The Vanishing Face Of Gaia

Title: The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A Final Warning

Author: James Lovelock

Publisher: Allen Lane 2009 (First)

ISBN: 978-1-846-14227-7

Pages: 168

James Lovelock is a lone voice among scientists, who preserves a sense of the poetical while doing serious research. Opinion is sharply divided in the scientific world on whether this man can be reckoned as a true scientist, reflecting on the quite unconventional ways in which his talent had wandered on. Lovelock, along with Lynn Margulis postulated in the early 1970s that life on Earth keeps the surface conditions always favourable for whatever is the contemporary ensemble of organisms. This is famously called the Gaia Hypothesis, the name suggested by the Nobel-laureate litterateur William Golding who was also his neighbour. Gaia was the goddess of Earth in Greek mythology. Lovelock has produced an earlier book on similar terms, titled The Revenge of Gaia (Reviewed earlier in this blog). This book brings to light the irrevocable damage man has effected on the face of the Earth, so that Gaia could not maintain an equilibrium at a temperature favourable for him. The Earth system, consisting of all life, including man is too potent to be impaired by human activities. Whatever man has done, he has to get paid for it, because the equilibrium Gaia arrives at would be at a higher temperature which would be unfit for man.

Gaia, being the biosphere constantly shape and fine tune the parameters for its existence. Man is only a humble part of the whole, and what is best for Gaia may not even be livable for us. Global warming – also called Global Heating by the author to accentuate the effect – due to human induced climate change is a reality. There is not much we can do about it – the slide to destruction had begun centuries earlier when the Industrial Revolution changed the way things were made and laid before man a whole new way of life, full of comforts and contrivances which were objects of pure conjecture for people who lived only a generation before. The excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases force Gaia to adopt higher temperatures for its existence, but even in such a hot world, there will be some islands of opportunity and habitable climate. Lovelock claims the U.K and New Zealand to be two such places. Whether English-speaking was a criterion, we don’t know! We have gone past the point of no-return. Climate mitigation efforts would have been successful if implemented in 1800, but not now.

The UN watchdog, Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stewards all effort to fight climate change. However, the predictions of IPCC scientists are proving to be way beyond the mark, like sea level rise. In 2007, the prediction was off by a factor of 1.6. Climate models assuming the Earth to be a dead planet, thus ignoring the effect of life are bound to doom. Many of them seek to measure the temperature rise, which is not as representational as a measure of the heat contained on Earth as the sea level. Human pollution is sometimes helpful in reducing the effect, as in the case of aerosols produced by pollution and automobile emission. The haze resulting from the discharge reflects a part of sunlight back to space. If IPCC’s target of reducing emission by 60% in 2050 could be achieved in a single year, the aerosol will be wiped off and atmosphere warms up. Theories being formulated by talented scientists must take into account all these factors and should consider the Earth as a single unit instead of being pigeonholed into compartments like atmospheric physics, geology and the like. The theories should be tested with long term experiments and analysed. This is to be our primary concern, rather than formulating policies on untested theories.

Lovelock envisages the face of the planet as a result of Global Warming. It would turn most continents to deserts. Overpopulated countries like India and China are doomed from the outset. Mankind can hope for redemption only in the temperate latitudes. Increased rainfall accompanying soaring temperature won’t provide any succour to tropical countries since water cannot be held in the soil at elevated temperatures. Wartime effort and action plans need to be initiated to tackle the crisis, when it will inevitably crop up.

The author examines various forms of renewable energy as a viable alternative. Generally, he is loathe to embrace wind power as it is ugly to place them in pristine country. In fact, Lovelock compares the installation of wind turbines in his picturesque Devon to placing sewers in Hyde Park in London. Solar energy, whether voltaic or thermal is an ideal source of renewable energy. A square-meter area receives a solar radiation of 1.35 kW. This could be harnessed with a 10-12% efficiency, opening up Southern Spain and Sahara for efficient solar power generation. However, Lovelock’s preferred choice of energy generation is nuclear. He flays the media and energy companies with vested interests behind the anti-nuclear protests. Nuclear energy is cheap, highly efficient, and non-polluting. In a half-century of operation, the Nuclear industry is accused for causing the death of only a hundred people (Chernobyl included), while the figure runs to tens of thousands for any other alternative energy production. The emission rate of carbon in a nuclear power plant is 4 g/kWh while for coal it is 955 g/kWh. Energy companies, particularly Russian-owned ones which distribute Russian gas in Europe is behind the vicious campaign against nuclear.

Geoengineering is way to meet the challenges of increased presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This is not something new, organisms had already successfully tried this out, 3.5 billion years ago. The prominence of oxygen in today’s atmosphere was the result of a sudden greening of the planet during the dawn of Gaia. Invention of fire and industry were also forms of geoengineering. There are three categories possible – physical means of amelioration like manipulation of planetary albedo (the amount of sunlight reflected back), biological (tree planting, fertilization of ocean algal ecosystems with iron) and active Gaian engineering which involves use of Earth’s own ecosystems to power the process.

After establishing his point with forceful, if not convincing vigour, Lovelock goes into a firefighting exercise in support of Gaia theory. There are very few scientists supporting the fantastic theory with all its ornamentation. Eminent earth scientists have derided the theory on the grounds that regulation of atmospheric parameters can be fully explained by geophysics and geochemistry alone. The theory was at the receiving end in the hands of biologists led by Richard Dawkins. The opposition had escalated to such heights in the 1980s that Lovelock had much difficulty in getting his papers accepted for publication in major journals, which he describes as amounting to censorship! Any good scientific theory should propose verifiable predictions and should be falsifiable. The author lists out ten predictions and claims that eight out of them have been verified till date. However, the successful eight include such sweeping assertions like Mars is lifeless and Gaia is aged and not far from the end of its lifespan which are quite obvious corollaries of entirely unrelated fields of study.

The book is reasonably easy to read and the author should be credited with the achievement of exppounding in full what he intended to do. It is a clear reminder to mindless exploitation of nature, forgetting the fact that we are only a species among the multitude which constitute Gaia. Green movements are cut to size for their militancy and the lack of love of nature which should be the basis on which nature movements need to carry on. Lovelock is entirely clear that nuclear energy is the promise of the future and the required non-polluting energy source compatible with a reduced carbon world.

Nonetheless, the book needs major restructuring to make the content attractive to readers. The author overemphasizes Gaia, which is in reality a novel appellation of a controversial subject. There is no question of the ideas anywhere attaining near proven status. An odd aspect of global warming which irritates the author is the anticipated banishment of white people! As he says, “When a tribe moves from temperate to tropical regions it only takes a few generations before individuals darken as selection eliminates the fair-skinned” (p.19).  How a person having the pretensions of science stoop to such racist and totally erroneous conclusions? Lovelock may care to look at the Brazilian society which has hosted both white and black people for centuries and the races were in fact interbreeding but still the whites remain whites. And what about the Inuits, who are dark, but still reside in the freezing Arctic cold?

Author’s justifications of his own child, the Gaia theory assumes comic proportions when he refers his own friends and cronies as authorities on the subject. He seems to forget the maxim of science that it does not respect authority. Unproved or imaginative postulates are elevated to the status of irrefutable principles, like his suggestion of Britain which would become a safe haven in the hot Earth, which might grant climate refugees asylum there. Readers become suspicious that if Lovelock deigns to write a sequel to the present volume, it would be on the eligibility criteria the people of Britain may demand on the refugees queueing at their gates for climate salvation!

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star