Fascinating that his Gaia hypothesis came after his research with Royal Dutch Shell. It’s amazing how early we knew fossil fuels were destabilizing our biosphere.
This man knew we were heading towards an uninhabitable world and screamed at the top of his lungs, but corporate growth was more important. Persephone, indeed.
He may have walked back his prediction of earth being largely uninhabitable by 2050, but I have a feeling he was only slightly off. The sad truth is that 50C is coming faster than you realize, and this man was crystal clear on the subject in the 1990s.
I'm not sure I'd say those documents suggest "a pretty complete understanding" by any means, and on their own would hardly constitute convincing proof of the need to start reducing emissions. But we definitely did have that by the 80s, and 40 years later we're still not taking it seriously.
What's wild to me is how consistently science has chosen to be politically palatable rather than come off as "alarmist".
Like in the original 1.5C report. We didn't have good data on permafrost melting and how much methane that would release. Permafrost melting has been hypothesized as possibly one of the biggest contributors to a runaway effect. But they just straight up decided to ignore the entire effect
That's just one of the many decisions made that makes the 1.5C report wildly more optimistic than reality.
It's no wonder scientists like Lovelock who were very familiar with this research were some of the most likely to point out that science is a political institution with its own biases and incentives
If the choice was to be invited to participate in the conversation or not, wouldn’t you tone down your public statements in order to have a hope of influencing policy?
I’m not saying it’s the right strategy now, but premature hyperbole just slows down adoption, if it does anything at all.
Assuming that permafrost is going not only be a major contributor to greenhouse gases, but also trigger a runaway reaction is the alarmism. They're not being politically palatable, they're making predictions based on the data that we have and being honest.
I'm sure you're right that the commenter meant Cassandra but one might also argue that Persephone's curse, that newly increased periodic temperature swings will sometimes turn the earth barren and useless to us, is relevant to the conversation.
That's a gigantic number in absolute terms. But it's also less than the difference between US and UK GDP per capita. And the UK is far from uninhabitable.
(My assumption here is that an uninhabitable place would have essentially zero GDP. Therefore to retain 80%+ of GDP, the planet must still be heavily inhabited.)
"Uninhabitable" could take many forms. Imagine that by 2050, summer temps in Europe and N America sometimes hit 50C, and in the likes of Middle East, N Africa, Pakistan/India etc they hit 60C. This doesn't seem far-fetched given that Seattle had 42C last year, UK 40C this year, Pakistan has had 50C, and the trend appears to be accelerating. So in the 60C places there'd be complete wipe-outs of population if people tried to stay living there, in the 50C places there'd still be mass deaths. But also, there'd be extremely severe crops failures leading to mass starvation even in places not as hot. Unless humankind develops very fast, some carbon capture tech that immediately rids us off this excess CO2, and/or some major advances are made in agriculture to respond to the change in temperature, it seems to me that much of the earth could become effectively uninhabitable.
Despite everything else he accomplished in his quite storied professional career as one of the last independent scientists... Including his work on the Viking mars landers! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock
To me he will always be the man who invented his own microwave to thaw frozen hamsters. The whole story is worth a watch since Tom Scott does an admirable job of explaining how he went digging up a weird fact expecting to debunk it only to wind up recording an amazing interview with James Lovelock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y but if you’re impatient the interview with lovelock about cryopreserved hamsters and his "microwave" starts here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y#t=5m42s
The New York Times has a nice obituary on his life.[1] There are two things that I would like to celebrate from his lifetime of innovation.
The Gaia Theory is a beautiful framework to understand humanity's outsized impact on the Earth and all of its lifeforms from fungi to insects to the trees and the critters who spend a lifetime in their canopies. The Earth will survive the spasmodic calamity of our species, even if we don't. It doesn't matter if you are the most cynical technologist or an optimist trying to change what you can -- that theory puts us in our place; we are so minuscule against the backdrop of planet, the solar system, the universe. Lovelock noticed that disproportionality a lot sooner than most.
The other important discovery he made was electron capture detector, which is a device capable of detecting man-made toxic chemicals in the wild. When I read Silent Spring and the testament to the frightening effects of DDT, it changed my life. Without that invention, Silent Spring might not have been written. Absolutely transformative for me.
> The Earth will survive the spasmodic calamity of our species, even if we don't.
