THE James Lovelock Thread (merged)

[Ferretlover]

Lovelock: Despair or Resolution ?

From the excerpt and article published in the Independent, Lovelock's book would seem to be truly lousy politics in that it offers no serious prospects of the mitigation of global warming, and I think we tend, as a species, to be least willing to acknowledge and take action on those problems for which no solutions are visible.

That said, the Inde may just, for whatever reason, have chosen not to mention a declaration by the author of the critical urgency of achieving a comprehensive Treaty of the Atmospheric Commons, but I doubt it.

Given the range of imponderables, such as the tipping point at which global temperature triggers phenomena that flip the sum of feedbacks from a positive to a negative influence (which event is repeatedly visible in the paleo-climate record) thus rapidly cooling the planet, and also the range of unpredictables, such as the interaction of global diplomacy, climate destabilization impacts and peak oil, drastically affecting humanity's output of GHGs, to imply that global die-back on the scale he suggests is in any way inevitable seems to me an emotive rather than a scientific perspective.

Given that so extreme a message sets a new pole to the spectrum of debate on human sustainability, this book may just get a few wavering politicos to dare to do their job, but, given that it fails to encourage co-operative action among govts., business or the population in general, it seems more likely to re-inforce the Gadarene outlook of "Party On!" So while it's good to see Lovelock wholly undermine his own much-propagandized support for nuclear power (which to my mind our successors need like a hole in the head) on balance I think he's just getting rather senile.

[Heineken]

Lovelock's most important point is that global warming is happening with extraordinary speed. Most major change on a global scale happens so slowly that human beings couldn't notice it in one lifetime or even a dozen lifetimes. But the changes of global warming are now discernable to humans on almost a year-by-year basis. It's happening so fast and so unambiguously that even the neocons' propaganda on the issue is being silenced.

Also, I'm very much sold on the positive-feedback-loop subtheory, according to which warming begets more warming (for example, because of the loss of reflective ice fields or increases in bacterial activity in melting permafrost). Yes, maybe at some point it flips to global cooling, but by that time this civilization is kaput. We're not likely to have a convenient "flip" just in time to save our Friday night binges at McDonald's.

Backstop, the difference this time around, vis-a-vis your comment about paleoclimates, is that those eras lacked the massive human agent.

[Jack]

A most interesting article; the material in "Climate Crash" by Cox tends to support Lovelock's conclusions.

I cannot see cooperation developing as privation increases. We presently see millions dying of starvation, and we do nothing. Will we do more as we have less?

Thread about cooperation

[DantesPeak]

Climate Change Will Kill Billions This Century, Scientist Says

Jan. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Climate change will kill billions of people this century as the Earth warms, passing into a ``fever'' phase from which it may take 100,000 years to recover, James Lovelock, the scientist who propounded the ``Gaia'' theory, said.

Temperatures in temperate regions such as Europe and the U.S., will soar by 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, and those in the tropics will rise by 5 degrees as a result of man-made emissions, Lovelock wrote in today's Independent newspaper.

``We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma,'' Lovelock wrote. ``She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... world_news

[Wildwell]

If you look at:

1. Climate change

2. Peak oil and gas and later coal

3. Nuclear proliferation

4. The rise in developing nations, in particular China and India and the resources they will need to grow.

5. Geopolitical events

www.earth-policy.org/Books/PlanB_contents.htm


You can conclude it is almost certain the there will be complete societal collapse at some stage, maybe within the next 50 years unless people change their ways. All the signs are that they won’t, in fact quite the opposite.

More worryingly the ‘techno fixes’ have particular problems. With bio fuels you can kiss goodbye to the rain forests, making global warming worse. Increasingly there will be a pressure on food and water supplies, add nuclear proliferation to the toxic mix and with absolutely certainty with face a critical mass event in the near future. Business as usual will cease because circumstances are already, and will certainly in the future compel us to do something about the situation and unless that happens soon we all face a very bleak future full of dislocation, misery, failure and loss.

[sneak]

Backstop, I think Lovelock's anything but senile.

Conversely, he understanding the principle of non-linearity better than most, having devised Gaia control theory.

