James Ephraim Lovelock,
CH,
CBE,
FRS (born 26 July 1919) is an independent scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist, and
futurist who lives in
Devon,
England. He is known for proposing the
Gaia hypothesis, in which he postulates that the
Earth functions as a kind of
superorganism.
Biography
He was born in
Letchworth Garden City in
Hertfordshire,
England, but moved to London where he was, by his own account, an unhappy pupil at
Strand School. He studied
chemistry at the
University of Manchester, before taking up a
Medical Research Council post at the Institute for Medical Research in London.
[, . Retrieved 30 October 2007.] His student status enabled temporary deferment of
military service during the
Second World War, but he registered as a
conscientious objector. He later abandoned this position in the light of Nazi atrocities and tried to enlist for war service, but was told that his medical research was too valuable for this to be considered.
In 1948 Lovelock received a
Ph.D. degree in medicine at the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Within the United States he has conducted research at
Yale,
Baylor College of Medicine, and
Harvard University.
Career
A lifelong inventor, Lovelock has created and developed many scientific instruments, some of which were designed for
NASA in its programme of planetary exploration. It was while working as a consultant for NASA that Lovelock developed the Gaia Hypothesis, for which he is most widely known.
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 determine whether Mars supported life, and many of the sensors and experiments that were ultimately deployed aimed to resolve this issue. During work on a precursor of this program, Lovelock became interested in the composition of the
Martian atmosphere, reasoning that many life forms on Mars would be obliged to make use of it (and, thus, alter 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 our
Earth's biosphere was strongly indicative of the absence of life on the planet. However, when they were finally launched to Mars, the Viking probes still searched (unsuccessfully) for
extant life there.
Lovelock invented the
electron capture detector, which ultimately assisted in discoveries about the persistence of
CFCs and their role in
stratospheric ozone depletion.
[Lovelock, J.E. (1971). Atmospheric Fluorine Compounds as Indicators of Air Movements. Nature 230, 379.][Lovelock, J.E., Maggs, R.J. and Wade, R.J. (1973). Halogenated Hydrocarbons in and over the Atlantic. Nature 241, 194-196.] After studying the operation of the Earth's
sulfur cycle, Lovelock and his colleagues developed the
CLAW hypothesis as a possible example of biological control of the Earth's climate.
[Charlson, R. J., Lovelock, J. E., Andreae, M. O. and Warren, S. G. (1987). Nature 326, 655-661.]Lovelock was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society in 1974. He served as the president of the
Marine Biological Association (MBA) from 1986 to 1990, and has been a Honorary Visiting Fellow of
Green Templeton College, Oxford (formerly
Green College, Oxford) since 1994. He has been awarded a number of prestigious prizes including the Tswett Medal (1975), an
ACS chromatography award (1980), the
WMO Norbert Gerbier Prize (1988), the
Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for the Environment (1990) and the
RGS Discovery Lifetime award (2001). He became a
CBE in 1990, and a
Companion of Honour in 2003.
An
independent scientist, inventor, and author, Lovelock works out of a barn-turned-laboratory in Cornwall.
CFCs
Reconstructed time-series of atmospheric concentrations of CFC-11.
After the development of his
electron capture detector, in the late 1960s, Lovelock was the first to detect the widespread presence of CFCs in the atmosphere.
He found a concentration of 60
parts per trillion of
CFC-11 over
Ireland and, in a partially self-funded research expedition in 1972, went on to measure the concentration of CFC-11 from the northern hemisphere to the Antarctic aboard the
research vessel RRS Shackleton.
[Lovelock, J.E. (1989). The Ages of Gaia. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. ISBN 0-19-286090-9.] He found the gas in each of the 50 air samples that he collected but, not realising that the breakdown of CFCs in the stratosphere would release
chlorine that posed a threat to the
ozone layer, concluded that the level of CFCs constituted "no conceivable hazard".
He has since stated that he meant "no conceivable toxic hazard".
However, the experiment did provide the first useful data on the ubiquitous presence of CFCs in the atmosphere. The damage caused to the ozone layer by the
photolysis of CFCs was later discovered by
Frank Rowland and
Mario Molina. After hearing a lecture on the subject of Lovelock's results,
they embarked on research that resulted in the first published paper that suggested a link between stratospheric CFCs and
ozone depletion in 1974, and later shared the 1995
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work.
Gaia
First formulated by Lovelock during the 1960s as a result of work for
NASA concerned with detecting life on
Mars,
the Gaia hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the earth form a
complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single
organism. Named after the
Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist
William Golding,
the hypothesis postulates that the
biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that acts to sustain life.