Lovelock himself was less sanguine. According to the Guardian's obituary, Lovelock "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life."
> "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life."
Having read many of his books, these are two different things. Biosphere is about 4 billion years old, so the last 1% is still 40 million years. This is inevitable, as the Sun grows warmer, eventually planet Earth gets too warm for life as well. But this death-in-40-million-years timescale is unrelated to human action.
I have never understood what the central point of the Gaia hypothesis is. Wikipedia summarizes as:
“… living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.”
How should we understand something like the Great Oxygenation Event in the light of this theory? The planet became somewhat uninhabitable for many organisms of that era, but it also unlocked a whole new generation of oxygen-using organisms. Is that supposed to be an example of perpetuating conditions for life on the planet?
Life, and its environment, affect each other in a complex two-way flow of influence. Yes, OK, that seems evident, but what about this is self-regulating? Surely the history of the planet is replete with mass extinctions and changing conditions that really don’t seem to be part of any greater system than natural selection and the buildup/drawdown of biogenic minerals.
Where is the homeostasis? Everything is changing, all the time.
> How should we understand something like the Great Oxygenation Event in the light of this theory?
The ancient war between anaerobic and aerobic factions is not over. Humans are a sophisticated biological weapon designed by the anaerobes to trigger the "clathrate gun" and return Earth to a non-oxygen-rich regime.
It's a very clever plan. We work faster than the aerobes can react, in geological/evolutionary time were are an explosion.
> what about this is self-regulating?
The answer to that question is in Lovelock's book. If you don't want to read the whole thing you can start with Daisyworld: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld
> Where is the homeostasis?
Oxygen levels. The first clue that led to the Gaia Hypothesis was, IIRC, that the atmosphere of the Earth is not in chemical equilibrium.
> What does the theory allow us to predict?
Well, for one thing, if we find a planet that has a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere that it might have life on it.
See also the "Medea Hypothesis" which proposes that organisms are generally suicidal at a population scale, destroying themselves and their own environment if left unconstrained.
Life's historical record alternates between extinction events and long periods of species-building. So in some ways we can see the Gaia and Medea tendencies as an cyclic pattern but not quite "homeostasis".
The important part is that "life begets life" but occasionally takes it away too. We tend to assume that complex life forms like mammals are inevitable but it's quite amazing we exist at all really, considering the thousands of other species and complex ecological support systems we require to survive. Break down that web of life and the earth would be dominated by bacteria and slime mold.
There are more ways to overshoot or undershoot than there are to be critically damped. Population level tends to be an overshooting system which then collapses back to equilibrium. Doesn't bode too well for us when you look at human population growth over the last century. The troubling part is the scale; even a loss of 10% of the population would be the largest wholesale loss of life in human history. Over a century, that's not a huge deal, but over a decade, it would be a disaster the likes of which we've never experienced.
Organisms modify their immediate microenvironment to their benefit. Lovelock points out that these modification mechanisms can regulate the planet-scale macroenvironment, as well.
It's been a long time since I read it, but in my youth I read one of his Gaia books. possibly not the first, since it had a long "rebuttal" part and also included stuff on endosymbiosis (which I believe came slightly later).
It did address these sort of questions at length. I remember one of the concrete predictions was that Mars was completely lifeless. Since life begets conditions for more life according to the theory, if there ever was significant life on Mars it would have kicked off the extreme makeover process that we see on Earth. Not necessarily exactly the same of course, but just like it's extremely apparent from space that there's life on Earth, so it would be on Mars.
And he made that prediction (according to the book, according to my memory!) before the Viking sondes.
It was a bold prediction. They hoped to find life. You find evidence of life even in the driest, coldest, harshest places on Earth, and even deep into the Earth's crust, so why wouldn't there at least be some primitive archaea-like organisms in Martian soil? But they still haven't found any, fifty years, 18 orbiters and ten landings later.
I actually don’t have much of an issue with the New Age version of the theory. We are indeed all in this together. But this is the version of the theory which Gaia proponents have typically insisted they are not pushing.
RIP James Lovelock. A true radical centrist, he was not the New Age person people mistakenly believed him and Gaia theory to be (e.g. he was a proponent of nuclear energy), but equally he was an enemy of many conservative scientists.
