herself - I agree, thus the old analogy of her shaking fleas off her back.

As for saving humans - on a good day, I might agree. Today is not a good day. :(

[Bigmack]

3. Lovelock - a HERO of mine for decades!

Would that we had listened to him and others, like Jim Hansen, YEARS ago, but informed reason, alas, has NEVER been the ruling ethos of this stranger than strange land.... We've always preferred our invisible Friend and the Goddess of Ignorance. Ms Bigmack

[GliderGuider]

4. When it comes to human decision-making, reason has NEVER ruled.

It's not something we should beat ourselves up over, it's just the way we are. Our brain structure evolved to favour immediate threats over distant ones. Immediate, visible threats merit a strong, emotional response; distant, abstract threats are ignored. This discount function is a good survival strategy out on the African veldt, but less so in the modern industrial world with its abstract and unseen threats -- our cleverness has outrun our inbuilt caution.

Then there is the human tendency to make most decisions at an unconscious level and dress them up with post-facto rationalizations only after they emerge into our awareness fully-formed.

Combine those two characteristics, and you get a sentient creature that is peculiarly unsuited to dealing with the results of its hypertrophied cleverness.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that while I agree with Lovelock, I think our situation is perhaps even worse than he imagines -- this endgame was unavoidable from the beginning because of how our brain evolved.

Edited to add: So if that's the case, what do we do? We're not programmed to just lie down and die. My suggestion is that we accept the physical outcome, but work to change our personal response to it. In my view, the only universally useful response there is to this unfolding crisis is individual spiritual transformation. That change is already well underway around the world, and the speed of it may even outpace climate change. YMMV.