[Scape]

Gaia's Revenge

Quote:

James Lovelock: The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years
Each nation must find the best use of its resources to sustain civilisation for as long as they can
Published: 16 January 2006
Imagine a young policewoman delighted in the fulfilment of her vocation; then imagine her having to tell a family whose child had strayed that he had been found dead, murdered in a nearby wood. Or think of a young physician newly appointed who has to tell you that the biopsy revealed invasion by an aggressive metastasising tumour. Doctors and the police know that many accept the simple awful truth with dignity but others try in vain to deny it.

Whatever the response, the bringers of such bad news rarely become hardened to their task and some dread it. We have relieved judges of the awesome responsibility of passing the death sentence, but at least they had some comfort from its frequent moral justification. Physicians and the police have no escape from their duty.

This article is the most difficult I have written and for the same reasons. My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 per cent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

By failing to see that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we have blundered into trying to do it ourselves, acting as if we were in charge. By doing this, we condemn ourselves to the worst form of slavery. If we chose to be the stewards of the Earth, then we are responsible for keeping the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface right for life. A task we would soon find impossible - and something before we treated Gaia so badly, she had freely done for us.

To understand how impossible it is, think about how you would regulate your own temperature or the composition of your blood. Those with failing kidneys know the never-ending daily difficulty of adjusting water, salt and protein intake. The technological fix of dialysis helps, but is no replacement for living healthy kidneys.

My new book The Revenge of Gaia expands these thoughts, but you still may ask why science took so long to recognise the true nature of the Earth. I think it is because Darwin's vision was so good and clear that it has taken until now to digest it. In his time, little was known about the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, and there would have been little reason for him to wonder if organisms changed their environment as well as adapting to it.

Had it been known then that life and the environment are closely coupled, Darwin would have seen that evolution involved not just the organisms, but the whole planetary surface. We might then have looked upon the Earth as if it were alive, and known that we cannot pollute the air or use the Earth's skin - its forest and ocean ecosystems - as a mere source of products to feed ourselves and furnish our homes. We would have felt instinctively that those ecosystems must be left untouched because they were part of the living Earth.

So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent. On these British Isles, we are used to thinking of all humanity and not just ourselves; environmental change is global, but we have to deal with the consequences here in the UK.

Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanised as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilisation the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.

We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.

The writer is an independent environmental scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society. 'The Revenge of Gaia' is published by Penguin on 2 February

Amazon

Wiki

Summary: Windmills and recycling are 200 years too late, buckle up it's going to be a bumpy ride. Kyoto will be seen as effective in saving civilization against the environment as the Munich agreement was effective in stopping the rise of Fascism.

[dog77_1999]

Scape wrote:

Gaia's Revenge

Quote:

James Lovelock:
My new book The Revenge of Gaia

Yey, at least he'll be using recycled paper for his books, but that won't really matter to us considering we are 200 years late?

Heck, if I knew that, I would do anything to accumulate wealth, including writing another book!

[Scape]

What if what is set to pass isn't going to happen until 2040 and he was born in 1919? Besides, what he is saying is that the earth and humanity will make it but there will be a cull in the billions for us when it happens as food will only grow in places like the arctic where it will be stable enough to have a growing season.

[Scape]

Why Gaia is wreaking revenge on our abuse of the environment

Quote:

"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."

[Canadian_Mind]

i've given up on the idea of stopping climate change, so we might aswell prepare for it.

[Scape]

That's his take as well. He surmises (correctly I might add) that countries like India, China and the US will not react fast enough and even if they did we are already on a warming trend to begin with. So instead of wasting effort on a pointless crusade it is time to look to how to sustain civilization. A key point he makes is that without power and more precisely electrical power most urban centres would be unsustainable in a week. He is a huge supporter of nuclear power to fill this need and as there will be far fewer people around it could be far more useful then windmills and solar panels. Another major concern is sustainable food production and it will only be a very small portion of the planet that will able to do it.

It is the basis of a positive feedback loop that really gets things going so fast. Like a speaker held to close to the mic a system that is self sustaining is prone to such faults. As it gets hotter the forests will fail and burn, the ice caps will melt and no longer reflect heat and the atmosphere will be choked with more carbon locking in more heat. On it goes with no relief for 100,000 years. I hope his wake up call is just that but I have little faith in mankind as a species taking the required action until it is forced upon us.