He seems to me to be simply calling the situation quite perspicaciously - there is absolutely no indication that we are collectively capable as a planet of making even a small percentage of the changes necessary to avert climatic breakdown. As we speak, Australian and US politicians are delighting in torpedoing the Kyoto agreement, the last flimsy chance we had at doing something concrete. Their answer? "New Technology!" I mean, the irony's beautiful in a way...

I admire your belief that global dialogue is still a possibility. How many scientific exhortations must there be though before action is taken? It's quite evident to many people that such changes are not forthcoming - at least not on any timescale meaningful to the climate change process. Every indicator we have is that the situation is getting radically worse - even as we exponentially increase carbon emissions, and encourage perpetual growth.

I want to believe too, I really do. But I think the time has come to face the facts. This planet is in deep, deep shit.

[Berkeley]

None of this, even in the worse case climate change scenarios, would happen so fast that humans would not have time to take emergency counter-warming measures - such as nuking the Sahara to provoke a mini nuclear winter. It's not very likely the big culprits, China, India, and the US, would just submit to broiling without using their technological powers. There are plenty of climate Dr Strangeloves around. I'm not suggesting it would work, but plenty of bizarre projects would be tried - just as we see with peak oil. Gaia is unlikely to get a clean revenge.

[pstarr]

None of this, even in the worse case climate change scenarios, would happen so fast that humans would not have time to take emergency counter-warming measures - such as nuking the Sahara to provoke a mini nuclear winter. It's not very likely the big culprits, China, India, and the US, would just submit to broiling without using their technological powers. There are plenty of climate Dr Strangeloves around. I'm not suggesting it would work, but plenty of bizarre projects would be tried - just as we see with peak oil. Gaia is unlikely to get a clean revenge.

is this some desperate attempt at optimism? or is it just more pro-technie, pro-human, monday-night hubris.

f#$k that sh#t, cap that mother-f*&king planet earth, sh%t b#tch is goin down

I really don't think it is appropriate to be setting up this particular challenge right here on Peakoil. I enjoy the site too much and would hate to loose it to an "unexpected" or "unexplained" natural phenomena

[EnergySpin]

I do not know if Lovelock is getting senile or not (he might be , who knows?) but:
a) if he is wrong, he has just shot down any initiatives to cooperate on emission caps which could really make a difference
b) if he is right, then it makes no difference whether we cap emissions or not.

Applying the old medical adage: "when confronted with 2 uncertain diagnoses, select the more favourable one" (and this is a rather uncertain situation, as both the existing paleoclimatologic evidence and the HadCM3 runs suggest) one should go for "option: we are not screwed yet" and push for something more drastic than Kyoto.

His call "every man for himself" is stupid, unless he is looking forward to a nuclear winter as a solution to GW.
In any case, the consequences of GW should be taken into account when planing for PO. After all, there is still plenty of coal around to make an 80C temperature change possible .

But if CC proves to be as bad as he says, one should question the rationality of decreasing power generation capacity. After all, unless we are talking about a Planet Venus final outcome then his suggestion that each nation/community "must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can" can only be realized with more carbon-free energy than less.

It is this realization that make me commit to nukular a couple of months ago

[Caswell]

'nuking the Sahara to provoke a mini nuclear winter.'

?????????

Just in case you're not joking, here's my commentary:

my understanding is that a nuclear winter would result from the sunlight being blocked out by the soot from thousands of incinerated towns, forests and woodland.

Last time I looked, sand didn't burn that readily.

[marika]

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

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commen ... 338830.ece

[KevO]

thanks for posting this.
great article, if 'great' is the appropriate word.
no doubt I'll get the book on Feb 2nd!

[strider3700]

Did anyone else here ever play simEarth?
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=984

I was about 14 when I played it first. When I wasn't busy trying to force dinosaurs or venus flytraps into being the sentient race I managed to figure out a few things.

- Lots of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and you get "mass extinctions occuring" as the planet slowly dies and life falls back a notch or two.

- Leave fossil fuel use high in the energy selection meter and when it starts to run out you get world wars.

- Leave nuclear poweruse high in the energy selection meter and it takes longer to run out but when it does you get nuclear war and nuclear winter

- The only ways to get your species to leave the planet(the end goal) was to either cheat with the 2001 monolith or drop fossil fuel and nuclear use down low early on and crank the solar and renewables graph until the final end when an energy push from fossil or nuclear would usually be enough to make it happen.

