Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Richard – James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis which underpins much of modern environmentalism, now thinks global warming is a religion. He also points out Singapore, one of the warmest cities in the world, is also one of the most desirable places to live.
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What has changed dramatically, however, is his position on climate change. He now says: “Anyone who tries to predict more than five to 10 years is a bit of an idiot, because so many things can change unexpectedly.” But isn’t that exactly what he did last time we met? “I know,” he grins teasingly. “But I’ve grown up a bit since then.”
Lovelock now believes that “CO2 is going up, but nowhere near as fast as they thought it would. The computer models just weren’t reliable. In fact,” he goes on breezily, “I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy, this climate change. You’ve only got to look at Singapore. It’s two-and-a-half times higher than the worst-case scenario for climate change, and it’s one of the most desirable cities in the world to live in.”
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But there is a third explanation for why he has shifted his position again, and nowadays feels “laid back about climate change”. All things being equal – “and it’s only got to take one sizable volcano to erupt and all the models, everything else, is right off the board”
Lovelock maintains that, unlike most environmentalists, he is a rigorous empiricist, but it is manifestly clear that he enjoys maddening the green movement. “Well, it’s a religion, really, you see. It’s totally unscientific.”
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Lovelock also points out that the rise of robots will completely invalidate concerns about people becoming “heat stressed” performing manual labour. As an IT specialist I have to say completely agree with him on this. Just as smart phones have evolved from huge bricks into intricate computerised assistants, so will the clunky automated vacuum cleaners and other automated appliances of today rapidly evolve into machines which take care of daily housework, and other manual tasks.
What I find most remarkable is that The Guardian is giving airtime to this climate heresy. Perhaps they are testing the water, to see how readers react.
After all, it is obvious to anyone remotely objective that the green religion is dying. It won’t take too many more South Australia style renewable energy disasters to completely finish what remains of the credibility of the green movement.
James Lovelock of course also played a critical role in the ozone depletion hypothesis that led to the Montreal Protocol and a worldwide ban on CFCs and other halogenated hydrocarbons. Lovelock’s only role was purely objective and scientific. Because halogenated hycrocarbons were chemically inert and because they did not otherwise occur in nature he wondered if their release into the atmosphere even in minute quantities would cause an accumulation that could have environmental implications. The testable implication of this hypothesis is that air samples far from human habitation should contain measurable amounts of this unnatural substance. So he sailed to the middle of the North Atlantic and took air samples far from human habitation and therein he did find measurable amounts of halogenated hydrocarbons. QED. He published these findings a now famous paper (Lovelock, J. (1973). Halogenated hydrocarbons in and over the Atlantic. Nature , 241. 194-196).
It so happened that 1973 was a time of intense ozone layer environmentalism. It was a movement to “save the ozone layer” and thereby to save us from skin cancer and cataract epidemics and all life on the surface of the earth including marine life from the hideously harmful effects of UVB radiation. See:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291833573_ozonePaperResource
And so the hunt was on almost immediately after the Lovelock paper to see if a “dangerous accumulation” of these synthetic chemicals could end up in the stratosphere and harm the ozone layer. Within a year a credible theory of ozone destruction was proposed by Mario Molina and the late Frank Rowland of UC Irvine (Molina-Rowland. (1974). Atmospheric sink for chlorofluoromethane: chlorine atom catalyzed destruction of ozone. Nature, 249(5460) 810-812.). Environmentally conscious scientists began looking for evidence of ozone depletion that could be described in terms of the Rowland-Molina theory of ozone destruction (RMTOD). In 1985, the British Antarctic expedition at Halley Bay near the South Pole produced data that was widely accepted as empirical evidence of the RMTOD. It was in the form of a steep decline in total column ozone (TCO) during the months of October and November between 1973 and 1984 measured at Halley Bay. The decline came to be called the ozone hole. Maurice Strong and the UNEP seized this opportunity, declared a global environmental crisis, convened the Montreal Protocol, and set in motion the latest incarnation of the fear of anthropogenic ozone depletion.
