long but worth reading
"http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatecha...
'Enjoy life while you can'
Climate science maverick James Lovelock believes catastrophe is
inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what
would he do? By Decca Aitkenhead
This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday March 01 2008 on p33 of
the Saturday section section. It was last updated at 01:28 on March 01
2008.
James Lovelock
James Lovelock. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like
in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about
fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological
stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he
predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will
be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their
business," he said.
"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's
almost exactly what's happened."
Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an
old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which
have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if
maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he
invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole
in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary
theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially
ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms
the basis of almost all climate science.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow
environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come
around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia,
predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global
devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of
London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) re****t deploys less dramatic language - but its
calculations aren't a million miles away from his.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my
confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock
therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a
winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers
and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his
thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More
alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter
certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain
of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the
current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon
offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the
calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the
planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we
have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any
difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe
is unstoppable.
"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes
like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these
standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are
just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me
saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the
contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of
things you want to do."
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't
dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think
you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're
far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to
the native peoples to not take down their forests."
Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we
don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a
waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to
little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of
ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a
scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."
Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag
campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that
this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more
rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in
causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he
considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.
"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such
as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover
the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of
time."
This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable
stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on
doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes,
there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change
anything."
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can
prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking
underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is
going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead
of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to
survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are
insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only
chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger
challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know.
Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in
Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You
can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies
in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out
by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he
says. "But this is the real thing."
Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and
Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested
Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more
to old age than science: "People who say that about me haven't reached my
age," he says laughing.
But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences
in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality."
There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems
an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the
irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the
international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action.
Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?
"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help
noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People
don't like it because it upsets their ideas."
But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it rewarding to
see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In
fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way into it,
to try and take the next steps ahead."
Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's
predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says,
smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."
Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all
knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do
about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got
excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ...
so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A
sense of purpose - that's what people want."
At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet. Sometimes
he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the
version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a
young man, he now favours market forces, and it's not clear whether his
politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to
renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic
terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he
talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms
all.
"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very
similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep
separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on
the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly.
That's the source of my optimism."
What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says:
"Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20
years before it hits the fan."
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