JAMES LOVELOCK: NOBODY REALLY KNOWS THE FUTURE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
IT’S not every day you get to meet a scientific hero – an earth scientist and inventor who worked for NASA in its infancy and helped to discover the devastating impact of CFC gases upon the ozone layer.
Chatting down the phone from his west Dorset home, the 96-year-old is everything (as a surprisingly nervous science geek) you hope he will be – witty, insightful and engaging.
The Dorset Wildlife Trust (DWT) patron clearly has a very soft spot in his heart for Dorset and is delighted to be living in “one of the best bits of the whole country.”
He has lived in and around the south all his life.
He said: “Dorset is very much a part of my life. I walked through it as a child and an adult. I have always been very fond of it. I have worked here both as a writer and managing an MoD site at Winfrith. I first came here in 1929 as a child to Swanage for a couple of weeks and spent time walking around the coast.”
His association with DWT is deep rooted. He used to visit Cranborne Chase and “grew very fond of it,” becoming a lifelong member of DWT in the late 1950s and has made charitable donations to the charity.
Mr Lovelock said it was a “nice feeling” to be made a patron. He said: “There’s talk of making Dorset and Devon into a national park and I hope it comes off. It should happen.
“To have Dorset as a park would be a great idea.”
He was pleased the Navitus Bay wind farm development didn’t get the go ahead, as the energy that would be produced “wouldn’t be very reliable.”
A more sensible idea would be to create a solar farm in the Sahara, he suggested. This would create enough energy for Europe, but was unlikely to happen, Mr Lovelock added.
Climate and energy production is not surprisingly one of his main concerns. But as to predictions about the future, he is far less certain, saying:
“I think anyone that tries to predict more than five to ten years ahead is a bit of an idiot, so many things can change unexpectedly.”
He added that global warming proponents stated that the earth would get hotter and hotter but “they don’t really know,” and climate models are only based on what data goes into them, so it was hard to say what would happen in the future.
Mr Lovelock is interested in what can be measured, what can be observed.
So for example the sea temperature around Chesil Beach being so low and the effects of the Gulf Stream dropping ‘significantly’.
He said: “That’s one reason global warming hasn’t been so noticeable around here. Far from being an automatic warming up. If the sea starts moving the currents in different directions we get quite cold conditions.”
He said: “The other thing I predict, everyone will be living in cities towards the end of the century,” adding: “This is a trend all over. What’s left of the rest of the world is difficult to predict.”
“Don’t try and save the world, it’s pure hubris. We might be able to save Dorset. I don’t know how we do it. It’s up to us. I think it’s easier to save Dorset than the planet.”
Adding: “There’s one thing to keep in mind here. We don’t need to save the planet, it’s looked after itself for four billion years. It’s always been habitable and things have lived on it, so why worry.”
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His Gaia theory is a bit froofroo, as are some of his doomish ideas about the fate of man, such as that world population will be severely culled, to about 1 billion people. However, these ideas are relatively harmless, like believing in space aliens and their inevitable attack.
James Lovelock was a long time warmist but changed his mind. He initially thought that the interactions between the various drivers for weather were understood well enough for accurate modelling but eventually realised that the level of chaos (an area in which he was a genuine expert) was far beyond our capabilities of measurement (since chaotic systems can be incredibly sensitive to inputs) and that models being used were unrealistic.
http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/04/03/green-guru-james-lovelock-on-climate-change-i-dont-think-anybody-really-knows-whats-happening-they-just-guess-lovelock-reverses-himself-on-global-warming/
Quotes:
“Don’t try and save the world, it’s pure hubris. We might be able to save Dorset. I don’t know how we do it. It’s up to us. I think it’s easier to save Dorset than the planet.”
Adding: “There’s one thing to keep in mind here. We don’t need to save the planet, it’s looked after itself for four billion years. It’s always been habitable [across vast ecological changes] and things have lived on it, so why worry.”
Anthropogenic effects are miniscule compared with the quantum of [any] Earthly metric. “Don’t worry, be happy!” is the quick answer to the 97% of homo-sapiens who don’t have the educational grasp to parse this stuff.
“Don’t Happy, be Worried!” is the profound answer for those of us who think a bunch of self-serving Snake-Oil salesmen are RIGHT and conquering the World! We 3% have the intellectual capacity & intestinal fortitude to fight these idiots in the Objective Court of Supreme Reason.
P.S. Far from funding efforts to criminalize so-called “Deniers” for “The Crime of our Times!” we shd be sending the money to found ”The Objective Court of Supreme Reason”.
Obviously a denialist in the pay of Big Oil, to the gallows with him.
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” ― Yogi Berra
As I recall, the laboratory work that showed the destructive effect of CFCs on ozone came out of the DuPont laboratories. At the time DuPont held all the patents on CFC manufacture, which were about to expire enabling anybody to make their own CFCs cheaply and without licensing. The ‘evil’ of CFCs and the ozone layer was publicized in time to prevent this, and to encourage the use of CFC ‘replacements’, HCFCs and other related compounds, which DuPont had already been quietly developing.
I never heard of the alleged action of CFCs on ozone being duplicated under conditions identical to those in the stratosphere – low pressure and pressure and high UV loading from sunlight. Neither did I hear of any explanation as to why the ozone hole (actually an attenuation of ozone concentrations in the south circumpolar stratosphere) miraculously healed itself every year when the Antarctic winter arrived. If the hole was due to CFCs, and they were still present when the sun went down, why didn’t the ozone hole remain?
Oops: “low pressure and *temperature*”
The only problem is that CFCs have been shown to have little to no impact on the ozone layer.
The belief that CFCs would destroy the ozone layer was based on an untested model.
as i said….