However, the ozone hole is a localized event that contains both seasonal and decadal cycles. It has more credible explanations in terms of ozone distribution rather than in terms of ozone destruction. The ozone hole is not a testable implication of RMTOD. The more rational testable implication is a dangerous and sustained decline in mean global TCO. The absence such evidence is the likely reason for an extreme focus in the South Pole, an area known for its anomalous behavior in a planetary context.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2843032
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2748016
“So he sailed to the middle of the North Atlantic and took air samples far from human habitation and therein he did find measurable amounts of halogenated hydrocarbons. ”
IIRC he also invented the apparatus to detect them… in his own workshop under his own funding. A very capable chap.
Lovelock said in 1988 that he was dubious about CFC threat to the ozone layer because of the possibility of a volcanic eruption. Im not sure if I can post pictures here to prove it.
Gaia is not an hypothesis it is unmitigated mystical rubbish.
“Gaia is not an hypothesis it is unmitigated mystical rubbish.”
So the concept that the biosphere consists of a myriad interlocking feedback systems to achieve a quasi-stable overall system is “unmitigated mystical rubbish”. Whoda thunkit?
The Gaia hypothesis explains why human technological civilization has arisen when it has, to free the sequestered carbon from geological strata of previous eras, and prevent a snowball Earth devoid of life.
Ah, at last someone who actually knows what the Gaia hypothesis means.
If people like lovelock had acted like real scientists instead of bought and paid for puppets how many lives would not have between lost . Tens of thousands per year . Live with that Lovelock . No doubt they wouldn’t have seen the joke but you are .
A religion he says . Really …who knew ? And who started the religion ? White coats disguised as scientists .
The rot in climate science started early .
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Robots!?! So robots will take over all the jobs that cause “heat related” stress???
So robots will do all the “daily cleaning” and “manual jobs”?
What’s he going to power them with? Pixie dust?
“To store and process the amount of information required to implement Lady Gaia would require an entity bigger than the universe.”
I’m not at all sure why that should be so. Is there really a relation betwixt extension and information? If there is I have certainly not come across it.
Hypocrite he is.
Just to invoke the concept of Gaia is promoting relgious “faith” and dogma.
Cheerss
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
“The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.”
Yep! Seems a lot of people around here believe living organisms never interact with their surroundings, so they can’t maintain or perpetuate the conditions for life on Earth. Wowsers! So it all happened because some dude with a long grey beard in the sky causes life? Presumably for only the last 6,000 years, not the 3.8 billion or so that Lovelock believes.
Remind me again, who’s promoting “religious faith and dogma here”.
“Gaia is a religious as well as a scientific concept. I cannot help but think that these country folk are worshipping something more than the Christian maiden” [referring to Irish shrines]
— James Lovelock, Jan 14th 1989, Irish Times
Quoting Einstein: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.
To know that what is inpenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and
the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—
this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.”
I could equally have quoted Sir Isaac Newton. I do not allow religious belief interfere with my appreciation of scientific laws and theories as you seem to Fabo.
Note: Jonathan Sturm is of course The Pompous Git’s alter ego. I was away from my home computer yesterday.
I agree with that but you were saying above that there was no religious aspect of Gaia.
The Guardian is trying to spin the story by inferring Dr. Lovelock is a lunatic, who believes humans will either perish under the reign of AI machines or by Climate Change, so humanity is doomed by 2100 regardless…
I agree with Dr. Lovelock that thorium reactors will eventually replace oil, natural gas and coal as our major source of energy and synthesized hydrocarbons, however, I don’t know why Dr. Lovelock believes there are only 200 years of thorium reserves available…
Most estimates project there are 10’s of thousands years of thorium reserves, as it is as common as lead, and it only takes 1.5 grams of thorium to produce all one’s energy needs for a year (transportation, electricity, heating, AC, etc.).