-plagues where annoying until you hit the information age when they could become lethal destroying most of your population.

- The planet always came back to life no matter what you did to it but quite often your dominant species was gone.


Every kid should have to play this game while at school.

I wish I could find a version of that game that actually plays on modern hardware. My disks are long since dead so I downloaded a copy but it doesn't run anyways.

[backstop]

Heineken -

I'd well agree that the scope of the info described in the article, and particularly the current acceleration of both warming and the destabilization of climate are really valuable inputs to the public debate.

The acceleration in particular brings the issue into the focus of politicians' term of office, especially if they aspire to 2 or 3 such terms.

That there will at some point be a massive cooling by negative feedbacks is only par for the course of the ecosphere's past conduct.
Given the evident reduction of the Gulf Stream it may be rather soon, or it may not be for a century - we have no way of telling.
But when that massive change occurs human ghg outputs will not noticeably offset it; on the contrary, the sheer climatic impact on society will itself hinder the extraction of further fossil fuels. (viz Katrina & GOM)

All we can do is establish the treaty, phase out fossil fuel dependence and maximize the sustainable banking of atmospheric carbon.
What luck we will have is imponderable.


Jack -

That we could do more for Africans now I well agree but, poor as they are, there's still iniquitous profit to be made from impoverishing them further.
The difference with the intensifying climate destabilization is that no nation, however wealthy, has any useful defences against its impacts (on food-production, water supply, storm & flood mayhem, lethal extremes of temperature, rising seas, etc).
In short we cannot rip off others' climate without ripping off our own.

Furthermore, we cannot negotiate the requisite mutual energy restructuring
without accomodating IIIW development - they simply won't sign up to the present ratio of consumption as a perpetual right of the currently wealthy. Hence Contraction & Convergence.

So yes, IMHO as privation increases, there is a strong prospect of international co-operation emerging to an unprecedented degree.
It is noticeable that the earlier that co-operation gets established at a productive level (as opposed to Kyoto gestures) the greater will be the avoidance of mutual privation.
Hence my critique of Lovelock for gratuitously generating apathy and exacerbating the difficulty of arousing public and political demand for that co-operation.


Wildwell -

for an overview of what used to be called the'problematique' I think you could add to the list the depletion of potable water and of fertile soils.



Sneak -

I may be entirely wrong about Lovelock getting senile, but it seems a large error of judgement for him to assist in the process of swathes of people moving directly from Denial to Apathy, rather than encouraging them to head into Resolution, regardless of what are the chances of success. Hence my complaint that calling such utter catastrophe inevitable is truly lousy politics.

As I've said elsewhere, it's not about what we think others will or won't do, what counts is what we ourselves are willing to do !


Energy Spin -

I like "Option; we are not screwed yet" -

The goal is not of course decreasing power generation capacity, but of restructuring to phase out unsustainable energy generation.
Lovelock verges on recommending BAUFALAP (Business-As-Usual-For-As-Long-As-Possible) on this point. Which would be a huge error to my mind -
No doubt his book will clarify quite what he meant by the "best use of its resources to sustain civilization . . . " statement.

I'm afraid I must continue to differ, amicably, with your faith in a "nookewlar" salvation - the more so in the light of the issues Lovelock raises over the collapse of this society -
Our succesors will need relatively simple, efficient, durable, locally maintained, carbon neutral and essentially safe energy systems.
Of these, Nookewlar is only durable, and that to an horrendous degree.

Regards,

Backstop

[Tanada]

'nuking the Sahara to provoke a mini nuclear winter.'

?????????

Just in case you're not joking, here's my commentary:

my understanding is that a nuclear winter would result from the sunlight being blocked out by the soot from thousands of incinerated towns, forests and woodland.

Last time I looked, sand didn't burn that readily.

Volcanic ash and meteor impact dust both have been shown to have a global dimming/cooling effect, the soot from the fires you mentioned is a much shorter term effect because the soot settles out reletively soon. Microscopic dust high in the stratosphere can stay suspended there for DECADES at a time, some of the fallout from Cold War tests of multi-megatone weapons are still circling the earth today.

