Lateline - 30/05/2006: Professor challenges scientific community over global warming


Reporter: Tony Jones
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: James Lovelock, thanks for joining us again. PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK, SCIENTIST AND AUTHOR: It's my pleasure. TONY JONES: Now, you refer to yourself as someone in the role of a doctor who has to tell his patient they've got a malignant cancer. Tell us why you use that analogy. PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: Well, I think a doctor in a position like that has one of the toughest jobs in life, bringing really bad news to someone and in a way the way that the world's climate is changing is almost like that and I've been thrown into the position as a kind of planetary doctor, if you like, of bringing that particular bit of bad news. It may not be quite as bad as a cancer in someone, but it is pretty serious anyway. TONY JONES: Now, your Gaia thesis explains the world as a living organism. You say this organism, the earth, is so seriously ill that it will soon pass into a morbid fever that will last as long as 100,000 years. PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: Yes, indeed. The reason I can say that, and other scientists say the same thing, is that the Earth went through a similar event 55 million years ago when roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide was put into the atmosphere as a result of a geological accident. We are doing just the same thing. TONY JONES: We've looked at your book, 'The Revenge of Gaia'. It looks like a kind of cry from the heart. Is it in fact your last plea to the world, as you see it, to save it from extinction? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: I'm pretty old, but I hope it's not my last plea to the world. (Laughs) I hope it's not the world's last event either. But it is a warning cry, if ever there was one. TONY JONES: Do you seriously think the human race actually faces extinction? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: No, I don't. We're an incredibly tough species. There will be humans surviving around breeding pairs in all sorts of places, whatever happens. But it is serious and I should add here that there's nothing certain in science. We might be saved by some natural events, such as a sequence of big volcanoes or it may be when the penny drops in the United States, they'll say, "But we can fix it" and do something about it like putting up sun shades in space. But, it is a very serious problem and we should look at it that way. TONY JONES: It's so serious that you write that billions of people could die and that the few - you have talked about breeding pairs. I mean, you say in your book that the few breeding pairs of people will end up in the Arctic because that's the only place where the climate will be compatible with life. PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: Well, when we look back at the past events of history 55 million years ago, which seems to be our fate now, most of the earth's surface, the great continents, were overheated and turned to scrub or desert and could support very little people. The people who are in those regions now will just not be able to survive. There will be no food and no water for them. So the consequences are almost inevitable. TONY JONES: Can you paint a picture for us then of the world as you imagine it, both at the Northern and Southern hemispheres if no major change happens to stop global warming now? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: Yes, they will become dry scrub and desert, those regions, and this is what happened in the past and when it happened in the past, living things, life migrated to the polar regions and survived through the change, which lasted for 200,000 years and when things returned to normal, the living things up there in the Arctic or in the Antarctic - of course that was then joined to the rest of the world and not a separate continent - migrated back and that's why there was no extinction at that time and there won't be in this time. There will be no extinction either of people or of - there will be of some plants and animals, but by no means all of them. TONY JONES: What do you say to those who believe your theories are more like philosophy than science? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: Well, all I can say to them is I wish they were right. No, the theory is well established now and, indeed, in the UK the Geological Society awarded me their senior medal, the Walleston Medal, this year purely for Gaia theory. TONY JONES: Can you just go back and tell us how you formulated the Gaia Theory in the first place? I understand it actually came out of conversations with a novelist? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: No. It began, strangely enough, at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory in California as long ago as the 1960s and my job was to help them design instruments for finding life on Mars and this was the kind of space operation and this enabled me to look back at the Earth and see what it was about the Earth, as if I was some alien, that would tell me that there was life on it and it immediately became obvious to me that the atmosphere reveals the presence of life on the Earth. It's a mixture of very strange gases, oxygen and methane, mixed together. That's the kind of gas mixture that goes into the intake of your car. It's potentially explosive if its composition were different in proportion. So we have a very strange atmosphere and that made me think there must be something in the surface that controls it and regulates it and keeps it constant and safe. This is what made me think of this great system Gaia and when I told my friend, the novelist William Golding, about it and he said, "Oh, you better give an idea like that a proper name" and he was the one that suggested Gaia. TONY JONES: Now you're talking about the revenge of Gaia, that Gaia in fact will take revenge on the human race for what it's done. PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: Yes. Well, that's a bit of a metaphoric statement and it expresses strongly what I feel and you see I regard our planet as a sort of living organism that's regulated the atmosphere, the water and the chemical composition of the Earth for 3.5 billion years. It's kept it comfortable for life for a quarter of the age of the universe and it's amazing that we're in the midst of wrecking it. TONY JONES: If global warming continues at the rate that it is now, what are the steps that need to be taken to stop us reaching the tipping point, which you've been writing about. PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: I'm not sure that we can stop it but we've got to try, obviously, by cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions. But remember, it's not just emissions that does the damage. During the course of our development to our present numbers over 6 billion, we've taken an awful lot of the land surface of the Earth for farming and to produce timber for our homes and that land surface used to be used before we took it away to regulate the Earth and we can't put that back quickly. So this is among the reasons why I think it's probably too late to do very much. TONY JONES: I'm intrigued to hear you say that because you seem to have moved beyond the point we were at the last time we spoke, for example. You were advocating nuclear power worldwide as a way of stopping carbon emissions. Are you now thinking it's too late to do that? