Product Description

For millennia, humankind has exploited the Earth without counting the cost. Now, as the world warms and weather patterns dramatically change, the Earth is beginning to fight back. James Lovelock, one of the giants of environmental thinking, argues passionately and poetically that, although global warming is now inevitable, we are not yet too late to save at least part of human civilization. This short book, written at the age of eighty-six after a lifetime engaged in the science of the earth, is his testament.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17660 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

About the Author
James Lovelock is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory). He has written three books on the subject: Gaia: a new look at life on Earth; The Ages of Gaia; Gaia: the practical science of planetary medicine; and an autobiography, Homage to Gaia. He has received many honorary degrees as well as being made Companion of Honour by the Queen in 2003. He has held posts at numerous universities both in the UK and the US and since 1994 has been an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Green College, University of Oxford.

Customer Reviews

Excellent and enlightening if a little sparse
I bought this book last night and had it finished within a few short hours. This is at the same time a compliment and a complaint. A compliment because it was a very good read and certainly made me want to keep reading. A complaint in that it is a very short book which is light in many areas. The overall Gaia theory is beautiful in its simplicity.

This book lays out how we have pushed the Earth so far and that it may well be too late to save our civilisation, not just in the West but world wide. It summarises the present understanding of Global Warming, previous climate change and where the world is heading now. The Author also delves into the potential solutions and gives some bad news to the proponents of renewable energy. It looks like they just won't be up to the job.

Anyway I highly recomend this book but be aware that it is light in detail.

The Biggest Issue we are facing
I was drawn to this book after hearing James Lovelock talking on Start the Week about the climate change we are facing and his proposed solutions.

This is a very good book and well worth reading. Lovelock exposes the full scale of the climate change situation we are facing and tries to bring the many disparate voices of the green movement into one clear direction that at least has a chance of preventing irreversible climate change.

Lovelock doesn't tries to bring in all the different ways in which we damage the planet and unlike many in the green movement doesn't take it as read that traditionally "green" ways of living are necessarility good for the planet. Specifically the misleading scientific results that present traditional "non-green" activities is a poor light.

One of the most interesting points for me was that the human obsession with reducing certain risks (from radiation, chemicals in food etc) to the bare minimum could well be the things that avoid us from saving the climate in which we live.

As Lovelock pointed out on the radio, if not in this book, the opportunities to avert irreversible climate change are rapidly running out and the risks from a nuclear power station are as nothing to the risks from permanent climate change.

Other reviwers have suggested that Lovelock might be looking at this from a UK perspective. I disagree. He's clearly looking from a world view and references he makes to the Devon countryside where he lives are not central to his argument. The people to suffer most from global warming will be some of the poorest in the world. His suggestion about nuclear power is only fair. We use the energy so we should bear the negative consequences of it's generation. He makes an eloquant case for why nuclear power is not the demon it made out to be. Incidently the BBC recently interviewed many locals around a Nuclear Power station and the locals were very supportive of it.

His case against renewables is equally compelling. Most of them just will not produce anything like the power that is required for modern living - even less so after the energy costs of building them is taken into account. Even bio fuels, he argues, would take around 5 times as much land area as the land currently used for crops. Ands he argues that the land used for crops is even too much - hence the need to be more efficient in our farming methods.

His case against organic farming is well argued in the light of the number of people that the planet can support. It's difficult to hear that organic farming methods might not be sustainable in the long term as they feel right. But if everyone lives off organic food and slowly killing the planet is it still a good thing?

Lovelock's critique of windmills is not based on them being German (as one reviwer suggested) but on the Danish experience of windmill technology, on the lack of reliability of wind now and on the quite possible scenario that our weather patterns change significantly with global warming thus making the windmills even less use than they are now.

For me the definition of a good book is to fundmentally change the way we look at the world and to open our eyes to a different approach which might hold more merit.

It opened my eyes to the way that climate change will effect every aspect of our way of life; the economy, the landscape, quality of life and even our democratic systems of government. I'm left wondering why the subjects raised in this book are not the main issue being discussed in the media.

Climate Change - we have little time left to act
Gaia, that self-regulating system consisting of the atmosphere, living things and the ecosystems that contain them, the oceans and the underlying rocks, is in danger. Such is the warning given us by James Lovelock.

The regulation works through what are called 'feedback' mechanisms, and in the glossary at the end of the book Lovelock gives an explanatory example of such mechanisms:

If the car we are driving deviates from the intended path, we adjust the wheels to try to cancel the deviation. The power steering amplifies our action (negative feedback). But if the steering mechanism was faulty and it increased the car's deviation from the chosen path, the initial error would be amplified (positive feedback).

The earth remains a suitable place for man and other living organisms through negative feedback. Unfortunately, the balance of Gaia is now being disturbed by positive feedback mechanisms: One example given by Lovelock concerns the melting of snow on land. This snow reflects almost all the sunlight that reaches it and thus helps to keep the world cool. But as the snow melts at the edges, the dark ground that is then at the surface absorbs much of the sunlight and gets warmer. The increase in ground warmth accelerates further snow melting.

Lovelock says that nearly all the processes that affect the climate of the earth are now in positive feedback, and he gives six examples of these processes. Together, these processes are likely to push Gaia quite suddenly from its present equilibrium to an equilibrium at a much hotter state, and this change beyond what Lovelock calls a 'tipping point' may occur soon.

If this happens - perhaps by the end of the present century - the climate of the world could then "be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive" (page 147).

Strong stuff. But this is not the language of some columnist in a popular newspaper. It is written by a scientist who for many years has explored the properties of Gaia. A member of the Royal Society, Lovelock has, according to his own web site, produced about 200 scientific papers spread almost equally among topics in medicine, biology, instrument science and geophysiology.

Lovelock is the author of the Gaia Theory which states (glossary page 162):
"A view of the earth that sees it as a self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving system. The theory sees this system as having a goal - the regulation of surface conditions so as always to be as favourable as possible for contemporary life. It is based on observations and theoretical models; it is fruitful and has made ten successful predictions".

In this book Lovelock gives the evidence for the theory, explains what is known of the regulatory mechanism, and looks at forecasts of how Gaia will behave in the present century; I have already written what Lovelock thinks may in fact happen.

How have we come to get into such a mess? Well Lovelock sees human population growth as the underlying cause of Gaia's problems:
"the root of our problems with the environment comes from a lack of constraint on the growth of population".

Lovelock discusses what we need to do now to avoid complete catastrophe. I will leave readers to find out for themselves what he proposes, apart from mentioning one thing he says, which I think may be paramount: "We need the people of the world to sense the real and present danger so that they will spontaneously mobilize and unstintingly bring about an orderly and sustainable withdrawal to a world where we try to live in harmony with Gaia".

This is a provocative book. Lovelock takes a swipe at 'affluent radicals', 'environmentalism' and 'Greens'. And unlike many, perhaps most environmentalists, he staunchly advocates nuclear power as the biggest ingredient in a future energy strategy portfolio designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as possible. I was myself one of those environmentalists who was against the use of nuclear power. But I have been convinced by Lovelock's arguments. He certainly makes it clear that biofuels could only make at most a modest contribution in the future, for to make even a fairly large contribution would require using all the land surface of the earth not already built up or used for agriculture.

I urge people to read this book.

Dr. J.F. Barker, Gaia Watch registered Charity