Previously, you may recall that Lovelock threw global warming under the bus. Now, he’s got another zinger the greens will be none to happy to hear in the middle of Rio+20. That “disturbance in the force” felt earlier today was the wailing and gnashing of teeth heard from eco-followers worldwide when they heard the father of Gaia say the much hated and maligned fracking process is “OK”.
I can’t wait to see how the Rommulans and McKibbenites spin this one.
Excerpts from the Guardian article by Leo Hickman:
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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Read the full Guardian article by Leo Hickman here and his complementary article:
James Lovelock on shale gas and the problem with ‘greens’
Give credit where credit is due, have a read up on the scientific achievements of the man during his lifetime, then think about how and why you became what you are now. I know my path was one of years of observation and interest in weather, so easy to be sceptical, but if you have any pride or integrity you must maintain an open mind just in case you might be wrong. that’s been my experience and if the science was compelling enough in data and detail I would be happy to change my mind as that is the way that science works. As time marches on I am not surprised that a scientist can change his mind in the face of the garbage served up in lieu of the real thing!!
Did they even think before publishing such junk.
Martin Brumby
I do love the sound of greenie heads exploding in the morning!
For some reason I was reminded of the last act in Mars Attacks!. The grandma playing the country crooning records and the aliens heads exploding.
I am afraid James has a distorted view of skeptics. they do not want to go back 20 years far from it they want to advance using real science not some politically codged together theory formulated to make everyone feel guilty.
Get real James, but I agree about the Greens, load of ignorant Luddites.
Steve C says:
June 16, 2012 at 12:32 am
The Liberal Party, for most of the 20th century, was the rump of what had been the progressive wing in British politics until the Labour Party adopted a more active position…
Sorry, but you have that 180 degrees incorrect. The British Liberal party (as opposed to the Liberal Democrats) was right-of-centre. They were classic liberals – who are now generically termed libertarians, since the word “liberal” was hijacked by the Left in Orwellian tradition to now mean the exact opposite of what it used to mean. Australia still has a Liberal party in the classical sense – although they are essentially Conservatives rather than libertarians.
“Carbon storage ‘may cause small earthquakes'”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/15/underground-carbon-storage-small-earthquakes
“US report finds injecting fracking wastewater underground can trigger seismic activity – with implications for CCS viability”
He’s getting there. He still seems to have no inkling of just how shonky the “science” on climate change is, but he will. Once your eyes have been opened it’s hard to shut them.
Schitzree says:
June 15, 2012 at 6:01 pm
You may not have gotten the tags right, but you did get the facts right.
Good review of the Tara matter, demonstrating how opponents of fracking distort the facts.
Lovelock also said; “I think the most outrageous example of climate scientists getting it wrong and not admitting it was the 2007 IPPC report. They happily accepted the Nobel prize, but their sea-level rise estimates, according to that very important Science paper by Rahmstorf (pdf), were 100% wrong. They didn’t really answer this other than say it’s a very complicated business and we’ve only just started. The IPCC is too politicised and too internalised. Whenever the UN puts its finger in it seems to become a mess.”
Cool.
All the money that have been sacrificed for the CO2 monster, could have been invested to turn rehabilitate large scale damaged ecosystems, as shown by John D. Liu
Please watch the Dutch TV documentary Groen Goud (Green Gold):
Most is English spoken with Dutch subtitles.
Perhaps Mr. Lovelock is a man with a keen sense of where the wind is blowing. He’s comfortable siding with the consensus, regardless the content.
Of course this would mean the CAGW scam is crumbling. We can only hope.
Well, there is nothing wrong with admitting your were wrong. I don’t know of any area of science or medicine where the leading lights were not seriously wrong about some things, often many things.
For some insight into our current debate on climate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth
Note that the guys with the mathematical models were wrong, because they simply did not understand the physical systems they were modelling. Their conceit was their mistake. If Kelvin had accepted the geologists much greater estimates of the age of the Earth, based on direct observations of the Earth, he might have hypothesized that there was another, unknown factor at work heating the Earth. Radioactive decay. Now that would have been something. People are just too conceited to concede that there are important things which just haven’t been discovered yet and which impact what they are doing.
About this guy’s age. I am 65, and I can tell you with each passing year I care less and less what other people think. It is not senility. I have to be careful at work, for example, of what I say. I watch what I say to safeguard my job. If I were independent of my job for income, I would be much more frank.
So, anyhow, in the end money will rule on this issue. Since the USA and Europe are broke, green dreams are going to be dumped. Germany is facing the truth about their green effort. It ain’t pretty. What people say will money less and less. Money talks.
Jeremy says:
June 15, 2012 at 11:05 pm
Lovelock is in one category with Ehrlich and Holdren. They are the spiritual fathers of the green Political Religion that serves as the new packaging for s0cialism – see here : http://lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo230.html – the “watermelon” phenomenon was planned. It is not an accident. It serves as the backdoor to reintroduce a planned economy as we sse in each UN gabfest. This is what Lovelock has enabled.