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: I think it probably is. I don't think that we have time to do it worldwide, although it takes nowhere near as long to build a nuclear power station as is often stated. I think most people forget that the first nuclear power stations that were producing energy for people, not making bombs, were in the United Kingdom and they took only 3.5 years to build and even then when we knew very little about it, I think they could be built in two or three years now if there was the will to do so. TONY JONES: Bearing in mind what you've just said, Australia, for example, is now having a serious nuclear debate that could go on, in fact, for many years. The big concerns are both political - that nuclear power is not politically feasible, but that it's not economically viable. What do you say to the Australian politicians who are thinking along those lines? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: I think the anti-nuclear stories are very understandable. You've got to look at their history. Not too many years ago, most of us were scared rigid of the possibility of a nuclear war between America and Russia and that sort of filled our lives for an awful lot of years after World War II and during that time a great fear of everything nuclear built up and we haven't dispelled that fear, in spite of the cessation of the Cold War. But nuclear power is nothing about bombs. Modern nuclear power stations are useless for making bombs and the dangers are not real. They've been exaggerated beyond all belief in the decent and proper cause of making people fight against the idea of nuclear weapons. That sort of objection should not be applied to nuclear energy, which quite the reverse could be our saving. TONY JONES: The primary objection now obviously is nuclear waste is simply very, very difficult to deal with and obviously remains radioactive for many thousands of years. PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: I had dinner with a famous gentleman Hans Blix about a year ago and he turned to me and said, "What on earth is all of this fuss about nuclear waste? "There's hardly any of it, is there?" And this is the truth of it. The quantity of nuclear waste is trivial, tiny. No great problem. It stays where it is and that's it. You just think of the carbon dioxide waste. Every year we produce in the world enough carbon dioxide that if you froze it solid to dry ice, it would make a mountain 1 mile high and 12 miles around in circumference. Now, that is deadly waste and it will kill nearly all of us if we don't stop doing it. TONY JONES: I have heard it said that you think nuclear waste is so containable you actually wouldn't mind having it buried safely in your own backyard. Is that so? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: It is, indeed. I would be very glad to have it because when it is freshly produced, it stays hot for about 10 or 20 years and I'd use it for free home heating. I'd be glad to use it. It would be a waste not to. TONY JONES: Now, Professor Lovelock, you've been a proponent for nuclear power for decades and this has been a huge problem for the green movement, which, as you know, you're widely regarded as the father of the environmental movement. Now you appear to be arguing as well that sustainable development is no longer possible. You alluded to this before. Can you tell us what you mean by that? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: If you go right back in history to Malthus, he proposed that overpopulation would ruin us all, destroy civilisation, way back 200 years ago. He was laughed at and people sort of said, "No, no, no." He was exaggerating. "It's not that bad." I happen to think he was just right because when he produced his ideas there was about a billion people in the world and if you kept the population of the world to a billion you could do almost anything. We could all drive around in gas guzzlers and it wouldn't really matter. The sad thing is I'm afraid it's not just population that has grown, but we've tended to use all of those wasteful things as well and this is what has landed us in the mess we are now in. So the green ideas of sustainable development would have been wonderful if we had done them 100 or 200 years ago, but now they are hopelessly too late. TONY JONES: You seem to be arguing for the complete abandonment of agriculture in some areas of the world at least and the replacement with synthetic foods. PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: I don't think we'll have to abandon them. Gaia will abandon them for us, in a sense, because as the climate changes, already it is happening in East Africa and I think you're finding it more and more in Australia. Growing food becomes more and more difficult. And so if we want to carry on with large numbers, we all just have to synthesise food and for that we'll need lots of energy. TONY JONES: So in fact you think it's too late for the green solution? The sustainable agriculture combined with large-scale alternative energy, sources like wind farms, hot rocks, wave energy? All of those things combined with solar power, you don't think that will all work? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: I'm afraid it won't. They would have worked with a small population like back in Malthus's time. If civilisation had developed that way we might not be in the mess we are now in. But you can't support 6 billion, growing towards 7 billion people, on that kind of energy source. It just won't work. TONY JONES: So, do you actually think that the green movement, the environmentalists who hold to those views are deluded? PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: No, I don't. As you rightly said, I'm very much associated with them and have been a green for most of my life. It's just that the green movement on the whole are not very scientific and scientists who should be speaking out on these matters are nowadays hampered by the fact that science is fragmented into a multitude of different expertises and each one sees the Earth only through the tiny fragment of their discipline. So you don't get a clear voice of science. I suppose it's been thrown at me because amongst scientists I'm one of the few that looks at the planet from the top down from outside. TONY JONES: But, a final question for you: if you don't think that the green movement is deluded, you do apparently think it is doomed. PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: No. I think the green movement has got to reform and change its attitude away from the rather negative and rather pointless fear of chemicals and nuclear energy and things like that that they've had for so long. I'm afraid that all comes because most of the green movement is supported by people living in big cities. We're nearly all urbanised nowadays and they've lost touch with the natural world. They don't see the world as it really is. They only see their city environment and I think they've got to grow up and start realising that their citizens have a really wonderful planet that's looked after itself for such a long time and we're the enemies of it and not the supporters. TONY JONES: Professor James Lovelock, some provocative thoughts there. We thank you once again for taking the time to join us on Lateline. PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK: Thank you