[mtbr]

Canadian_Mind wrote:

i've given up on the idea of stopping climate change, so we might aswell prepare for it.

The climate is and has always changed, there is absolutely nothing you can do to change that.

[BartSimpson]

mtbr wrote:

Canadian_Mind wrote:

i've given up on the idea of stopping climate change, so we might aswell prepare for it.

The climate is and has always changed, there is absolutely nothing you can do to change that.

I disagree.

The climate is and has always changed, there is absolutely nothing you SHOULD do to change that.

[mtbr]

BartSimpson wrote:

mtbr wrote:

Canadian_Mind wrote:

i've given up on the idea of stopping climate change, so we might aswell prepare for it.

The climate is and has always changed, there is absolutely nothing you can do to change that.

I disagree.

The climate is and has always changed, there is absolutely nothing you SHOULD do to change that.

I stand corrected.

[Zipperfish]

Scape wrote:

That's his take as well. He surmises (correctly I might add) that countries like India, China and the US will not react fast enough and even if they did we are already on a warming trend to begin with. So instead of wasting effort on a pointless crusade it is time to look to how to sustain civilization. A key point he makes is that without power and more precisely electrical power most urban centres would be unsustainable in a week. He is a huge supporter of nuclear power to fill this need and as there will be far fewer people around it could be far more useful then windmills and solar panels. Another major concern is sustainable food production and it will only be a very small portion of the planet that will able to do it.

It is the basis of a positive feedback loop that really gets things going so fast. Like a speaker held to close to the mic a system that is self sustaining is prone to such faults. As it gets hotter the forests will fail and burn, the ice caps will melt and no longer reflect heat and the atmosphere will be choked with more carbon locking in more heat. On it goes with no relief for 100,000 years. I hope his wake up call is just that but I have little faith in mankind as a species taking the required action until it is forced upon us.

The problem with the positive feedback model, as presented by most people, is that it tend sto be too pessimistic; it does not take into account the natural resiliency of nature. In practice, nature has myriad negative feedback mechnaisms for anything which upsets its equilibrium. Airborne ebola would be a good negative feedback loop that would control climate change, for example. Clouds, as a less extreme example, may also temper climate change.

Also, nuclear power is, of course, our default energy system once oil starts to get thermodynamically uneconomical to exploit, but, at current energy usage, the uranium will only last a couple of generations. After exploitation of oil and urnaium becomes uneconomical, the planet will no longer be able to support six, seven, eight billion people. Access to easy, cheap energy is a precondition for sustaining anything above about four billion.

[BartSimpson]

Zipperfish wrote:

The problem with the positive feedback model, as presented by most people, is that it tend sto be too pessimistic; it does not take into account the natural resiliency of nature. In practice, nature has myriad negative feedback mechnaisms for anything which upsets its equilibrium. Airborne ebola would be a good negative feedback loop that would control climate change, for example. Clouds, as a less extreme example, may also temper climate change.

Also, nuclear power is, of course, our default energy system once oil starts to get thermodynamically uneconomical to exploit, but, at current energy usage, the uranium will only last a couple of generations. After exploitation of oil and urnaium becomes uneconomical, the planet will no longer be able to support six, seven, eight billion people. Access to easy, cheap energy is a precondition for sustaining anything above about four billion.

In the next 100 to 200 years as energy becomes more of a question we'll see the development of alternatives such as massive solar platforms in space to collect solar power and then beam it to earth (a test of which is in the planning right now with Kiribati as the receiving point for said beam). We'll also see the moon being mined for its vast stores of He3 (for use in fusion reactors). And as it becomes economical (likely with the help of robotic workers) hydrocarbons will be collected from Titan and shipped to earth or near-earth orbit for use in manufacturing and energy production.

Where we have so many valuable corporations involved in energy production it is inevitable that one or more of them will invest in new energy sources as economic condtions favor those new sources over existing sources.

And the climate will be warmer or colder and no one will much care as there still won't be anything we can do about it either way.

