Wild Land News no 68, Spring 2007

Gaia and the energy debate Article

With man-made climate change now officially acknowledged, Fiona Anderson examines the latest ideas of James Lovelock

James Lovelock published his book The Revenge of Gaia last year. It is a fascinating read, as well as being accessible to a non-scientist, and has some messages of interest to SWLG. He first presented his Gaia theory in the 1970s. Its hypothesis about how the earth regulates its own temperature, as if it were a living organism, was then widely disputed. Now at the age of 86 he has synthesised all his books and findings on Gaia into just 159 pages for the 21st century - very timely in view of the recent publication of the Government's commissioned Stern Report into climate change and the very late conversion of the United States!

Gaia comprises the living part of the Earth, including all the creatures in it, which extends from the rocks of the crust out through the soil, the ocean and the atmosphere to the edge of space. It is a dynamic interconnected system, which appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating its own climate and chemical composition to a comfortable state for life. The existence of an Earth System as a working model was accepted by scientists in Europe in 2001.

All life forms have lower, upper and optimum criteria for growth. When the surface waters of the ocean exceed 10ºC from the Sun's heat as a result of global warming, algae and other nutrients for birds and fish, which have a cooling effect, die as the temperature rises in the spring. The surface layers do not mix with the cooler, nutrient-rich waters below and become a desert, covering 80% of the world's water surface, short of the polar regions and the edges of continents where cold rich waters well up from the depths. This alone would account for seabird deaths around the Scottish coast in recent years.

On land living organisms flourish up to 40ºC, but the water they need evaporates rapidly above 25ºC. The eco-system of tropical rain forest adapts to this to an extent by recycling water to the atmosphere as clouds and rain, but a 4ºC rise in temperature, coupled with changes in wind patterns, would destabilize the rainforests and turn them into scrubland.

There are other intricate links in chemical composition between the gases produced by algae in the oceans and climate that are currently being uncovered in dozens of laboratories around the world - these gases when oxidised with air make the tiny particles that cause clouds to condense - one of Gaia's air-conditioning mechanisms. Modelling of the ocean and land eco-systems shows that ocean temperature suddenly jumps when carbon dioxide approaches 500 parts per million, which scientists say is now almost inevitable within 40 years. This is close to the temperature rise of 2.7ºC predicted by the Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change (IPCC) as sufficient to start irreversible melting of Greenland's ice.

Arguments like this may not by themselves be strong enough, Dr Lovelock says, to justify political action, but they become serious when taken in conjunction with evidence that nearly all systems that affect climate are now in "positive feedback", meaning any addition of heat from any source will be amplified. Examples include:

as the oceans warm and the area of sea that can support the growth of algae grows smaller as it is driven closer to the poles, there is less take up of carbon dioxide(CO2) from the atmosphere which normally generates marine stratus clouds, reflecting back the sun's heat.
land or sea covered by snow or ice normally reflects sunlight, but once the edges begin to melt, dark ground or sea emerges which absorbs sunlight and therefore melts more snow. The IPCC predicted in 2001 that the sea ice in the Arctic, which polar bears need to survive, would go first. This is now happening as well as melting of the perma-frost in Siberia; which will release huge amounts of methane;
as forest and algal eco-systems die their decomposition releases CO2 and methane into the air. Methane is 24 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 .

What has upset Gaia's temperature regulation is that in the last 200 years we have turned up the heat by massively increasing greenhouse gases and simultaneously removing the natural systems that helped to regulate it, particularly the vast tropical and temperate forests, (and the woodlands and hedgerows which were extensive in Britain even 100 years ago,) and replacing them with barren farmland and overstocked fields to feed the world's 6 billion population which do not absorb CO2 . These actions have also irreparably reduced bio-diversity in the world and is causing severe loss of wildlife in Britain - a "silent spring" worse than the use of pesticides in the 1950s.

Lovelock has strong views about renewable energy, particularly "bio-fuels." We would need the land area of several Earths just to grow the bio-fuel for our transport systems alone. The problems with wind power are its intermittency - at best energy is available only 25% of the time and the most recent reports from Germany and Denmark put it at 16% and 3% (Scotland is a windier country!), and how to store it where pump storage reservoirs like Cruachan are not available. He says there are many parts of the world, like the great plains of Russia and USA, where wind farms could co-exist perfectly well with large scale agriculture, but in the densely populated parts of Europe like Britain there is no place for 100+m high towers on a large scale. 276,000 of them, about 3 per square mile, if national parks, urban and industrial areas are excluded, would be needed to supply the UK's present electricity needs. Offshore wind is a better idea as the wind is more powerful and reliable, and they could be out of sight, but the costs of maintenance are much higher.

Solar energy though ideal, is still too costly for widespread use. Wave and tidal energy schemes seem well worth while but are likely to take decades to develop. Hydro-electricity, our oldest renewable energy source, is less damaging than on-shore wind, but there are too many of us and too few rivers to satisfy more than a fraction of our needs. Burning natural gas halves the emission of greenhouse gases compared with coal, but leaks reduce this advantage. Which leaves nuclear energy. Lovelock sees no alternative to nuclear fission until fusion energy and sensible forms of RE arrive. He considers the benefits of nuclear power as far outweighing its alleged dangers, and the widespread fear of it as having been built up in the public's mind ever since the intense fears during Cold War in the 1960s.

Lovelock concludes that we must stop using the land surface as if it was ours alone. It is not: it belongs to the community of eco-systems that support life on Earth. By massively taking land to feed people - he speculates on the possibility of synthesising food production - and by fouling the air and water, we have stumbled into a war with Gaia that we have no hope of winning, and all we can do is make peace while we are still strong.

But Al Gore, the former US vice-president (whose documentary film An Inconvenient Truth you may have seen last autumn, and is to be shown in Scottish schools) considers Lovelock is very pessimistic, and wrong in presuming people are incapable of changing their behaviour. David Attenborough also interpreted the findings of the Stern Report as meaning that we cannot change the warming effects that will happen in 20 years, but if each one of us responds now in 2007 by reducing our personal use of fossil fuel energy we can improve the situation in 40 years time, by around 2050. If not, within 10 years we will have passed the threshold of irreversible heating.