Over the next 100 years (who knows), we’ll likely learn how to make fusion work, so there is little need to worry about future energy needs. We have 10’s of thousands of years of thorium reserves to figure out what the next energy source will be…
I like the Cajun philosophy of life, “Ya neva know”….
“Let’s see … I think uranium that is affordable to extract would last about 50 years, something in that range. It might be 100. When you’ve used all that up, you go to thorium, and that would last you three times as long as uranium – so, shall we say, about 200 years?”
The same error the “Peak Oil” crowd makes, assuming that “is affordable to extract” is fixed, and not susceptible to improvement. Sometimes radical improvement. The energy return on uranium is so great that you come out ahead extracting it from rocks. And there are traces of it in coal ash and tailings. And sea water.
I wonder if he was counting on reprocessing “spent nuclear fuel”, because the first pass only extracts 5% of the energy, the fuel only has to be removed because of the buildup of decay products that absorb neutrons without contributing energy. Reprocessing increases your fuel supply by 20 fold.
And that doesn’t begin to address the potential of mining asteroids, which, among many other things, will have uranium and thorium.
LarryD, I think you said it quite well. Here is a interesting paper that backs it up.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241148150_Nuclear_Fission_Fuel_is_Inexhaustible
He has merely switched to a different catastrophe: robots instead of Warming. Why do some people enjoy imaginary disasters
Why do some people enjoy classing all dangers as being imaginary?
Please provide examples of some people who “enjoy classing all dangers as being imaginary.”
Or perhaps you used the wrong word? Maybe it should be stated as “enjoy classing imaginary dangers as being imaginary.”
Another quote from the Guardian interview.
This isn’t the first time Dr. Lovelock has been interviewed by the Guardian newspaper on the subject of global warming. There was a column in the Toronto Sun newspaper (columnist Lorrie Goldstein) on April 29, 2012 that detailed Lovelock’s interview with the Guardian during the week of April 22, 2012 (Goldstein doesn’t give an exact date). Goldstein refers to Dr. Lovelock in his article as the “Godfather of Global Warming”.
Goldstein wrote that Lovelock still believed human emitted CO2 was having SOME effect on the climate, but that the main cause of global warming was natural. Lovelock also said the best way to lower CO2 emissions was through Nuclear and Natural Gas. He referred to Wind Turbines and Solar Panels as “Useless” and that Sustainable Development was “Meaningless Drivel”. Lovelock changed his mind on global warming due to the lack of warming after 1998 (the so-called “Pause”), combined with the continued increase of atmospheric CO2 levels.
3cworth Wind Turbines generate infrasound, which carries for miles. Only people who have read about Nikolai Tesla and his work on vibration will perhaps realize what a potential for damage that implies. Solar I am still somewhat optimistic about, but storage is still the big hurdle to jump. Thorium, however, sounds as if it was discarded because it had no applications in weaponry ! The Ergosphere on Blogspot has some interesting thoughts on Thorium Salt Reactors.
So I think he owes the “skeptics” something. But what? Maybe a post on here – on the truth website for “global warming”, “climate change”. Probably no apology, but maybe just a clarifying post here.
Good luck to see that…I am sure that he is aware of this website WUWT. If not, he is no scientist now.
I read another review of Lovelock’s article elsewhere (I admit to extreme prejudice against reading the Guardian itself: I have a heart condition and I dont take risks with elevated blood pressure). When he claims that there is only at most a couple of hundred years of fissile material for nuclear power I gave up.
So a senile old gent has finally reviewed some assumptions and found them a little flawed, but hasn’t reviewed the rest and is probably too old to actually make the journey to fully understand them now, anyway.
No, what is significant is that bastion of virtue signalling, right-on Leftism, is actually printing this piece. I can only assume we are seeing the early booster rockets fire as they attempt to bring the green rocket in for a soft landing.
And they have decided that the current fiction is – in the modern parlance – unsustainable.
I have to admit I read WUWT not to glean further evidence of whether or not climate change is substantially anthropogenic these days, because I think the overwhelming balance of such real evidence as is available – as opposed to the plethora of models based on unproved assumption, refutes those models beyond reasonable doubt.