[Scape]

Zipperfish wrote:

The problem with the positive feedback model, as presented by most people, is that it tend sto be too pessimistic; it does not take into account the natural resiliency of nature. In practice, nature has myriad negative feedback mechnaisms for anything which upsets its equilibrium. Airborne ebola would be a good negative feedback loop that would control climate change, for example. Clouds, as a less extreme example, may also temper climate change.

The positive feedback loop exists because there is already overt excess pressure that is steadily and exponentially building up on the equilibrium of a self regulating ecosystem that is Gaia. To every action a reaction. Eventually the system will resort to more radical means in order to restore itself. That is what will happen here unless we use technoligy to bypass the factors generating the aggravation on they system to begin with. The system does indeed react with resiliency, a shut down is just a part of that process. It has happened many times before in Earth's history and there is nothing preventing a relapse. This is one of those instances where an ounce of prevention is far better than the pond of cure the reset would do and if it is a possibility then it would be prudent to begin planning for such a disaster rather than hoping against hope with no fall back plan.

[bootlegga]

Scape wrote:

Gaia's Revenge

Quote:

James Lovelock: The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years
Each nation must find the best use of its resources to sustain civilisation for as long as they can
Published: 16 January 2006
Imagine a young policewoman delighted in the fulfilment of her vocation; then imagine her having to tell a family whose child had strayed that he had been found dead, murdered in a nearby wood. Or think of a young physician newly appointed who has to tell you that the biopsy revealed invasion by an aggressive metastasising tumour. Doctors and the police know that many accept the simple awful truth with dignity but others try in vain to deny it.

Whatever the response, the bringers of such bad news rarely become hardened to their task and some dread it. We have relieved judges of the awesome responsibility of passing the death sentence, but at least they had some comfort from its frequent moral justification. Physicians and the police have no escape from their duty.

This article is the most difficult I have written and for the same reasons. My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 per cent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

By failing to see that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we have blundered into trying to do it ourselves, acting as if we were in charge. By doing this, we condemn ourselves to the worst form of slavery. If we chose to be the stewards of the Earth, then we are responsible for keeping the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface right for life. A task we would soon find impossible - and something before we treated Gaia so badly, she had freely done for us.

To understand how impossible it is, think about how you would regulate your own temperature or the composition of your blood. Those with failing kidneys know the never-ending daily difficulty of adjusting water, salt and protein intake. The technological fix of dialysis helps, but is no replacement for living healthy kidneys.

My new book The Revenge of Gaia expands these thoughts, but you still may ask why science took so long to recognise the true nature of the Earth. I think it is because Darwin's vision was so good and clear that it has taken until now to digest it. In his time, little was known about the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, and there would have been little reason for him to wonder if organisms changed their environment as well as adapting to it.

Had it been known then that life and the environment are closely coupled, Darwin would have seen that evolution involved not just the organisms, but the whole planetary surface. We might then have looked upon the Earth as if it were alive, and known that we cannot pollute the air or use the Earth's skin - its forest and ocean ecosystems - as a mere source of products to feed ourselves and furnish our homes. We would have felt instinctively that those ecosystems must be left untouched because they were part of the living Earth.

So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent. On these British Isles, we are used to thinking of all humanity and not just ourselves; environmental change is global, but we have to deal with the consequences here in the UK.

Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanised as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilisation the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.

We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.

The writer is an independent environmental scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society. 'The Revenge of Gaia' is published by Penguin on 2 February

Amazon

Wiki

Summary: Windmills and recycling are 200 years too late, buckle up it's going to be a bumpy ride. Kyoto will be seen as effective in saving civilization against the environment as the Munich agreement was effective in stopping the rise of Fascism.

Good find Scape, interesting reading. I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but he makes some good points to think about.

[sasquatch2]

This just shows how far you can expand upon a crusade of BS.

real science about CO2

His remarks about Mars are the tip off to the useful idiots who did get the first hints.

Venus and Mars both have high concentrations of CO2 in their atmospheres---one is hot and one is cold-----CO2 is irrelevant to Venus mars AND earth----what is relevant is the proximity to the sun and it's activity.

Why is it that as soon as somebody hangs the label of "scientist" on a man he is assumed to be honest and apolitical? Kevin Treberth the darling of the IPCC turned sceptic/denier is perhaps one honest man.....he rebelled when the IPCC panel discarded research because "it was not helpful for the cause."