"Gaia" is often seen as a really unfortunate name for an actually well-thought out scientific theory. However, this was exactly Lovelock's point and why he decided to go with a name like that. He and Lynn Margulis WANTED to highlight and stand against the cultural biases of science as an institution.
Though it should be noted there's growing scientific support for the theory regardless
We're losing people who have no true replacement and James Lovelock is one of those people. According to the wikipedia article he was pro nuclear and fracking as an environmentalist. I think largely natural gas and fracking is a relative success where regulation are followed and cost cutting does not occur. Some of the capability learned and gained in that area can be applied for a lot of useful things in the future.
>Retreat, in his view, means it's time to start talking about changing where we live and how we get our food; about making plans for the migration of millions of people from low-lying regions like Bangladesh into Europe; about admitting that New Orleans is a goner and moving the people to cities better positioned for the future.
We definitely need to consider moving towards sustainability much more quickly. CO2 burden related to climate and daily life should be looked at. Something needs to happen to save the bayou around New Orleans.
To prevent habitat loss. Like the mangroves in Florida it can help resist sea level rise and from that the city and shipping lanes itself. There is also an entire local economy supported by it. You have tourism, sustainable living, and ecological science being done.
He thought New Orleans is a goner and it honestly it might be. We can learn a lot of things regarding erosion and climate impacts from the wetlands of the area. In return we can help others resist other climate impacts.
I'll support saving wetlands anywhere due to how useful they are. In the past we have viewed them as useless in other areas of the country and subsequently destroyed them.
Readit News
This man knew we were heading towards an uninhabitable world and screamed at the top of his lungs, but corporate growth was more important. Persephone, indeed.
He may have walked back his prediction of earth being largely uninhabitable by 2050, but I have a feeling he was only slightly off. The sad truth is that 50C is coming faster than you realize, and this man was crystal clear on the subject in the 1990s.
For those who don't know, the US government had a pretty complete understanding of the issue in the 60s.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3227654-PSAC-1965-Re...
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibr...
Like in the original 1.5C report. We didn't have good data on permafrost melting and how much methane that would release. Permafrost melting has been hypothesized as possibly one of the biggest contributors to a runaway effect. But they just straight up decided to ignore the entire effect
That's just one of the many decisions made that makes the 1.5C report wildly more optimistic than reality.
It's no wonder scientists like Lovelock who were very familiar with this research were some of the most likely to point out that science is a political institution with its own biases and incentives
I’m not saying it’s the right strategy now, but premature hyperbole just slows down adoption, if it does anything at all.
Huh? Since when are we heading towards an uninhabitable world?
Yes, climate change is real. But it's not going to make the world uninhabitable.
The best estimates are that climate change would cut between 5-20% of global GDP. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... or https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/climate/climate-change-ec... (Keep in mind that the latter is an article from the NYT reporting on an analysis by an insurer. The NYT isn't exactly a climate change denier.)
That's a gigantic number in absolute terms. But it's also less than the difference between US and UK GDP per capita. And the UK is far from uninhabitable.
(My assumption here is that an uninhabitable place would have essentially zero GDP. Therefore to retain 80%+ of GDP, the planet must still be heavily inhabited.)
50 degrees C of warming?
Dead Comment
To me he will always be the man who invented his own microwave to thaw frozen hamsters. The whole story is worth a watch since Tom Scott does an admirable job of explaining how he went digging up a weird fact expecting to debunk it only to wind up recording an amazing interview with James Lovelock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y but if you’re impatient the interview with lovelock about cryopreserved hamsters and his "microwave" starts here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y#t=5m42s
The Gaia Theory is a beautiful framework to understand humanity's outsized impact on the Earth and all of its lifeforms from fungi to insects to the trees and the critters who spend a lifetime in their canopies. The Earth will survive the spasmodic calamity of our species, even if we don't. It doesn't matter if you are the most cynical technologist or an optimist trying to change what you can -- that theory puts us in our place; we are so minuscule against the backdrop of planet, the solar system, the universe. Lovelock noticed that disproportionality a lot sooner than most.
The other important discovery he made was electron capture detector, which is a device capable of detecting man-made toxic chemicals in the wild. When I read Silent Spring and the testament to the frightening effects of DDT, it changed my life. Without that invention, Silent Spring might not have been written. Absolutely transformative for me.
1-https://archive.ph/bQFAt
Wikipedia pages usually aren't as good for HN submission as more specific in-depth articles, and you're right, this is a nice one.
