Wild Land News no 66, Spring 2006

The Revenge of Gaia bodyswerves Scotland? Article

by David Jarman

When I mention James Lovelock I am often greeted with scepticism, if not suspicions of crankiness - and similar innenduos trail him in the press. But I have never read his Gaia book, and only have a vague awareness of the hypothesis. So when he turned up in the wilds of Devon to promote 'The Revenge of Gaia' I go along with an open mind to judge his creditworthiness.

That very afternoon I am sauntering with my brother (who has played a small part in transforming the stuffy old National Trust into one of South Britain's best-informed and most effective campaigners on climate change). He is surprised that I should confess that it is only in the last couple of years that the 'peak oil' penny has really dropped for me: the sheer profligacy of mankind discovering a vast lake of fossil fuel and burning the lion's share of it in a few centuries. Not to mention all the greenhouse gases released thereby.

I am equally surprised a few hours later to hear James Lovelock confess that the climate change penny had only just dropped for him. Until recently, his vision of Gaia was of a robust life-support system, with checks and balances that redressed any natural or man-induced wobbles. His own revelation emerged from a spell at the Hadley Centre here in Devon (where I am in semi-exile). This world-leading collection of climate change scientists took him through each of their specialisms and demonstrated that wherever they look - the Arctic, boreal forests, oceans, tropics, Antarctica, atmospheric aerosols - the trends are towards rapid global heating (his phrase - warming still sounds rather benign to some). Far from cancelling each other out as he was accustomed to finding, they now reinforce and accelerate each other in what is known in systems theory as 'positive feedback'. Thus sun-reflecting arctic ice melts and is replaced by black water which absorbs solar energy and further warms the oceans...

Analytical and realistic

Lovelock comes across as sane and realistic, on the scientific facts and probable trends. He is not himself a climate specialist - his gift is to synthesise and communicate, to see and show us the bigger picture. Nor is he an evangelist - he is not peddling any pet solutions, because he sees their futility. He is more like a wise old family doctor who has seen his patient recover from many a passing illness, but now has to pronounce that it is a severely crippling affliction from which recovery to anything like former fitness is nigh-impossible. Perhaps his most telling remark is that the Hadley scientists are completely detached and analytical. They are just there to do the science, as accurately as possible, and make the best predictions; they are not going to trumpet them from any rooftops because that is not what scientists do.

We have an hour of Q&A of the most stimulating quality. Lovelock is excellent at fleshing out the science, but eventually admits that he is unable to answer questions about what governments should do about it (nationally, let alone internationally). He proclaims himself a natural optimist, but his age and generational experiences betray him - he found living through the blitz thrilling, and the ability of everyone to pull together against a common enemy a good omen for humankind's survival this time round. He also sees the way forward as a way backward, to low-energy lifestyles - and envisages a great general who can save his army by a well-managed retreat, living to fight another day.

Sadly, his martial analogies are fallacious. A general is a dictator - but the prospects for finding a benevolent despot capable of leading our greedy and divided polity back to living within the world's means are remote. And in WW2 there was a tangible enemy who could be defeated in a few years with survivable pain and expense. Now the enemy is within - for it is in effect humankind - and cannot be conquered without unimaginable trauma for many generations.

The scale of abuse

Lovelock the scientist can talk confidently about the survival of our species over Darwinian timescales of evolution, glossing over the political and human realities of how our numbers might reduce rapidly from billions to millions. He can cite a volcanic eruption which gave us a 'year without a summer' two centuries back - and a volcanic cataclysm 55 million years ago which injected as much 'pollution' into the atmosphere as we just have, from which Gaia was able to recover in, oh, about 100,000 years.

This is what he means by the revenge of Gaia - he remains loyal to his original, brilliant conception of a self-healing ecosphere, but now admits he had failed to conceive of the scale on which we were abusing it. Global heating does not mean Earth lurches uncontrollably towards the lifelessness of Venus or Mars, just that its carrying capacity for human life will soon be much reduced for a very long time.

Fretting about what cars we drive or how often we fly off on holiday becomes rather trivial from his lofty perspective. Given that Lovelock has been portrayed as selling his soul to nuclear power, it is interesting that the Q&A barely touches on this (near the end, a few young antis attack him on ethical rather than rational grounds, and he easily rebuts them with simple statistics about relative numbers of deaths and volumes of waste from other forms of energy- citing Hans Blix as seeing management of the present quantity of radioactive waste globally as a trivial concern). In fact, Lovelock has always viewed nuclear as an acceptable component of a power supply portfolio - and is scathing about the impracticality of wind and biofuel as global panaceas.

His most vital statistic from the Hadley scientists is a projected global heating this century by 8°C in the temperate zone and 5°C in the tropics. Leaving aside rising sea levels (which can be adapted to by defence or retreat), such heating is a problem because rainforests disappear, deserts spread, oceans become too warm for plankton, productive farmland shifts and shrinks, and above all, global fresh water supplies are dislocated and reduced. So even if we could adapt to a low-carbon, low-energy world economy, the politics of sharing out rights to food and water would go far beyond the dystopian sci-fi imaginings of even such pessimists as Doris Lessing.

Why might this 'we are all doomed' apocalypso bodyswerve Scotland and indeed Devon then? Lovelock goes local by pointing out that the Gulf Stream currently makes Britain markedly warmer than any other place at this latitude - such as Hudson's Bay. Switching it off - as has happened in past deglaciations - will simply bring us into line with the rest of our parallel. Our mild, wet, productive maritime location will make us one of the most desirable pieces of real estate on the planet. For everyone else to covet. Gaia might spare our island her revenge, but not necessarily its present tenants.

- at this precise moment, on a gloriously sunny Devon spring afternoon, I answer the phone to learn I may soon become a grandfather for the first time

Never mind Lovelock (or my son) being a born optimist, many of the questioners want him to qualify these predictions, to confer some hope and purpose. One invokes a Swedish study suggesting that fossil fuels will simply run out (or be priced out) before the worst can kick in. Lovelock is not dogmatic, he freely recognises the very unpredictability of these system feedbacks, and he extols our ingenious way with technofixes (orbiting solar umbrellas, reflective ocean surfaces). But his best estimate is that global climate is currently undergoing a perturbation more drastic than any experienced in the last few million years, with unforeseeable because unprecedented consequences. Surely, people ask, some Chernobyl-type catastrophes will wake governments up in time? Sure, they will occur, and Hurricane Katrina has had an impact within USA, but the 2003 heatwave in Europe which killed tens of thousands hasn't deterred us from demanding cheap energy and flights of our elected representatives.

Curiously, I leave somewhat elated. A man who is devoting his life to conserving wildlife in tropical Africa asked whether it was all pointless. Lovelock skirted with useful bits of science until a straight answer was demanded. Yes, he replied. But my National Trust brother says no; in geological timescales, man can only be a fleeting occupant of the planet, but while we are its tenants we should act in accordance with our best instincts and impulses, not just give up. My own instinct is that we should be doing our best to ensure that our knowledge and achievements are preserved in the fossil record - in which the early history of homo spp is suspiciously elusive.