No, the real news is human news, what changes and adjustments are being made to the vast engines of the media, in order to construct yet another common world-view that can capture the imagination of the great unwashed, and pervert it towards whatever political social and economic future those who have access to it, have dreamed up as desirable.
Personally, with a view in many different pots, I am perhaps as much perturbed by the failure of this system, which has more or less run the Western world since the inception of the Cold War, showing the signs of its abject failure, as I am by the knowledge that for the last 60 years at least, we have been gulled and swindled by a media and government increasingly supported by and owing allegiance to deep corporate financial interests.
The world is waking up to the facts that their so called and would-be leaders who claim authority and respect on the basis of being part of and educated for an elite, that actually knows better, are in reality incompetent posturing fools, for hire to anyone with the cash to bribe them.
Perhaps they always have been, and its merely the Internet that has allowed us to assemble a group world view that for the first time is not dominated by what they wish us to believe, but by what we jointly have arrived at through discussion.
And perhaps the most salient feature of this new emerging world view, epitomised by Climate Change, is that is set to call into question the very assumptions on which the modern political state justifies itself: Namely that We (They) Can Do Something To FIx The World.
Is this in fact the nemesis of global politics? Having first of all identified ‘global problems’ like disease, poverty, and latterly Climate Change, and justified the development of some kind of pan national political structures – the EU, the UN – these structures have become subverted into the exercise of global profiteering instead, and have addressed pseudo problems as a means of exercising political control for profit, rather than for problem solving?
The rise of the hard Left, whose message has always been ‘smash the corporate capitalists’. with however no clear idea what to replace its function with, seems to suggest a massive disillusions with politics and politicians, except of course those who claim to be of that persuasion, and here in the UK we see the second coming of JC – Jeremy Corbyn – hailed as the One True Prophet of the New Socialist Age.
Whilst more adult and considered perspectives are rapidly coming to the understanding that politicians are a necessary evil, and what counts is less to find an honest competent one, and more how to ensure that a dishonest incompetent one does what the people want. And the tacit acceptance that in reality, that doesn’t amount to very much.
That is, this post and its message are worth considering in the light of a proposition, that what is actually happening, globally, is a massive and vast disillusionment with at least the politics and fantasises of the Western world, towards a new understanding that Politics can’t solve nearly as many problems as it claims to.
Whilst the US hopeful still fantasise that a clown with bad hair, or a harridan with hair set in concrete, can actually be the new One True Saviour, and the UK hopeful still applaud the Second Coming of JC, the more discerning are beginning to understand that, after all, the real lesson of these electoral processes is that, by and large, politicians are ignorant, incompetent, clowns and liars, and the real point is to fix the system to limit the amount of damage they can do.
And sack them regularly ‘pour encourager les autres’
Climate change is in fact a perfect microcosm of this change in global western consciousness. On the one hand we have the ‘anthropics’ – those who, through the lens of Marxism, declare that all that is wrong with the world is down to man’s inhumanity to man, (or latterly to Nature), and the remedy is strong centralised world government populated by people who by virtue of having arrived at the very pinnacle of global power, suddenly acquire the ability to channel the energy of sunlight through their anuses, versus what we may call the ‘Chaotics’ who understand that civilisation and humanity itself may only be an emergent property of the froth that exists on the surface of the vast chaotic system that is represented by the term ‘ecosphere’ and that the best strategy towards survival is to accept and acknowledge this, and develop small quasi autonomous units of political control that, in an emergency, can react to changes in the world rapidly and efficiently, and share knowledge of their successes and failures with their peers.
That is, whilst global communications and global trade are positive contributors to the survival of the species, global government – at least of the sort on offer – is not.
Climate change legislation is absolutely predicated on the faux assumptions that there exists a global problem that is soluble by human intervention, and that strong centralised political legislation is the way to solve it.
Both of those assumptions are increasingly being challenged, in almost every sphere of political activity, not just climate change.
