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THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Re: THE James Lovelock Thread (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Sun 03 Nov 2013, 21:33:17

I have heard people use the term CO2 thermostat but didn't associate it with Lovelock.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/lacis_01/
A study by GISS climate scientists recently published in the journal Science shows that atmospheric CO2 operates as a thermostat to control the temperature of Earth.

There is a close analogy to be drawn between the way an ordinary thermostat maintains the temperature of a house, and the way that atmospheric carbon dioxide (and the other minor non-condensing greenhouse gases) control the global temperature of Earth. The ordinary thermostat produces no heat of its own. Its role is to switch the furnace on and off, depending on whether the house temperature is lower or higher than the thermostat setting. If we were to carefully monitor the temperature of the house, we would see that the temperature does not stay constant at the set value, but rather exhibits a "natural variability" as the house temperature slips below the set value and then overshoots the mark with a time constant of minutes to tens of minutes, because of the thermal inertia of the house and because heating by the furnace (when it is on) is more powerful than the steady heat loss to the outdoors. If the thermostat is suddenly turned to a very high setting, the temperature will begin to rise at a rate dictated by the inertia of the house and strength of the furnace. Turning the thermostat back to normal will stop the heating.
That was from the NASA web page updated in 2010 so maybe Lovelock picked up the terminology when he was associated with NASA?
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread (merged)

Unread postby dorlomin » Sun 30 Mar 2014, 14:24:44

James Lovelock: environmentalism has become a religion

Oh dear, some of his fans from back in the day will be beside themselves.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Sun 30 Mar 2014, 14:37:32

d - Environmentalism a religion? Only fair IMHO since so many worship at the Holy Shrine of Spindle Top and the Alter of Ghawar. LOL.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Sun 30 Mar 2014, 16:28:09

Its kind of like Mat Savinar used to say before he parted ways, almost everyone worships oil whether they know it or not.

As I pointed out to my spouse this morning, the fact that we can take a ton of vehicle and two passengers at 30 miles an hour for 50 miles using $4.00 worth of gasoline is incredible compared to what it would have cost us 200 years ago to move the same thing 50 miles in three days. Petroleum and other fossil fuel are incredibly energy dense compared to muscle power, which is if we are honest about it what they replaced everywhere except at sea where wind was the main driving force.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby Lore » Sun 30 Mar 2014, 16:57:10

A bit strange coming from a guy that promotes the concept of the Gaia hypothesis. I believe that Lovelock, in the end, just wants to be the hero of his own story.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby joewp » Sun 30 Mar 2014, 17:06:45

Lore wrote:A bit strange coming from a guy that promotes the concept of the Gaia hypothesis. I believe that Lovelock, in the end, just wants to be the hero of his own story.


I think he wants a payday from the fossil fuel industry in GB.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby dorlomin » Sun 30 Mar 2014, 17:44:39

Lovelock sat in front of the US congress in the mid 70s and declared CFCs would not damage the ozone layer. The two scientists on the other side Molina and Rowland won the Nobel prize for saying he was wrong. He is personal good mates with the Global Warming Policy Foundation head honcho Lord Lawson.

I suspect Lore is right, he is someone whos self image is built around being a rebel and courting controversy.

He has some brilliant ideas and some plumb duffers. A very good instrument technician but not so good a geophysicist.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby Synapsid » Sun 30 Mar 2014, 18:44:58

Lovelock is also about 95 years old, and if I'm anything to go by we should give him a little slack.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby ennui2 » Mon 31 Mar 2014, 09:07:07

Just because he predicts doom doesn't mean his prescriptions are going to be what people would prefer. When push comes to shove, he's a pragmatist and his intention is to keep people alive in the now even if it pushes us off the cliff a little harder than it would otherwise.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby Plantagenet » Mon 31 Mar 2014, 19:19:34

joewp wrote:
Lore wrote:A bit strange coming from a guy that promotes the concept of the Gaia hypothesis. I believe that Lovelock, in the end, just wants to be the hero of his own story.


