James Lovelock
Dr James Ephraim Lovelock CH
CBE FRS, is an independent scientist, author, researcher and environmentalist who lives in
Cornwall, in the south west of
Great Britain. He is most famous for proposing and popularizing the Gaia hypothesis, in which he postulates that the Earth functions as a kind of superorganism .
Quotations
The climate and the chemical properties of the Earth now and throughout its history seem always to have been optimal for life. For this to have happened by chance is as unlikely as to survive unscathed a drive blindfold through rush hour traffic.
In the current fashionable denigration of technology, it is easy to forget that nuclear fission is a natural process. If something as intricate as life can assemble by accident, we need not marvel at the fission reactor, a relatively simple contraption, doing likewise.
Our planet...consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb...Within our bodies, no less than three million atoms rendered unstable in that event still erupt every minute, releasing a tiny fraction of the energy stored from that fierce fire of long ago.
More Quotes >>
Encyclopedia
Dr James Ephraim Lovelock CH
CBE FRS, is an independent scientist, author, researcher and environmentalist who lives in
Cornwall, in the south west of
Great Britain. He is most famous for proposing and popularizing the Gaia hypothesis, in which he postulates that the Earth functions as a kind of superorganism .
Life history
Lovelock was born in
Letchworth Garden City. He studied
chemistry at the
University of Manchester before taking up a
Medical Research Council post at the Institute for Medical Research in London.
In 1948 he received a Ph.D. in medicine at the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Within the United States he has conducted research at
Yale,
Baylor University College of Medicine, and
Harvard University.
Professional career
A lifelong inventor, Lovelock has created and developed many scientific instruments, some of which have been adopted by
NASA in its program of planetary exploration. It was while working for NASA that Lovelock developed the Gaia Hypothesis.
In early 1961, Lovelock was engaged by NASA to develop sensitive instruments for the analysis of extraterrestrial atmospheres and planetary surfaces. The
Viking program that visited
Mars in the late
1970s was motivated in part to determining whether Mars supported life, and many of the sensors and experiments that were ultimately deployed aimed to resolve this issue. During work towards this program, Lovelock became interested in the composition of the
Martian atmosphere, reasoning that any life forms on Mars would be obliged to make use of it . However, the atmosphere was found to be in a stable condition close to its chemical equilibrium, with very little
oxygen,
methane or
hydrogen, but with an overwhelming abundance of
carbon dioxide. To Lovelock, the stark contrast between the Martian atmosphere and chemically-dynamic mixture of that of the Earth was strongly indicative of the absence of life on the planet. However, when they were finally launched to Mars, the Viking probes still searched for life there. To date no evidence for either extant or
extinct life has been found .
Lovelock invented the Electron Capture Detector, which ultimately assisted in discoveries about the persistence of
CFCs and their role in
stratospheric ozone depletion.
Lovelock is currently president of the Marine Biological Association, was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society in 1974, and in 1990 was awarded the first
Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for the Environment by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. An independent scientist, inventor, and author, Lovelock works out of a barn-turned-laboratory in Cornwall. In 2003 he was appointed a Companion of Honour by
Queen Elizabeth II.
Controversy
Gaia
While the Gaia Hypothesis was readily accepted by many in the environmentalist community, it has not been fully accepted within the scientific community. Among its more famous critics are
Richard Dawkins and
Ford Doolittle, and a detailed description of disputes surrounding it can be found here. Briefly, critics point out that since
natural selection operates on individuals, it is not obvious how planetary-scale
homeostasis can evolve. Lovelock has countered with models such as Daisyworld, which illustrate how individual-level effects can translate to planetary homeostasis. However, as Earth Systems Science is still in its infancy, it is not yet clear how the lessons from Daisyworld apply to the full complexity of the Earth's
biosphere and
climate.
Nuclear power
Lovelock has become concerned about the threat of
global warming from the
greenhouse effect. In 2004 he caused a
media sensation when he broke with many fellow environmentalists by pronouncing that "Only
nuclear power can now halt global warming". In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to
fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfil the large scale energy needs of mankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions.
In 2005, against the backdrop of renewed
UK government interest in nuclear power, Lovelock again publicly announced his support for nuclear energy, stating, "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy".
Although Lovelock's interventions in the public debate on nuclear power are recent, his views on it are longstanding. In his 1988 book
The Ages Of Gaia he states: "I have never regarded
nuclear radiation or nuclear power as anything other than a normal and inevitable part of the environment. Our prokaryotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of
fallout from a
star-sized nuclear explosion, a
supernova that
synthesised the
elements that go to make our planet and ourselves."
Mass Human Extinction
Writing in the British newspaper
The Independent in January 2006, Lovelock argues that, as a result of global warming, "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable" by the end of the Twenty First century . He claims that by the end of the century, the average temperature in temperate regions will increase by as much as 8°C and by up to 5°C in the tropics, leaving much of the world's land uninhabitable and unsuitable for farming. He suggests that "we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can."
Books
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External links
- , acceptance speech for Blue Planet Prize 1997
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