While the
Gaia hypothesis was readily accepted by many in the
environmentalist community, it has not been widely accepted within the
scientific community. Among its more famous
critics are the
evolutionary
biologists
Richard Dawkins,
Ford Doolittle, and
Stephen Jay Gould — notable, given the diversity of this trio's views on other scientific matters. These (and other) critics have questioned how
natural selection operating on individual organisms can lead to the evolution of planetary-scale
homeostasis.
Lovelock has responded to these criticisms with
models such as
Daisyworld, that illustrate how individual-level effects can translate to planetary homeostasis.
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 fulfill the large scale energy needs of humankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions. He is an open member of
Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy.
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 these 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."
In
The Revenge of Gaia (2006), where he puts forward the concept of
sustainable retreat, Lovelock writes:
"A television interviewer once asked me, 'But what about nuclear waste? Will it not poison the whole biosphere and persist for millions of years?' I knew this to be a nightmare fantasy wholly without substance in the real world... One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets... I find it sad, but all too human, that there are vast bureaucracies concerned about nuclear waste, huge organisations devoted to decommissioning power stations, but nothing comparable to deal with that truly malign waste, carbon dioxide."
On 30 May 2006, Lovelock told the Australian
Lateline television program: "Modern nuclear power stations are useless for making bombs".
[, Friends of the Earth, 4 July 2007. Retrieved 4 October 2007.] This view may be based on the fact that
plutonium-239 from the nuclear reactor of a power plant is contaminated with a significant amount of
plutonium-240, complicating its use in
nuclear weapons. It is easier to
enrich uranium than to separate
240Pu from
239Pu to produce
weapons-grade material, although even reactor-grade plutonium can in fact be used in weapons, e.g.
dirty bombs.
Friends of the Earth Australia responded: "Lovelock's claim that nuclear power plants cannot be used for weapons production is false, irresponsible and dangerous. A typical nuclear power reactor produces about 300 kilograms of plutonium each year, enough for 30 nuclear weapons".
Climate and mass human mortality
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 21st century.
[, James Lovelock, The Independent, 16 January 2006. Retrieved 4 October 2007.] He has been quoted in
The Guardian that 80% of humans will perish by 2100 AD, and this climate change will last 100,000 years.
He further predicts, 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, with northerly migrations and new cities created in the Arctic. He predicts much of Europe will become uninhabitable having turned to desert and Britain will become Europe's "life-raft" due to its stable temperature caused by being surrounded by the ocean. 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".
He partly retreated from this position in a September 2007 address to the
World Nuclear Association's Annual Symposium, suggesting that climate change would stabilise and prove survivable, and that the Earth itself is in "no danger" because it would stabilise in a new state. Life, however, might be forced to migrate
en masse to remain in habitable climes. In 2008, he became a patron of the
Optimum Population Trust, which campaigns for a gradual decline in the global human population to a sustainable level.
Ocean Pipes proposal
In September 2007, Lovelock and
Chris Rapley proposed the construction of ocean pumps comprising pipes "100 to 200 metres long, 10 metres in diameter and with a one-way flap valve at the lower end for pumping by wave movement" to pump water up from below the
thermocline to "fertilize algae in the surface waters and encourage them to bloom". The intention of this scheme is to accelerate the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean by increasing
primary production and enhancing the
export of organic carbon (as
marine snow) to the deep ocean. At the time the authors noted that the idea "may fail, perhaps on engineering or economic grounds", and that "the impact on
ocean acidification will need to be taken into account". However, a scheme similar to that proposed by Lovelock and Rapley is already being developed by a commercial company.
The proposal attracted widespread media attention,
[, Lewis Smith, The Times, 26 September 2007. Retrieved 3 October 2007.] although also criticism.
[Shepherd, J.G., Inglesias-Rodriguez, D. and Yool, A. (2007). . Nature 449, 781.] Commenting on the proposal,
Corinne Le Quéré, a
University of East Anglia researcher, said "It doesn’t make sense. There is absolutely no evidence that
geoengineering options work or even go in the right direction. I’m astonished that they published this. Before any geoengineering is put to work a massive amount of research is needed – research which will take 20 to 30 years".
Other researchers have claimed that "this scheme would bring water with high natural
pCO
2 levels (associated with the nutrients) back to the surface, potentially causing exhalation of CO
2".
Books
- (Lovelock's autobiography)