I think he wants a payday from the fossil fuel industry in GB.


Lovelock is 95 years old and has spent his entire career as an independent scientist precisely so he doesn't have to kowtow to anyone. The last thing he is looking for is a "payday."

Lovelock is a brilliant man who says what he thinks. Good for him

Lovelock calls for frakking in the UK and replacement of coal with NG to slow global warming
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Sun 31 Jul 2022, 23:21:39

Farewell James Lovelock, the green icon who turned his back on modern environmentalism

As the British research vessel RRS Shackleton steamed toward Antarctica in 1971, scientist James Lovelock was a familiar presence on deck along with his invention: an ultrasensitive instrument that could detect virtually any trace of pollutants and other environmental toxins.

Even in the most remote reaches of the South Atlantic, Dr. Lovelock’s device found that the air carried chlorofluorocarbons then used in aerosols, refrigerants and other commercial applications.

It was a moment where the major threads of Dr. Lovelock’s groundbreaking work and theories began to braid into one. He was already exploring his hypothesis that Earth itself is a fully interwoven ecosystem — “like a gigantic living thing” — that can self-regulate to sustain life.

The readings from the ship brought a sharper edge to his Gaia theory, named after the Greek goddess who personified the Earth. It showed no place on the planet was untouched by man-made threats to the environment, findings that helped launch Dr. Lovelock’s reputation as a planetary caretaker with an ailing patient.

“The biosphere and I are both in the last 1% or our lives,” Dr. Lovelock told the Guardian in 2020. It was an environmental warning repeated in many variations during a more than 80-year career of remarkable scientific range and originality — winning widespread praise as a visionary and scorn as a doomsday fatalist.

These overlapping roles — inventor, researcher, moralist, provocateur — were worn with pride by Dr. Lovelock, who died July 26 at his home in Abbotsbury, on England’s southwest Dorset coast, on his 103rd birthday.
James Lovelock's work: Climate change personified

British journalist Jonathan Watts called Dr. Lovelock the “Forrest Gump of science”: turning up at just the right times to have major influences on the environmental studies and the understanding of climate change and the interconnectivity of the world’s ecosystem.

“He was the ultimate big thinker on the subject,” said Watts, the global environmental editor of the Guardian who is writing a biography of Dr. Lovelock.

Dr. Lovelock used his sweeping Gaia theory as an entry point for specific challenges to ease a planet under stress. He broke with eco-allies to promote nuclear power, and backed agro-giant farming and genetic modifications for more sustainable crops. He shrugged off policies on renewable energy and carbon-cutting goals as too incremental. Just “faffing around,” he said.

In the end, it’s up to humanity to make huge and revolutionary accommodations to live with Earth — “an ultra-high-tech, low-energy civilization,” he wrote — or the planet to find a way to live without humans.

“The question is not how humanity can retain its planetary dominance, which was always an illusion,” Dr. Lovelock wrote in “The Revenge of Gaia” (2006), part of a series of “Gaia” books over four decades. “It is whether humanity can use science and technology to mount a sustainable retreat.”
Inventor from necessity

James Ephraim Lovelock was born in Letchworth Garden City, about 30 miles north of London, on July 26, 1919. He lived his first years with his grandparents, then joined his parents in London’s Brixton Hill, where his father ran an art shop and his mother worked in the town offices.

He said his early interest in nature came from hikes in the Hertfordshire hills with his father, who taught him the names of various plants and bugs. Dr. Lovelock graduated from the University of Manchester in 1941 during World War II, but he was given conscientious objector status because of his family’s pacifist Quaker beliefs.
This time we've pushed Earth too far, says James Lovelock

He joined the government-run Medical Research Council, where he would spend the next two decades while working toward a doctorate in medicine in 1949 at the University of London. As he took on more projects, he realized the equipment of the era was not up for the tasks. So he designed his own, leading to more than 60 patents ranging from a method to freeze bull sperm to a blood-pressure gauge for scuba divers.

