ENVIRONMENT: The Vanishing Face of Gaia By James LovelockAllen Lane, 192pp. £20. He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia By John Gribbin and Mary GribbinAllen Lane, 256pp £20
JAMES LOVELOCK must be the most influential scientist and writer since Charles Darwin. His 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on earth transformed the common understanding of how our planet works. In 2004 his work Revenge of Gaia delivered a shocking prognosis that our own interference in this “living” earth system is threatening our future existence.
Now, aged 90, he is returning to that same theme like a grim reaper. Our first and best planetary doctor gives little or no hope. The feedback mechanisms which regulate our climate will, he believes, inevitably trip a global heating switch, in a way which we can hardly now avoid.
The publication of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, coincides with a biography of Lovelock by John and Mary Gribben from the same publishers. He comes out in their hands as a kind, thoughtful and resourceful human being and in his own writing as a scientific genius who explains things like a natural storyteller.
The biography switches between details of Lovelock’s own career to a history of other scientists who have tried to understand the role of the atmosphere in global warming. The authors have written their book in cooperation with their subject and it comes across in personal observations from himself, his family and friends.
His story starts with his birth in London in July 1919, a product of an armistice night celebration. His first teacher was a Miss Tierney, remembered as “an embittered Irishwoman” who liked uniformity and hated the precocious child who had the temerity to have his own ideas. He was rescued by a transfer to a class under the care of a “plump and motherly” Miss Plumridge where discipline came with a better purpose. The boy was able to develop a love of reading and with the help of a local library and Jules Verne and HG Wells, a love of science.
By a series of good fortune, Lovelock’s early working life gave him the necessary skills he would later need to make his most significant discoveries. He started in a firm specialising in the chemistry of photography, where he learnt the discipline of scrupulous accuracy in his work and where his paid evening classes led to a full-time college course in chemistry in Manchester.
Lovelock had already developed the ability to make instrumentation and experimental devices from the most simple scrap materials, when he then went to his first job in the National Institute for Medical Research. His work to understand the spread of the common cold was helped by the development of remarkably sensitive wind speed measurements made in his own corner of the lab. That tinkering with instruments led to what he calls “the most important event of his scientific life” in the invention of the Electron Capture Detector in 1957 which could detect a trace of gas as small as one part in 10 million billion and which is still in use today. The technology provided evidence of chemical pollution which in turn inspired Rachael Carson to write “Silent Spring” and to start a new green movement across the world.
Lovelock also used it to measure the atmospheric difference between the clear skies of his West Cork holiday house and the haze over his home in Southern England. To test whether the haze was due to industrial pollution he concentrated on the presence of CFCs, which could not come from natural sources. It was the smaller amounts of CFCs that still showed up in the West Cork air which spurred him on to join a scientific vessel heading to the Antarctic to get atmospheric measurements from the southern as well as Northern hemisphere. His findings in turn played a major part in the later discovery of the hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, caused by the build-up of those CFC’s.
His inventions were already bringing Lovelock recognition in the wider scientific community and in 1961 he was invited to join the Nasa jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, where one of his tasks was to determine whether there was life on Mars. He believed he could answer that question by measuring if the atmosphere exhibited the natural tendency under the second law of thermodynamics for systems to wear down or dilute to their natural “high entropy” level – given that only life could lead to a reversal of that natural order. His own tests using this measure showed that life did not exist,which of course has been proven right. The work also started him thinking as to how the Earth managed to sustain its own atmosphere which was rich in oxygen and other gases.
That question led him to the revelation that it was living things which were regulating the composition of the atmosphere. Previous medical work on the regulation of blood temperature had given him an understanding of “homeostasis”, by which an organism maintains a more or less constant internal state. He now applied the concept to the planet earth, where complex interactions between the living and geological systems had helped maintain the right conditions for life for over 3,000 million years.
His work was advanced in cooperation with Lynn Margulis (the former wife of Carl Sagan) who had pioneered the idea that once free-living bacteria are now incorporated within animal and plant cells where they carry out specific tasks such as converting sunlight into useful energy.
Her concept of “mutualistic cooperation” by which the cell as a whole benefits from the division of labour and the individual components benefit from being in a stable environment, was now adopted by Lovelock for the world in what he called his Gaia theory.
The response to this hypothesis was initially very sceptical. Neo-Darwinian scientists such as Richard Dawkins argued that such a living earth concept could not have evolved in the absence of competition from alternative living systems.
Others shied away from the title Gaia, preferring the title such as “Earth system science” or at the very concept that the Earth exhibits any living characteristics. However, over the last thirty years the hypothesis has been tested and is now recognised as a commonly agreed theory.
You get the sense that in this latest book Lovelock wants to nail that recognition down. With the exception of a new proposal to convert agriculture waste to char, which could then be ploughed back into the soil as a means of carbon storage, there is little new from the book of four years ago. He remains a passionate advocate for nuclear power and slates “the great religious symbol of spin, the giant white wind turbine”. He cannot stand those Greens who are “streetwise urban dwellers with a sentimental view of nature”, but I am glad he still describes himself as a “Green”.
He is the equivalent of a modern-day Churchill, warning of the climate wars that are ahead of us. In these bleak economic times it is hard to read such a grim account about the weakness of the natural systems which must ultimately sustain us. There is little joy in the concept that these island nations in a cooler zone might be able to survive the coming heat like lifeboats for humanity; he sees us being flooded with massive immigration by climate change refugees.
Yet there is something forgiving in the manner in which James Lovelock honestly presents his analysis and thinks through geological time about our future evolution as a species.
Perhaps his own achievements in understanding how our planet works can give us hope that we may find a way to organise an effective response to the environmental crisis we face. Perhaps he has still time for one further bright idea as he takes up the offer of Richard Branson of a trip to space for a once in a lifetime look back on the planet. Perhaps life can still start at ninety.
Eamon Ryan is a Green Party TD and Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources