(Allen Lane, £16.99)
Every generation considers itself to occupy a special place in history, but perhaps for our generation it really is the case. All serious forecasts of oil production put the peak before 2100. Nuclear weaponry is entering a new phase of proliferation. A global crisis in water demand looms. Advances in information technologies continue, leading to predictions that we will soon be more machine than meat.
But in James Lovelock's view, all these things pale into insignificance in comparison with the threat posed by climate change. The Revenge of Gaia is Lovelock's grimmest prognosis so far. If we do not mend our ways radically and quickly, we are headed for "a new Dark Age later this century." He makes a comparison to the threat Britain faced in 1939: "In our small country we have to act now as if we were about to be attacked by a powerful enemy." We have to become self-reliant for food and energy, for "imports will increasingly become inadequate as the suppliers in other regions are overwhelmed by droughts and floods."
This might sound alarmist, even by the standards of environmental campaigners. It certainly goes well beyond the warnings issued by the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), the most authoritative scientific body studying the problem. On what authority, then, does Lovelock speak?
In the 1960s he began advocating the idea that the Earth is a complex system, its climate and environment controlled by many interdependent processes that had previously been studied in isolation. Geology, oceanography, biology and atmospheric phenomena all interact with one another to maintain a stable, robust environment. For example, one of the processes that Lovelock and others studied in detail was the way that marine algae produce a sulphur-containing gas which can be converted to particles that nucleate cloud droplets, altering the amount of sunlight at the Earth's surface and thus the climate—which feeds back on the growth of the organisms in the first place. The climate system, said Lovelock, is full of these complex feedbacks.
It was not a wholly new idea, but Lovelock was the first to give it coherent expression—and a name. He called the self-regulating Earth "Gaia," and he suggested that it be regarded as a kind of living entity. This "living Earth" sounded deeply romantic to the burgeoning green movement, which clasped Gaia to its bosom and, to Lovelock's dismay, invested it with a teleological and anthropomorphic significance that provoked antagonism with the scientific community.
Yet Lovelock remains unrepentant about the naming of his progeny, even if he has sometimes tried to lend it more scientific respectability by talking of "geophysiology" instead. He says now that the idea of a living Earth "has never been more than metaphor," but also implies that he still sees it as more than that: rather than imagining Gaia as some kind of animal (as greens have tended to do), he would rather that science took a more permissive definition of "life."
That debate, however, has tended to cloud the real issue. Gaia's basic postulate of interconnectedness and feedbacks is now generally accepted among Earth scientists. Lovelock deserves much of the credit for this. His notion that "Earth system" feedbacks promote distinct climate states, such as ice ages and warm interglacials, with relatively abrupt switches between them, has also been borne out by palaeoclimatologists.
There is good reason, then, to listen to what Lovelock has to say about the future of our climate. But if his message sounds at times greener than green, it also holds shocks for the likes of Zac Goldsmith and Jonathon Porritt (a friend with whom Lovelock sadly notes an increasing divergence of views). Lovelock's critique of the greens will doubtless draw comparison with that of the ex-green and Kyoto sceptic, Bjørn Lomborg, although his heartfelt impatience with anti-science environmentalists is a world away from Lomborg's grandstanding.
It is no secret that Lovelock has always advocated nuclear power as a solution to the problem of climate warming through fossil-fuel burning. He argues that the nuclear option is the only way to meet our energy needs on the timescale we have available. He is dismissive of wind power and doubtful that other "green" energy sources, such as hydrogen or solar power, can be advanced fast enough. Biofuel production entails yet more damage to the natural biosphere—one of the virtues of this book lies in its hard-headed look at the ecological effects of agriculture.
But if that is shocking enough for some greens, wait until you see what he has in mind for food production. It can be grown artificially by tissue culture, he says, fed with synthetic amino acids and sugars. Nitrates? Shamefully restricted in fertiliser, he says, without clear evidence of health risks, leading to slurry farming that wreaks havoc in streams and rivers. DDT? A minor worry, prohibition of which has exposed millions to malaria. He gives an appreciative nod to what greens would surely see as precarious technofixes, such as sunshields unfurled in space.
It is easy to take issue with the details. And some of the ideas, such as a return to sailboat travel, are clearly idylls floating free of socioeconomic realities. But the romantic delusions that Lovelock attacks—distrust of anything synthetic and "chemical," zero-risk culture, idiotic dreams of longevity—are far more insidious, and deserve the rough treatment he gives them.
In the end, however, whether Lovelock's tough medicine is justified depends on whether he is right about the short time we have left. He would be the first to admit that we still do not fully understand the climate system, which retains the potential to deliver surprises for better or worse. The apocalypse he fears, based it seems on a blend of intuition, qualitative argument and simple Gaian computer models, does not feature in the IPCC assessment, which represents the current state of the art. I am tempted to stick with the latter—it is already scary enough. But if, in the century ahead, Gaia shrugs and civilisation topples, we can't say we weren't warned.