[Heineken]

Backstop et al., I'd like to try to feel more optimistic about GW, but all the facts seem to point in the other direction, and they're multiplying and converging. There is almost no good news on the GW front and little prospect for any. The coup de grace will be dealt by coal. The world's use of coal will inevitably continue to escalate as oil and natural gas dwindle and become more expensive. And my gut feeling is that nuclear energy will not be offsetting, since it will prove unaffordable for large swaths of the world, particularly if we have the global recession/depression that I think is unavoidable.

I am not saying that I don't think we should try to ameliorate GW; it's a noble motion well worth going through. But I think it will fail for the reasons Lovelock presents. Also, there is much question whether humanity is capable of such unified and rational behavior.

No, I think aliens who visit the earth eons hence will conclude that our civilization was done in by heat pollution.

[agmart]

We will just have to build those smokestacks tall enough to reach the stratosphere. Let the SO2 from the powerplants block out the sun.

[sneak]

Backstop, I've thought a bit more about it, and I really do agree with you.

Lovelock has essentially given cause to individuals, corporations and countries to continue business as usual - which is an appalling prospect. Perhaps toward the end of his life, he's given in to defeatism - understandable, having spent 86 years on planet Earth, most of them in the 20th century.

I suppose I believe he's right...technically...but does that give him the right to direct people toward apathy? Probably not. As you say, there are too many imponderables to decree anything regarding the future with absolute certainty.

God, I really wonder where we'll all be in 30 years, y'know? I just turned 30 the other day, and it's really given me pause -- I'm going to be here, dealing with this, in the most real sense. I've got perhaps 50 years of productive life left - which takes us to 2056 - I can't even imagine the world then. What an extraordinary time to be alive.

But you're right, we can't give in fatalism.

Sneak

[Tanada]

Did anyone else here ever play simEarth?
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=984

I was about 14 when I played it first. When I wasn't busy trying to force dinosaurs or venus flytraps into being the sentient race I managed to figure out a few things.

- Lots of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and you get "mass extinctions occuring" as the planet slowly dies and life falls back a notch or two.

- Leave fossil fuel use high in the energy selection meter and when it starts to run out you get world wars.

- Leave nuclear poweruse high in the energy selection meter and it takes longer to run out but when it does you get nuclear war and nuclear winter

- The only ways to get your species to leave the planet(the end goal) was to either cheat with the 2001 monolith or drop fossil fuel and nuclear use down low early on and crank the solar and renewables graph until the final end when an energy push from fossil or nuclear would usually be enough to make it happen.

-plagues where annoying until you hit the information age when they could become lethal destroying most of your population.

- The planet always came back to life no matter what you did to it but quite often your dominant species was gone.


Every kid should have to play this game while at school.

I wish I could find a version of that game that actually plays on modern hardware. My disks are long since dead so I downloaded a copy but it doesn't run anyways.

I played it too, but like all the sim games it is far too simplistic. The game designers beleive in certain goals like renewable power so they preset game conditions to force them on you as the only viable option. High use of nuclear power does not automatically mean nuclear war, if it did France would be nuking people left and right. High fossil fuel use is our current scenario, will it lead to world war? I personally don't think so but it might. The sim however didn't give other results at random, it always lead to war war and more war. I think if we stick to fossil fuels we will shortly use up the majority of them and crash our civilization, how bad we crash depends on how hard we use them.

[backstop]

Heineken -

I wish I could persuade you of the simple accuracy of prefixing threats with "would" rather than "will", as evreyone's statements are dynamic in affecting others' expectations, morale and degree of useful action.

With regard to current news, having been working towards the treaty for many years I can honestly say that present news is not as good as at some periods, but much better than at others.
Particularly, even Americans are now escaping the imposed delusion of denial - which is a very big shift.

Re amelioration, I have to say that the best intentioned actions in America for conservation, efficiency and sustainable energy are of themselves irrelevant -
They won't save a single tonne of fossil fuel being burned (after it gets bought by China, India, Britain etc)
unless and until we have a global treaty allocating national carbon emission entitlements and the trading thereof.

This is not of course to knock those efforts for amelioration, but to clarify how they are actually of secondary importance compared to establishing the treaty.

regards,

Backstop