Guru who tuned into Gaia was one of the first to warn of climate threat
24 May 2004The Independent
Twenty-five years ago, he conceived the most radical way of looking at life on Earth since Darwin, and became a hero to the emerging environmental movement. Now, because he believes nuclear power is the only answer to the growing threat of climate change, some Greens may see him as the enemy. But that will not worry 84-year-old James Lovelock, CBE, FRS, who all his life has been a maverick, Fellow of the Royal Society or not.
It was as an independent scientist, working for himself, that he invented the equipment that detected CFCs, the chemicals from spray cans that began to destroy the ozone layer. And it was as an independent thinker that he conceived of Gaia - his name for the mysterious system by which the Earth (he came to believe) had kept itself fit for life, over millions of years. It was a complex series of feedbacks and interactions which regulated the temperature, the chemical composition of the atmosphere, even the salinity of the seas, so that life could thrive - and what was controlling it all, was life itself.
Living organisms were keeping the environment benign for themselves, and the Earth was in effect a single giant super- organism. You might even say - and Lovelock did - that the Earth was alive.
The Brixton-born scientist, who once worked for Nasa on the American space programme devising experiments to test for life on Mars, was originally going to call this the "biocybernetic universal system tendency". Had he done so, it might have remained a subject for arcane scientific journals. But his neighbour in the Wiltshire village of Bowerchalke, the Nobel prize-winning novelist William Golding, suggested he name it after the Greek goddess of the Earth, and Gaia was born.
To Lovelock's surprise, the hypothesis was at first ignored by the scientific community, and was taken up instead with enthusiasm by New Agers and by the Green movement, who found in Gaia a cherishable personification of the shimmering blue planet first seen by humans in the late 1960s, in the photographs taken by American astronauts.
Gradually the theory (now generally termed Earth System Science) has become accepted in the scientific community worldwide: last December, the scientific journal Nature gave Lovelock two pages to sum up recent developments in it.
It was his conception of a planetary life-support system maintained in precarious balance that made Lovelock sensitive to developments that could destabilise it, and his was one of the first voices raised to warn of the dangers of global warming. In 1989, he was one of a small group of leading scientists chosen to brief Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet on the threat from climate change.
Since then he has followed developments closely and become increasingly convinced that Gaia - to use the metaphor - is likely to react violently to the stress caused by the huge amounts of greenhouse gases we pour into the atmosphere each year. In two weeks' time he is hosting a meeting at Dartington Hall in Devon on "Gaia and global change" at which many leading climate scientists will be present.
A short, wiry figure with a frequent mischievous grin, Lovelock lives in an old mill in west Devon with his American second wife, Sandy Orchard, and for all his years has undiminished energy and passion, especially about the global warming threat, which he thinks is now critical, and widely underestimated.
Recent climatic events, such as the unprecedented 2003 European heatwave and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, indicate it is likely to proceed "much faster than anybody guesses", he said, yet there is as yet no adequate response.
"I think we should think of ourselves as a bit like we were in 1938. There was a war looming, and everybody knew it, but nobody really knew what the hell to do about it." The Kyoto protocol, he said, was "the perfect analogy for the Munich agreement", because it would solve nothing [as the cuts it mandates in greenhouse gases are tiny], while making politicians appear to be doing something.
The only real solution to replacing the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas that is causing the greenhouse effect, he said, was a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power. He did not dismiss providing energy from renewable sources such as tides, wind and the sun - the Green movement's solution - but believed it simply could not be done in time.
The Greens' attachment to renewables was "well-intentioned, but misguided", he said - "like the left's attachment to disarmament in 1938. And I believed that, at the time. I was misguided too."
Major action on climate change could not wait, he said. "Unless we stop now, we will really doom the lives of our descendants. If we just go on for another 40 or 50 years faffing around, they'll have no chance at all, it'll back to the Stone Age. There'll be people around still. But civilisation will go."
* The meeting, "Gaia and Global Change", will be held at Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon, from 2-5 June. The final day will be open to the public.
THE ENERGY SOURCE THAT FELL FROM GRACE
Fifty years ago, nuclear power was regarded as the answer to the world's energy problems, but it has long fallen out of favour with politicians and the public.
A string of nuclear power station accidents (the worst was in 1986 at Chernobyl in what is now Ukraine), the fear of cancer caused by radiation and the enormous difficulty and cost of disposing of radioactive nuclear waste have come together to cast a cloud over what was once a miracle technology. What was seen as the secretive nature of the nuclear industry has not helped.
The environmental movement has always been resolutely opposed to nuclear power, both in its civil and military versions, but the enthusiasm of governments has also waned. Some nations, led by France and Japan, have kept faith, but in Britain and America it is 20 years and more since new nuclear plants were ordered. In the world as a whole, there are about 440 reactors supplying about 16 per cent of global electricity.
Britain led the world in commercial atomic power, when the nuclear plant at Calder Hall in Cumbria began producing electricity in 1956. Another 18 nuclear power stations were built in the UK: 10 magnox stations (named after the type of fuel), seven advanced gas-cooled reactor stations (AGRs) and one pressurised water reactor (PWR) at Sizewell in Suffolk. Six magnox stations are running, with the AGRs and Sizewell, and they produce about 25 per cent of the UK's electricity supply. They are gradually being run down with no plans as yet to replace them.
Supporters keenly awaited last year's Energy White Paper but the Government, while not specifically ruling out future nuclear stations, made no commitment whatsoever to building any.
Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, said she believed Britain could achieve its ambitious greenhouse-gas reduction targets without new nuclear plants, creating a "low-carbon economy" through renewable energy. The Green movement warmly welcomed the White Paper. The door is theoretically still open to the expansion of nuclear power in Britain - but only by a crack.