Great achievement that.
There are two Guardian pieces and I recommend reading both in their entirety:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/15/james-lovelock-interview-gaia-theory?intcmp=122
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jun/15/james-lovelock-fracking-greens-climate
The move, he (Lovelock) says, has been forced on him. Three years ago, he received a heating bill for the winter totalling £6,000.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/15/james-lovelock-interview-gaia-theory?intcmp=122
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And who says there is no justice in the world? He promotes a goofy idea, the politicians implement it, and it comes back to bite him in the pocket book!
So, faced with sky high heating bills, he finally comes to realize that just maybe it had it wrong all along.
Unfortunately James Lovelock has never said anything remotely scientifically intelligent. We have had to put up with the turgid crap he and other idiots like Pail Ehrlich spouts for far too long. Less than 5 years ago he predicted that most humans would be wiped out this century due to global warming with “a few breeding pairs living in the arctic”.
His views are utterly ignorant. People like him are responsible for the gross decline in the credibility and application of the scientific method. He should be called out for what he is : a sham and a fraud.
Voltaire must be turning in his grave with the rejection of the Enlightenment that began in the mid nineteenth century, saw the era of Fascism, Bolchevism and Nazism and now has its incarnation in Environmentalism. Belief in Gaia is no more rational than worship of Apollo or Isis but at least it is not necessarilly as malevolent as the Greenie god, who is more akin to Baal-Moloch.
janama says:
June 15, 2012 at 4:10 pm
“Perhaps he should spend a quiet morning at Tara in Queensland where you can see the layer of methane settle over the land as the fog rises. The children suffering from intense migraines and bleeding noses and ears. Just because he proposed the Gaia theory it doesn’t qualify him for making statements about a subject he appears to know nothing about..”
I don’t get it. Do you have a unique natural gas? Why is it settling? Sounds like you have confused propane aka cooking gas with natural gas. Propane is manufactured from oil. Natural gas is , ah, natural. While it is classified as a fossil fuel, in fact it also has geologic origins and has always been a component of the planet. Natural gas quickly exits ground level. And it is quickly dispersed and chemically altered.
May the day come when all nuclear power plants are closed!
Of course some will tell me they are safe. Would they tell me the same if there was a nuclear disaster in the US? Many of them would. There are some that would advocate nuclear power even while dying from health problems caused by a nuclear power plant disaster. They kinda remind me of manmade global warming believers who advocate manmade global warming despite how much evidence there is questioning it.
From Amino Acids in Meteorites on June 16, 2012 at 3:25 pm:
We had one, it was called Three Mile Island. Located in Pennsylvania, to the south of me, where I’ve lived all my life. I also have the Berwick nuke plant (Susquehanna Steam Electric Station) to the east. Berwick’s been going since 1982 and 1984, units 1 and 2 respectively, licensed to 2042 and 2044.
In terms of perceived risk, nuclear war with the Soviets was ultimately higher, getting nuke bombed now by terrorists or “rogue” nations is still higher. In realized risk, adding in “incidentals” like nuke bomb production, it’s a wash to lower with nuke plants. Ask around a question, “Would you rather have a nuclear plant within 10 miles of your home or nuclear materials in the hands of terrorists?”
There are many advocating solar power while dying from health problems caused by the Sun. Skin cancer can be miserable, metastasizing and spreading before you even know you have it.
Face the reality, all energy comes with risks. How many houses have you heard of that blew up from a gas leak, or people who died from carbon monoxide poisoning due to a furnace malfunction, or even a wood stove that had a venting problem? Electrical problems cause scores of house fires every week, no matter the source of the electricity.
Nuclear plants are over-engineered from the start, designed and built by those legally and fiscally obligated to get it right, run and maintained by a highly skilled workforce, and regulated up the whazoo. No other energy source comes close with regards to safety. Don’t forget the reliability.
Plus there are many light water reactors running that are over 30 and even 40 years old, using designs and understanding that can be more than 50 years old. They’ve held up remarkably well. There are the always-safe CANDU’s and newer “inherently safe” LWR designs, loaded with hair-trigger automatic shutdown mechanisms. Nuclear power is safe and getting safer.
Catastrophic global warming, catastrophic nuclear energy, many similarities. Practically no evidence that stands up to scrutiny. Lots of fear generated based on linear no-threshold models: any warming is bad, any radiation is bad.
What’s still the worst nuclear plant accident? Chernobyl, a crappy old design no longer used, and as has been discussed here in the past, was the result of a test that exceeded design specs, shouldn’t have been authorized, ill conceived and not even carried out as it should have been. Even Wikipedia has a good write-up. It was the functional equivalent of some engineering students crashing a Yugo head-on into a tree to see just how bad it would really be, deciding just before to add another 10mph, and right afterwards a still-conscious person had a smoke and threw the burning butt into the pool of leaked gasoline.
