Respecting Gaia

I've just finished reading James Lovelock's Revenge of Gaia, and it was a hair-raising experience.

We hear this or that theory in the press, or watch documentaries such as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth or the recent Global Warming Swindle on Channel 4, and in general the lay person is at a loss to know what to believe. Maybe this is a case where we have to rely on the testimony of those that know - the scientists.

The problem that I have now is that I believe in James Lovelock. He's the last great independent scientist, and it appears now that his Gaia-theory has gained general acceptance among the scientific community. So far as I can understand, it says that the earth (or at least the living part of it, and its environment) is best understood as a single self-regulating organism. Until recently Lovelock believed that Gaia was much stronger than man's ability to harm it, but in the last few years he has changed his mind ... click Read more

Although the sun is now considerably hotter than it was when life began, Gaia has maintained temperatures at more or less the same level through a set of negative feedback mechanisms. For example, warmth causes evaporation from the oceans, which causes clouds, which cool Gaia. The overall temperature of the globe does vary over time, oscillating between ice-age and "interglacial" period. We have been in an interglacial for thousands of years, but according to Lovelock this is not the optimum state: Gaia likes it cold.


Look at a picture of a sun-kissed Caribbean beach, with its pellucid blue waters and white sands. What you are looking at is a sterile environment. I was in Cuba last year and tried to go snorkelling: the sea is empty. By contrast, the murky slate-coloured seas off our own coasts look like that because they are teeming with life. 80% of the surface of the world's oceans is essentially empty, which is not good news for Gaia because its regulatory systems rely on things like algae (such as seaweed), which weirdly but wonderfully help to create the clouds. So, according to the latest science Gaia is not ideally prepared for global warming generated by mankind. Gaia would much rather be in an ice age, with 3 km of ice covering Britain and most of Europe.



Lovelock now believes that there are a number of positive feedback mechanisms that are getting under way, including: the melting of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica; the progressive death of the algae; and the defrosting of the Siberian tundra, which threatens to release vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere (24 times worse than CO2). He says that we may well have passed the point of no return.



The worst-case scenario is probably not the death of Gaia, nor the destruction of life or of human life, but the end of civilization. Gaia will give up the effort to maintain temperatures at the present level, and the temperature will leap to a new level at which Gaia can again find equilibrium. Impossible to predict what temperature this would be, but we could see a return to the hot desert world of the Eocene period, which lasted 200,000 years. In that event, the seas would rise to their maximum level, 80 metres above where they are now, leaving most of the population of the world to fight for the remaining highlands.


Lovelock is not some crank, but possibly the greatest scientist of our times. His view is now pretty much supported by the science community. He believes that this nightmare scenario is not just possible, but probable.


We may have already gone too far to reverse the process, but we may not. What Lovelock is saying is that we need to immediately retreat from our present way of life. "Sustainable devlopment" is a lie, and "saving the planet" hopelessly arrogant. He says we need to convert our civilization to nuclear power (he kindly offers to store one year's nuclear waste from a power station in his garden, to show how convinced he is of its safety) to buy ourselves some time.


All of this might appear to be off-topic, but this is at least in part a personal blog. Also, the School is supposed to be about practical philosophy and economic science. If civiliation survives, it will no doubt look back with the brutal clarity of hindsight and judge those that preached complacency, with no more mercy than we now afford to Neville Chamberlain or to the bureaucrats of Nazism.


What will WE have done in the face of danger? What will the School have done?

Lovelock blames our problem in part on the scientific philosophy created by Descartes, which takes everything apart and then reassembles it: a philosophy that cannot understand complex systems in action. This is the philosophy of modernity, and there is a need for a better philosophy for our time. The Upanishads were not written by people who lived today, and if they were more concerned about chariots and cows than we are, it's because of that. The perennial philosophy needs to be rewritten in every age, and for modernity. Are we going to rise to that challenge, or will we, like Arjuna in his despondency, put down our weapons and renounce the painful actions we see ahead of us? Will we leave the work to others, and order in new carpets for Mandeville?


I strongly recommend that you read this book. An article about it was recently published in The Independent.