James Lovelock has long been a hero of
mine. He is a scientist and
inventor with hundreds of patents to his name. That alone would be remarkable
but his great mark is as the originator of the Ghia Theory which conceives the
earth as not just the sum of innumerable chemical reactions but as a living and
self-regulating organism. It is a poetic concept that he came to at the same
time as we as a species saw our planet for the first time in the 1960s as an
island of beauty and life in the dark, cold void of space. Ghia, Mother Earth,
seemed a perfect description of that blue, shining earth-rise that the Apollo 8
astronauts saw for the first time above the grey corpse of the Moon. Lovelock
became the patron saint and evangelist of the Green movement which arose in the
60s, a movement that has taken environmental issues to the forefront of
politics – in the developed world anyway.
Not any more.
In the last twenty years the environmental
focus as moved on to carbon emissions and climate change as the urgent and
defining issue of the age. Insidiously and slowly, like the metaphorical frog
in the bath, we are heating our planet by our use of fossil fuels. This may, by
the way, be a good thing for us as a species as the alternative might well by
now, without anthropogenic heating, have been another ice age: an ice sheet
reaching London would not be good for anything. The Green Movement’s reaction
to man-made climate change is to demand a winding down of human activity and
energy use – crudely summarised as bicycles, renewables and lentils. It is
viscerally opposed to nuclear, GM and technological fixes.
James Lovelock, as a practical scientist
with a skeptical view of human nature, rightly in my view, sees nuclear as the
only practical and sensible option to get us through to a genuinely low carbon
future – probably mid century and probably based on fission. Far from being a
Frankenstein’s monster, nuclear is the fundamental power source of the universe
and is extraordinarily safe. What about Chernobyl? He points out that during
the forties, fifties and sixties there was a Chernobyl sized event happening
every other week with nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere. Its detritus
was taken into the upper atmosphere and scattered uniformly around the world
and we have all absorbed it into our bodies over that time – and never been
healthier. Apart from the movingly brave firemen who doused that reactor fire
at Chernobyl there were no other casualties. Compare this to the hundreds who
die every year on oil-rigs and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who
have died as a consequence of working in the coal industry. Nuclear waste? It
can now be used as fuel in the latest generation of nuclear reactors. Storing
it? Lovelock has offered to have it buried under his house (where he would sink
a borehole to harvest the waste’s latent heat to provide his central heating).
These views have made him a heretic and apostate to the Green movement – a
movement that is now sadly becoming a cause of, and not a cure for, climate
damage. Look at the cant and foolishness involved in the German abandonment of
nuclear energy (which they now get from France).
Lovelock is now ninety-four and I saw him
last night in conversation with the philosopher John Gray. He has new book out called Rough Ride
to the Future. He is whip sharp, funny and charming and the interview was
beautifully handled by Gray, of whom I am also a big fan. I had the chance to speak to them both
afterwards and Lovelock is a delight. For someone with such bad news he is a
professed optimist – which I found rather amusing as Gray (his friend) is such
a deep-seated pessimist. He laughed at this and said that he is Gray’s
therapist….
His source of optimism is the exploding
information age that we are currently living through. Whether or not you
believe in the singularity (the point at which artificial intelligence exceeds
human intelligence) the speed of progress helped by Moore’s Law is fast and
accelerating. There is an interesting point here about Moore’s law (which holds
that computing power doubles roughly every two years). As transistors get ever
smaller they will soon be getting down to only a few atoms wide – when Quantum
Mechanics take over and it all goes weird. This is going to happen quite soon
(15 years or so) and without Moore’s Law future leaps might become more
pedestrian.
That aside, Lovelock’s view is that
starting with the first steam engine when humans began to harness energy we
have become a unique species who have accelerated evolution a thousand fold
over the last three hundred years or so.
Darwinian evolution takes millions of years. With genetic engineering
and the replacement of biological by electronic life we are on the cusp of a
different age where hopefully we can mitigate and adapt to climate change. We
are living, as Lovelock reminds us in the Anthropocine – an age where one
species is changing Ghia. The last species to do this were plants - a couple of
billion years ago.
Also at the same event, I met Sir Crispin
Tickell – another great figure in the environmental movement, but not as well
known. He was a diplomat and over a long period took an amateur interest in
climate matters. His great practical contribution was to persuade Margaret
Thatcher (a scientist by training and education) that humans were altering the
climate. It was she that was the drive behind the creation of the IPCC and the
Hadley Centre for Climate Change which provide the science and research heft
that is the backbone of worldwide government efforts to control carbon
emissions.
It was a privilege to meet these great
people and to be reminded that we are living through genuinely epochal times
where the world and we are changing faster than any humans, let alone any other
species, ever have. And to be reminded of the privilege of living in London
where it is possible to hear and meet men like James Lovelock.
