wisconsin_cur wrote:I apologize if this was posted elsewhere. I'll give the guy his props for being honest.
Lovelock, "I was a climate change alarmistJames Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.
Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared.
The moral: The things we talk about may be real. They may be a threat. But they are not as real or as threatening as our fearful imaginations tend to make them out to be.
THE idea that we live on a planet that takes care of us is intuitively appealing. So it's no wonder that James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis – that the biosphere acts like a living organism, one that self-regulates to keep conditions just right for life – became so popular. Although rooted in science, Gaia appeals to the same side of human nature that gods and guardian angels do.
It's a complex hypothesis, and was never going to be easy to test. But the evidence has been mounting since Lovelock put it forward 40 years ago, and now the first major review of that evidence has been conducted. The verdict? Gaia doesn't hold up (see "My verdict on Gaia hypothesis: beautiful but flawed").
Gaia may yet bounce back. But if it has been struck a fatal blow, it could be the most fitting example yet of what T. H. Huxley called "the great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact".
That's science. Some will lament the demise of a beautiful, comforting idea, but Gaia should be remembered for being an elegant hypothesis that stimulated vital research on what is now (inelegantly) called the Earth system. There will be no tragedy in its passing.
Graeme wrote:Gaia: The death of a beautiful ideaTHE idea that we live on a planet that takes care of us is intuitively appealing. So it's no wonder that James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis – that the biosphere acts like a living organism, one that self-regulates to keep conditions just right for life – became so popular.
SeaGypsy wrote:Taken to it's logical extreme, humanity's purpose under Gaia is to get the locked up Carbon out of the ground and back into circulation.
SeaGypsy wrote:'Gaia' does have a purpose- to sustain the requirements of life on Earth.
SeaGypsy wrote:The 'balance' in favor of LIFE. Whether defined as purposeful or not- it is contrary to entropy.
SeaGypsy wrote:Life, globally interactive- defined as 'Gaia'
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tanada wrote:Has Lovelock actually come out and said point blank that he based his Gaia concept on Eastern Mysticism rather than on the Earth Mother concept of ancient Greece?
Loki wrote:Tanada wrote:Has Lovelock actually come out and said point blank that he based his Gaia concept on Eastern Mysticism rather than on the Earth Mother concept of ancient Greece?
I listened to a couple interviews with him recently. The term Gaia was suggested to him by one his neighbors, novelist William Golding. He had already formulated the broad outlines of the theory before using the term Gaia. He developed the theory while working for NASA (or JPL?) and trying to figure out how it might be possible to determine if a planet had life on it. It had nothing to do with either Asian philosophy or ancient Greek mythology.
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