Marxism at is most fundamental level asserts those assumptions. Socialism draws its justification from them.
Pragmatic libertarianism denies them.
And that is why Donald Trump, and Nigel Farage arouse so much ire. Because at a subliminal level they challenge the very orthodoxy on which left/liberal political and social thought is based, that the most important instrument of progress towards ‘social justice’ is the political power of elected governments.
Leaving aside whether such a nebulous concept as ‘social justice’ is, like ‘no climate change at all’ either attainable or desirable, we have to call into question the mechanisms by which it is to be achieved, relying on political candidates whose intellectual judgement and dedication to public service must be as infallible as he who doesn’t shit in the woods.
The point about Nigel and Donald, is not that they appear to be incompetent buffoons, but that they at some level readily acknowledge that that is their intention, to parody the very political process. When Trump claims that the simple answer to Hispanic immigration is to build a wall across the Mexican border, he is being precisely as lunatic as Hillary Clinton who says that to prevent a far more nebulous issue – climate change, we must build windmills and solar panels everywhere. Well in fact he is being less lunatic, as immigration is a definite tangible issue, and a wall might actually make some difference.
NIgel and Trump are the little boys saying ‘look at the Emperor, he’s got no clothes…’
The real question is, how mature is the electorate? Are they ready to admit that, by and large, 90% of politics is probably a waste of time? And the other 10% absolutely is? And thereby vote for small pragmatic and limited governments that do not seek to change fundamental human nature, but merely progress in the the small matters in which they are competent?
Time will tell. One of the features of the human condition is that there is one born every minute. And older wiser and more cynical men will always exploit that..”The future belongs to the young, they should have more say”.
Yeah, right.
“NIgel and Trump are the little boys saying ‘look at the Emperor, he’s got no clothes…’”
I’ve said that Trump has already done a service in planting a boot to the posterior of the Uniparty. If winning the election, I hope he attracts a good cabinet.
Great commentary Leo
there is one born every minute
There are three babies born every second, so if only the one per minute was gullible and muddleheaded, that would be only one in 200 people and not such a problem.
Its more like “there’s one born every second”.
Great essay Leo!
Yes, I see you understand. At some point the mechanic, seeing that no further adjustment will cause the machine to produce the desired results, reaches for his hammer and applies the final and decisive “adjustment” and walks away to have lunch.
No open thread this weekend, but after hurricane Mathew passes Cuba and it’s mountains, and the Bahamas, I think it will be a category 2 hurricane. Who knows from there. I think it will head out to the Atlantic rather than hit the Carolina’s directly. Let’s hope…any thoughts?
“… grown up a bit …”
He seems a bit long in the tooth for much growing up.
– Sitting in the dark in your living room for a few days can be carthartic.
– Throwing out all the food in your warm refridge and freezer because the power has been off for two days might be carthatic.
The Climate Change movement is past its peak and is now in desparation mode. But desparate wounded animals can still be very dangerous. The Climate Change hustle needs a clean kill head shot, which Gaia undoubtedly has coming sooner rather than later.
Gaia, kaya, who really cares?
I do not fully understand this comment. Manmade emissions of CO2 have been business as usual. Manmade emissions have not slowed or fallen below what was originally predicted/projected when the scare took force in the 1980s.
Perhaps, he is inferring that the carbon cycle was not well understood, and it was not appreciated that carbon sinks would take up about 50% of Manmade emissions. Thus although Manmade emissions are at least what was originally contemplated, atmospheric levels of CO2 are rising/have risen less than one may expect given the volume of Manmade CO2 emissions.
I agree with others that he needs to do more to tell the world of his revised views and grown up thinking.
“SURPRISE, SURPRISE”, …… of course the atmospheric levels of CO2 have not risen/are not rising at the rate that was originally contemplated due to the exponential increase in/of human CO2 emissions …….. simply because there is not, and never was, …… a human “signature” to be found anywhere with the daily, weekly, monthly, bi-yearly, yearly or decadal measurements in/of atmospheric CO2 ppm quantities.