In 1957, he hit on his most far-reaching invention: the electron capture detector, a portable device that looked a bit like a hose nozzle and could detect infinitesimal evidence of man-made chemicals such as pesticides. It was among the most important analytical instruments of the 20th century, likened by French philosopher Bruno Latour to Galileo’s telescope but peering inside our planet rather than to the heavens.

The detector’s data became part of the scientific underpinnings for Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” which helped launch the environmental movement, and later were cited in the banning of chemicals such as pesticide DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, in some countries.

The device, fitted with a gas chromatograph, was with Dr. Lovelock on his Antarctic voyage, and his findings helped confirm links between chlorofluorocarbons and the hole in the ozone layer. (Chlorofluorocarbons have been banned in most countries, including the United States.)

At the dawn of the space race in 1961, Dr. Lovelock was recruited by NASA for projects that included looking for life on Mars. The first stirrings of the Gaia theory came as Dr. Lovelock and a colleague at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., noticed the stability of the atmospheres on Mars and Venus, while Earth was “in a deep state of disequilibrium,” he wrote in “Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine” (1991).

“It was that moment that I glimpsed Gaia,” Dr. Lovelock wrote in 1991. “An awesome thought came to me.” A neighbor in England, “Lord of the Flies” author William Golding, suggested wrapping the ideas around the name of the Greek goddess.

Dr. Lovelock began unveiling the theory in the late 1960s in academic papers and conferences. The response was mostly dismissive. Some researchers rejected the contention that ecosystems — from subterranean bacteria to the ice crystals of the stratosphere — could work in some grand network. Evolutionary researchers said it ran counter to the laws of natural selection.

Others wrote off Dr. Lovelock as pushing Age of Aquarius quasi-science with a gloss of Earth Mother spirituality.

“I have a suspicion that the Earth behaves like a gigantic living thing,” Dr. Lovelock said in a 1969 speech, echoing an 18th-century forerunner, Scottish geologist James Hutton, who described the planet as a “superorganism.”

A few colleagues, among them evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, became early acolytes and helped bring Gaia into widespread acceptance and the bedrock principles of a discipline known as earth system science.
Lynn Margulis, leading evolutionary biologist, dies at 73

Dr. Lovelock remained a tireless champion of Gaia, giving interviews just weeks before his death. He favored simple analogies to explain what he saw as a world on the brink. One story was his imagined Daisy World: The hypothetical planet’s black daisies absorb light and warm the planet; the white daisies reflect light and keep it planet cool; a change in the balance could be catastrophic.

He married Sandra Orchard in 1991. In addition to his wife, he is survived by four children from his first marriage to Helen Hyslop, who died in 1989; and grandchildren.

At a lecture in 2011, he said he had no plans to retire because of the urgency of climate change. “The need to do something about it now,” he said.

His final years, in a cottage near the sea, were spent vacillating between optimism about mankind’s resilience and dread about its refusal to deal with the perils at hand.

“The Gaia hypothesis is for those who like to walk or simply stand and stare, to wonder about the Earth and the life it bears, and to speculate about the consequences of our own presence here,” he wrote in “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth,” his seminal 1979 book. “It is an alternative to that pessimistic view which sees nature as a primitive force to be subdued and conquered.”


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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 01 Aug 2022, 07:41:38

RIP
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby Doly » Mon 01 Aug 2022, 14:36:39

Oh dear, some of his fans from back in the day will be beside themselves.


You have to admit that he was right that the environmental movement is pretty much a religion these days. What he didn't mention is that we have lots of religions these days. Political ideologies function as religions. Capitalism functions as a religion. Even atheism functions as a religion, ironically enough. What we are seeing today seems to be a battle of the various gods. I expect none of the old gods to win. We are probably seeing some new ones develop, but we don't fully see yet what they are like because we are too close to the action.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 01 Aug 2022, 16:00:58

^ ahmen to that.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby FamousDrScanlon » Mon 01 Aug 2022, 16:22:51

Lovelock was wrong, Peter Ward is right. Earth's mom is Medea and she is going to kill all her children before this century is out. She has some extra hurt in store for her disbelieving kids (climate deniers) even though it's not their fault they do not get it (intelligence is hereditary).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_hypothesis
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby AdamB » Mon 01 Aug 2022, 17:51:41

Doly wrote:
Oh dear, some of his fans from back in the day will be beside themselves.