Even then, as the NRC noted in their write-up, “Health Effects from the Accident” section, the aftereffects weren’t that bad. Nothing like the then-envisioned nightmare scenarios, and nothing like assorted rent-seekers are trying to claim actually has happened.
Yup, pretty much like what’s happened with global warming.
Oh, and Fukushima? As the BBC reported:
But what about the “safe” renewables, wind and solar?
2008: Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power is actually more dangerous than Chernobyl
Notes:
1. Strange formatting, may have to reduce text size to see all of it.
2. Uses the disputed EPA-style “deaths due to particulates” to inflate coal/oil numbers.
3. Rooftop solar is three times as deadly as wind power, which is itself FOUR times deadlier than nuclear.
http://toryaardvark.com/2011/03/18/wind-energy-has-killed-more-americans-than-nuclear/
“Wind Energy Has Killed More Americans Than Nuclear”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
“How Deadly Is Your Kilowatt? We Rank The Killer Energy Sources”
Nuclear is safest.
http://notrickszone.com/2011/03/14/even-candles-kill-many-more-than-nuclear-power/
Candles Kill Many More Than Nuclear Power
So, why do you have this irrational fear of nuclear power when it’s continually shown to be the safest energy we have?
One of the largest problems with nuclear energy is the fact that people do not understand it in the least. Due to overblown fears of radiation among other things we have come to the point where people are just not understanding of various issues.
For one, there is very little difference between Gen 3 reactors (uranium/plutonium) and Gen 4 reactors (thorium).
The concepts are the same where cooling is passive and even in the event of catastrophic power loss the units can still be cooled down. The only nuclear disasters have been involved with Gen 2 reactors where cooling is not passive and that include Fukushima and Three Mile Island among other various scares. That Chernobyl tragedy was from what I would almost consider a Gen 1.5 model that was badly designed, and not a good idea in the first place.
But why are people gung-ho about thorium versus uranium and how gen 4 is so much better? Well I would stand to reason that it comes down to the fact that thorium reactions can be done more efficiently and the prime reason being that you can not extract usable fissile material from thorium reactions. People are scared of nuclear prolifiration, so for the sake of argument, I would argue that as long as we can safe-guard nuke plants and otherwise keep the fissile material contained, Gen 3 works just fine. Gen 4 would be an option in the third world where we do not want bad people getting this kind of material or countries such as Iran which have promised to destroy the US and/or Israel or other countries.
Regardless, its always about economics as far as power goes. If we want to go nuclear I would strongly suggest doing it slowly to keep power costs down. As we are seeing in the US from EIA data (look for yourself) our power costs are going up and up. Some of this is due to renewables from solar, wind, etc, but a lot of it is from new NG plants and basically retiring plants before they are ready to be retired. Broken window fallacy in other words.
If we really want to keep power costs down and switch over to nuclear or any other power source, this must be done slowly and you should allow some new coal plants to be installed so as to give time to various industries to switch production without harming people in those fields too quickly.
This also allows production lines and other infrastructure to be build slowly over time also keeping down costs. The problem most of us realize is that power costs are going up and up and these costs are often felt with rising costs everywhere for increased prices for gas, power, etc which drives everything to be more expensive. Every company in the real world is out to make a profit and they rise prices to the consumer so they can do so.
Its in this vein that our only option is to not protest individual sources of power or otherwise triumph them….our options include doing this slowly and to allow the market to decide versus draconian regulations that do not take into consideration economics.
The US for instance is already in a recession as is most of the world. The only way we escape this trap is by keeping power costs down and making sure that everyone has access to the best and the cheapest sources of power.
If that is nuclear, hydro or whatever, I am fine with that. Even coal or NG if it keeps prices low. It is only through economic strength that we have the resources to combat real environmental problems and when times get rough, people always do what people do: they become more destructive to their local environments not because they “hate nature” but more or less because they want to survive. this is a key to remember. If we really want to rise to a challenge, there must be a solution that is practical for the common man. But to find this, the key as always is to find the costs and the benefits of every power source and use that as a litmus test.
The sad thing here was that is was so obvious what I would find if I dug into this. I mean, how could a company stay in biz if half their wells are leaking. the odds of this biing true were increadabley low. And as usual it wasn’t true.
Amazing that he comes with this now he is OFF a Gov’t payroll, the truth will out.
He is old enough to remember what science used to be before postmodernism destroyed the very notion of objective truth. But like many rational men (such men were actually rare, even in his generation, when there were much more of them than are now) he grossly underestimated irrationality of humankind and its propensity to turn everything, science included, into some parody of religion. The Gaja idea is a nice scientific methaphor, encompassing geological power of life, its homeostatic nature and some telenomic tendencies of it, manifest in evolution. It was not his fault that the damn fools made a myth from it. Now he understood what a beast he unnowiningly created.
Spoken as a true scientist! A man willing to admit he was not correct and making it good of his newest discovery to correct a past error. Eviidence is that our world has experienced much hotter weather patterns in 100s of years past.