“Gaia” as a term has been misunderstood and misused as a label for all things green and irrational.
But it refers in fact to the specific and normal scientific hypothesis of Lovelock, that a planet’s biota regulate the planet’s climate to their own collective advantage (the word “collective” will raise hackles in the political part of some folk’s brains, but there it is). This hypothesis is nicely stated in the Daisyworld simulation (a world with just black and white daisies and a sun with changing output):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld
This hypothesis is a serious one largely accepted by ecologists.
The emission of significant amounts of fossil carbon as CO2 by burning is almost as straightforward an example of the Gaia hypothesis as the changing ratio of black and white daisies on Daisyworld. Long term silicate weathering from tectonic turnover slowly depletes CO2 in the atmosphere toward life-threateningly low levels. The biosphere evolves a species which finds a way to return that carbon to the atmosphere. The important thing is that they do this without the explicit thought of fulfilling a Gaia imperative, it is done by what drives all biological evolution – by pure self interest. But when the hominids involved start trying to intellectualise the process they get it wrong and fall in to the belief that CO2 in the air is harmful.
Doing what comes naturally we fulfil the Gaia mechanism and preserve the earth’s ecosystem as optimally supporting of life. But inserting pseudo-intellectual environmentalism is toxic to the operation of the Gaia mechanism and derails its nurturing and protecting operation.
Isn’t belief in the harmfulness of CO2 just natural selection for the B Ark?
Yes it would be a perfect task for NASA to make the B ark.
Then when all their employees are inside it for the opening ceremony, with all the world’s eco-activists such as Leonardo di Caprio and Al Gore, then suddenly launch the vehicle!
http://www.geoffwilkins.net/fragments/Adams.htm
And then we all die from a plague passed by dirty telephones…
Actually its relative BS. What actually happens is that organisms evolve that are suited to the conditions and change those conditions by their existence – think what plants did to atmospheric CO2 – and other life forms evolve to suit the new conditions – oxygen rich? fancy 5 ft wingspan butterflies?
The problem with Gaia is the hidden assumption that there is a correct state of the ecosphere.
WE are just another organism that has evolved to capitalise on a niche environment – fossil fuels and are busy turning the clock back to where it was before the plants turned all the CO2 into coal gas and oil…
Which is fine for us and great for plants.
Leo
There is more to Lovelock’s Gaia than just “organisms adapt”. Yes they adapt, but the Gaia mechanism is an emergent consequence of adaptive reponses of more than one organism with the result that the combined responses alter the environment in the favour of all the organisms. It is actually a complex high order of emergent self-regulation in a nonlinear pattern formation system.
Think again about the simple daisyworld model. Black and white daisies separately respond to changing sunlight in Daisyworld. The relative response of both alters the earth’s albedo thus keeping temeratures favourable for both. But the individual species – black and white daisies, are simply responding in their own interest by natural selection.
“The problem with Gaia is the hidden assumption that there is a correct state of the ecosphere.”
Citation required.
” …now thinks global warming is a religion.” This is wrong. He says the green movement is a religion. The green movement and global warming are not the same.
Isn’t it time for a Nova episode or a whole season actually, to document the “explored new ideas” that were wrong or naive and misleading to science and the public?
The first of the religious hymnals are out now.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160930214143.htm
Just for the record, James Lovelock has been a prominent critic of wind power and similar ineffective “emissions reduction” measures beloved by the green movement for many years. He has never to my knowledge endorsed them – on the contrary, his support has long been welcomed by those of us involved in pertinent campaigns.
He was all-but sidelined by the “green” mainstream for his pains. Wherever the blame for the environmental and social mayhem caused by the “renewables” and other AGW-related industries may lie, it cannnot reasonably be laid at his door. Thirty seconds on Google shows that some of the above comments are almost as ill-informed as they are loutish.
He looks retired. My there’s a fourth reason like no more grant money. 😊