You have to admit that he was right that the environmental movement is pretty much a religion these days. What he didn't mention is that we have lots of religions these days. Political ideologies function as religions. Capitalism functions as a religion. Even atheism functions as a religion, ironically enough.


Were you ever a Peak Oil congregation member Doly, or was oil just part and parcel of your overall energy modeling interest?
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby Doly » Wed 03 Aug 2022, 14:25:48

Were you ever a Peak Oil congregation member Doly, or was oil just part and parcel of your overall energy modeling interest?


I don't know how you define "peak oil congregation member". If you are asking whether I was a regular poster, yes, absolutely, just look at the number of posts on my profile. And if you are asking what came first, interest in peak oil or interest in modelling, they sort of merge. I've been interested in modelling since I first learned what computer models are, and the book where I learned first about computer models contained a chapter on the Limits to Growth model. I didn't think about making my own tweaks on the Limits to Growth model or doing much on energy modelling till I became aware of peak oil, though.
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Re: THE James Lovelock Thread Pt 2 (merged)

Unread postby AdamB » Wed 03 Aug 2022, 18:33:03

Doly wrote:
Were you ever a Peak Oil congregation member Doly, or was oil just part and parcel of your overall energy modeling interest?


I don't know how you define "peak oil congregation member".


A comment denoting congregation members in The Church Of Peak Oil. Churches have religious symbols (bell shaped curve), they read the dogma required of them (Hubbert's work, Campbell, Jean, Energy Bulletin, TOD, etc etc), they sit together in pews and sing the same song, they excommunicate members who dare to question the dogma, and when the comet passes, or the Mayan calendar end comes and goes, or Yellowstone doesn't explode, or multiple peak oils come and go and no one seems bothered, fewer people show up on Sunday, the songs are sung less enthusiastically, and pretty soon only the prophets remain..and sometimes..not even them.

Doly wrote: If you are asking whether I was a regular poster, yes, absolutely, just look at the number of posts on my profile. And if you are asking what came first, interest in peak oil or interest in modelling, they sort of merge.


Studying peak oil doesn't make you a church member any more than I. I didn't even realize the concept was primarily faith based until I had studied it for a bit, and began using that information to ask questions, and realized what type of folks I was dealing with.

Doly wrote: I've been interested in modelling since I first learned what computer models are, and the book where I learned first about computer models contained a chapter on the Limits to Growth model. I didn't think about making my own tweaks on the Limits to Growth model or doing much on energy modelling till I became aware of peak oil, though.


So, maybe you are more of an honest peak oiler, without the baggage that comes with the church members. I didn't model much of anything beyond project economics and whatnot in the first half of my industry career. The last half was where I was introduced to oil and gas reserve and resource modeling, first doing corporate acquisitions and modeling financing and revenue expectations, later as part of a multi-billion dollar bankruptcy proceeding. Someone had to try and get our 40 million dollars from those bankruptcy filing corporate thieves! So, happy go lucky and maybe 30 years of age I was given a pep talk and sent into battle. Fantastic learning experience, modeling, geology, values of everything, court dictated calculations for damage estimates. It was the first time I managed a multi-disiplinary team of engineers, geologists and consultants, and even more importantly was handed a corporate credit card and told to get the fastest machine I needed to put my computer skills to use. First machine I ever custom ordered, and used to build all my engineering, geologic, automated operational reporting routines, and cash flow models. Played Doom a bunch after business hours as well. Later I moved on to bigger and better things in my next career path.
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