Why Gaia is wreaking revenge on our abuse of the environment
- From: alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Alan)
- Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 10:07 +0000 (GMT Standard Time)
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article338879.ece
By Michael McCarthy
Published: 16 January 2006
With anyone else, you would not really take it seriously: the proposition that
because of climate change, human society as we know it on this planet may
already be condemned, whatever we do. It would seem not just radical, but
outlandish, mere hyperbole. And we react against it instinctively: it seems
simply too sombre to be countenanced.
But James Lovelock, the celebrated environmental scientist, has a unique
perspective on the fate of the Earth. Thirty years ago he conceived the idea
that the planet was special in a way no one had ever considered before: that it
regulated itself, chemically and atmospherically, to keep itself fit for life,
as if it were a great super-organism; as if, in fact, it were alive.
The complex mechanism he put forward for this might have remained in the pages
of arcane geophysical journals had he continued to refer to it as "the
biocybernetic universal system tendency".
But his neighbour in the village of Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, the Nobel
Prize-winning novelist William Golding (who wroteLord of The Flies), suggested
he christen it after the Greek goddess of the Earth; and Gaia was born.
Gaia has made Professor Lovelock world famous, but at first his fame was in an
entirely unexpected quarter. Research scientists, who were his original target
audience, virtually ignored his theory.
To his surprise, it was the burgeoning New Age and environmental movements who
took it up - the generation who had just seen the first pictures of the Earth
taken by the Apollo astronauts, the shimmering pastel-blue sphere hanging in
infinite black space, fragile and vulnerable, but our only home. They seized on
his metaphor of a reinvented Mother Earth, who needed to be revered and
respected - or else.
It has been only gradually that the scientific establishment has become
convinced of the essential truth of the theory, that the Earth possesses a
planetary control system, founded on the interaction of living organisms with
their environment, which has operated for billions of years to allow life to
exist, by regulating the temperature, the chemical composition of the
atmosphere, even the salinity of the seas.
But accepted it is, and now (under the term Earth System Science) it has been
subsumed into the scientific mainstream; two years ago, for example, Nature, the
world's premier scientific journal, gave Professor Lovelock two pages to sum up
recent developments in it.
Yet now too, by a savage irony, it is Gaia that lies behind his profound
pessimism about how climate change will affect us all. For the planetary control
system, he believes, which has always worked in our favour, will now work
against us. It has been made up of a host of positive feedback mechanisms; now,
as the temperature starts to rise abnormally because of human activity, these
will turn harmful in their effect, and put the situation beyond our control.
To give just a single example out of very many: the ice of the Arctic Ocean is
now melting so fast it is likely to be gone in a few decades at most. Concerns
are already acute about, for example, what that will mean for polar bears, who
need the ice to live and hunt.
But there is more. For when the ice has vanished, there will be a dark ocean
that absorbs the sun's heat, instead of an icy surface that reflects 90 per cent
of it back into space; and so the planet will get even hotter still.
Professor Lovelock visualises it all in the title of his new book, The Revenge
of Gaia. Now 86, but looking and sounding 20 years younger, he is by nature an
optimistic man with a ready grin, and it felt somewhat unreal to talk calmly to
him in his Cornish mill house last week, with a coffee cup to hand and birds on
the feeder outside the study window, about such a dark future. You had to pinch
yourself.
He too saw the strangeness of it. "I'm usually a cheerful sod, so I'm not happy
about writing doom books," he said. "But I don't see any easy way out."
His predictions are simply based on the inevitable nature of the Gaian system.
"If on Mars, which is a dead planet, you doubled the CO2, you could predict
accurately what the temperature would rise to," he said.
"On the Earth, you can't do it, because the biota [the ensemble of life forms]
reacts. As soon as you pump up the temperature, everything changes. And at the
moment the system is amplifying change. "So our problem is that anything we do,
like increasing the carbon dioxide, mucking about with the land, destroying
forests, farming too much, things like that - they don't just produce a linear
increase in temperature, they produce an amplified increase in temperature.
"And it's worse than that. Because as you approach one of the tipping points,
the thresholds, the extent of amplification rapidly increases and tends towards
infinity.
"The analogy I use is, it's as if we were in a pleasure boat above the Niagara
Falls. You're all right as long as the engines are going, and you can get out of
it. But if the engines fail, you're drawn towards the edge faster and faster,
and there's no hope of getting back once you've gone over - then you're going
down.
"And the uprise is just like that, the steep jump of temperature on Earth. It is
exactly like the drop in the Falls."
Professor Lovelock's unique viewpoint is that he is just not looking at this or
that aspect of the Earth's climate, as are other scientists; he is looking at
the whole planet in terms of a different discipline, control theory.
"Most scientists are not trained in control theory. They follow Descartes, and
they think that everything can be explained if you take it down to its atoms,
and then build it up again.
"Control theory looks at it in a very different way. You look at whole systems
and how do they work. Gaia is very much about control theory. And that's why I
spot all these positive feedbacks."
I asked him how he would sum up the message of his new book. He said simply:
"It's a wake-up call.''
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article338830.ece
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article338878.ece
And we, who believe in the Goddess Nemesis, wholeheartedly agree with him.
Alan
"Can't you see we're still here,
Can't you see we're still here,
Singing loud; Singing clear,
We shall not go under,
We're still here."
Nemesis Peace Centre
http://www.veloceraptor.free-online.co.uk/protector.html
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http://theoriginalfirebird.blogspot.com/
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http://lordcerneabbas.blogspot.com/
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http://lordcerneabbastoo.blogspot.com/
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