Lovelock himself was less sanguine. According to the Guardian's obituary, Lovelock "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life."
https://archive.ph/I3dog
Having read many of his books, these are two different things. Biosphere is about 4 billion years old, so the last 1% is still 40 million years. This is inevitable, as the Sun grows warmer, eventually planet Earth gets too warm for life as well. But this death-in-40-million-years timescale is unrelated to human action.
It's the humans that are screwed.
Literally yesterday... small world I guess. He seemed like such an amazing person.
“… living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.”
How should we understand something like the Great Oxygenation Event in the light of this theory? The planet became somewhat uninhabitable for many organisms of that era, but it also unlocked a whole new generation of oxygen-using organisms. Is that supposed to be an example of perpetuating conditions for life on the planet?
Life, and its environment, affect each other in a complex two-way flow of influence. Yes, OK, that seems evident, but what about this is self-regulating? Surely the history of the planet is replete with mass extinctions and changing conditions that really don’t seem to be part of any greater system than natural selection and the buildup/drawdown of biogenic minerals.
Where is the homeostasis? Everything is changing, all the time.
What does the theory allow us to predict?
The ancient war between anaerobic and aerobic factions is not over. Humans are a sophisticated biological weapon designed by the anaerobes to trigger the "clathrate gun" and return Earth to a non-oxygen-rich regime.
It's a very clever plan. We work faster than the aerobes can react, in geological/evolutionary time were are an explosion.
> what about this is self-regulating?
The answer to that question is in Lovelock's book. If you don't want to read the whole thing you can start with Daisyworld: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld
> Where is the homeostasis?
Oxygen levels. The first clue that led to the Gaia Hypothesis was, IIRC, that the atmosphere of the Earth is not in chemical equilibrium.
> What does the theory allow us to predict?
Well, for one thing, if we find a planet that has a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere that it might have life on it.
Life's historical record alternates between extinction events and long periods of species-building. So in some ways we can see the Gaia and Medea tendencies as an cyclic pattern but not quite "homeostasis".
The important part is that "life begets life" but occasionally takes it away too. We tend to assume that complex life forms like mammals are inevitable but it's quite amazing we exist at all really, considering the thousands of other species and complex ecological support systems we require to survive. Break down that web of life and the earth would be dominated by bacteria and slime mold.
Daisyworld is a very simple thought example, but also a computer simulation, of emergent planetary homeostasis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld
Organisms modify their immediate microenvironment to their benefit. Lovelock points out that these modification mechanisms can regulate the planet-scale macroenvironment, as well.
This link[1] runs at the time of posting.
[1] https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simearth-the-living-plane...
It did address these sort of questions at length. I remember one of the concrete predictions was that Mars was completely lifeless. Since life begets conditions for more life according to the theory, if there ever was significant life on Mars it would have kicked off the extreme makeover process that we see on Earth. Not necessarily exactly the same of course, but just like it's extremely apparent from space that there's life on Earth, so it would be on Mars.
And he made that prediction (according to the book, according to my memory!) before the Viking sondes.
It was a bold prediction. They hoped to find life. You find evidence of life even in the driest, coldest, harshest places on Earth, and even deep into the Earth's crust, so why wouldn't there at least be some primitive archaea-like organisms in Martian soil? But they still haven't found any, fifty years, 18 orbiters and ten landings later.
But the rich people WILL have an easier time of it.
And, keep your stick on the ice.
Though it should be noted there's growing scientific support for the theory regardless
https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one...
>Retreat, in his view, means it's time to start talking about changing where we live and how we get our food; about making plans for the migration of millions of people from low-lying regions like Bangladesh into Europe; about admitting that New Orleans is a goner and moving the people to cities better positioned for the future.
We definitely need to consider moving towards sustainability much more quickly. CO2 burden related to climate and daily life should be looked at. Something needs to happen to save the bayou around New Orleans.
Why? (Genuine question interested in your answer)
He thought New Orleans is a goner and it honestly it might be. We can learn a lot of things regarding erosion and climate impacts from the wetlands of the area. In return we can help others resist other climate impacts.
I'll support saving wetlands anywhere due to how useful they are. In the past we have viewed them as useless in other areas of the country and subsequently destroyed them.
https://www.epa.gov/wetlands/why-are-wetlands-important