It is now a commonplace that there is a plausible threat to the welfare of our
species from the environmental damage caused by us. This notion, with its
echoes of the Mutual Assured Destruction of the Cold War, has in recent
years evolved rapidly from minority obsession to international political
preoccupation. Many eminent scientists have joined in as the debate has
rolled on, but only a handful can claim that they were seminal. Prime among
the small group of pioneers is James Lovelock.
Lovelock is unusually widely recognised by his fellows. Scientists, like other
human beings, are comfortable in tribes. It is rare for these scientific
tribes to issue major trophies outside their own discipline. Yet in 2006 the
Geological Society awarded its most senior medal to Lovelock, whose
outstanding observational science and instrumental development lay in areas
well beyond geology. He has reached significantly across tribal boundaries
to help to establish Earth System Science, all the while gathering evidence
for his latest assertion that the apocalypse is nigh: The Vanishing Face of
Gaia. So the citation for his 2006 Wollaston Medal provides the appropriate
first pages of text in the companion biography by John and Mary Gribbin: He
Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia (Allen
Lane).
He did know that he was right, but, as Gribbin and Gribbin relate so well, it
took a while for many to agree. Lovelock's metaphorical style of writing and
his associated apparent flirtation with teleology set him apart.
Contemporary fashion in science tends to favour sparse prose and the
avoidance of anything that implies purpose in the Universe at large, let
alone on Earth in particular. With his invention of the concept of Earth as
Gaia, Lovelock led us into a world of metaphor, describing a planet that
regulates its affairs ostensibly in favour of life. We are invited to
recognise, if not worship, a goddess made even more alluring by the hint
that she conducts her affairs in a way that looks almost - but not quite -
purposeful. And what do we do, ungrateful species, too numerous and too
ignorant as we are? We defile her. We are mindless criminals, assaulting
Gaia casually as we pursue the unwise style of life that we find convenient.
Now the goddess is rounding on us and it is inevitable that we shall be
scourged. She is good for a few hundred million years yet: we are not -
unless we now prepare ourselves for uncomfortable survival in greatly
reduced numbers.
But the use of metaphor as the basis of communication allows any number of
individual intepretations of Lovelock's message. Does this matter? In this
case it does, because it really is important for us to understand what he is
saying and to examine it closely to see if we agree. If Lovelock is right in
his most recent pessimism we have to act in a particular way just to
survive. If he is only partly right we shall have to act in a largely
different way, just to survive in reasonable comfort. If he is entirely
wrong and there is indeed nothing much to worry about we should at this
stage abandon this heady business of predicting the future of our species
and turn instead to the sports pages, to see if we can forecast the result
of a horse race.
To help us to decide on our reaction to The Vanishing Face of Gaia we have,
ready for inspection, a full spectrum of published evidence bearing on the
key issue of climate change. At the more prosaic and optimistic end of that
spectrum we can place the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) . These reports contain a host of numbers and graphs, some
based on observation of our planet, others drawn from computer-generated
forecasts, all provided by groups of scientists engaging in the favourite
sport of peer review. Spanning the whole spectrum and beyond is The Oxford
Companion to Global Change: a wealth of thoughtful analysis that provides
valuable perspective. Right at the more poetical and pessimistic end of the
line we have James Lovelock's 1979 book Gaia.
As recently as 2006, in the very subtitle to his The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock
still gave us a whiff of encouragement: “Why the Earth is Fighting Back -
and How We Can Still Save Humanity”. Just three years later hope has fled
his home in Coombe Mill and Lovelock's tone has hardened. In The Vanishing
Face of Gaia he tells us that it is too late to mend our ways: “There is
only a small chance that... we could reverse climate change.” This is a
message with potentially huge practical significance. If he is right, the
Copenhagen climate summit to be held at the end of this year becomes a waste
of time, because we should be concentrating more on how to survive the
apocalypse rather than on how to avoid it.
Is Lovelock right? He explains why he is led by observations of present-day
trends to step outside even the gloomy end of the range of possibilities set
out by the uncertain computer models of the IPCC. Both Lovelock and his
biographers also look at the past for clues to our future, not least at a
notable warming event that took place 55 million years ago: the dauntingly
titled Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The evidence of the
geological record suggests that we would be ill-advised to provoke a repeat
of the inimical effects of the PETM through our own agency; we can all agree
that a re-run would be a disaster for us. But something else may be read in
those ancient rocks: a hopeful message that we may still avoid that disaster
if we rapidly and radically change our behaviour.
Thanks to advances in the dating of rocks we can now divide geological time
into thousands rather than millions of years. This enables us to bring on to
a human timescale those events 55 million years ago, long before we were
around to strike so much as a spark from our first flint tools. Over the
course of a few thousand years on either side of the boundary between the
Paleocene and Eocene epochs, Earth ran the experiment on which we have now
ourselves embarked. Embarked, not completed - unless Lovelock's worst fears
that we have already triggered an imminent and unavoidable rapid warming are
realised. We can stop now, and even begin to retreat from the edge, but only
if we are united across the globe in our determination to do so. So those
striving for agreement at Copenhagen in December should not despair just
yet, but should urgently seek ways to establish regulatory frameworks within
which truly low- carbon economies may flourish.
That does sound rather dull compared with Lovelock's forecast of struggles
against rapidly changing climates, flooding of the land by the seas, mass
migrations of displaced people and consequent significant decreases in the
human population of the planet. Is Lovelock's apocalypse close upon us? We
do not know. Is regulating our dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
still a first priority? Yes, it should be, combined with a more realistic,
Lovelockian, view of the capacity of Earth to sustain even more billions of
us. For a while, at least, let us persist in the belief that if we greatly
improve our behaviour towards the goddess we may still enjoy her
dispassionate embrace.
The Vanishing Face of Gaia by James Lovelock
Allen Lane, £20 Buy
the book
Bryan Lovell is Senior Research Fellow in Earth Sciences at the University of
Cambridge
