When was the last time you read a book that was at once terrifying, exhilarating, melancholic, immobilising, stimulating, uncompromising, aesthetically satisfying, relevant to you and not very long? Oh, and, that put you into a ferment of imagination?
I am reading one now. The Vanishing Face of Gaia (Penguin, 2009) is by James Lovelock, the man behind the Gaia hypothesis. This is the idea that the Earth and its living constituents together form a self-regulating whole that functions like a single organism. (Gaia is the Greek goddess of the Earth.)
The scientific point being that the biosphere, that is all living organisms, and the inorganic planet and atmosphere that surround them, constantly influence each other. We living creatures act on the Earth just as the Earth acts on us.
Big deal. What else is global warming?
Yes. But wait: the interaction is far older than humanity. Way back when life was young, the ocean became home to vast numbers of single-celled organisms that evolved photosynthesis. That is, they began to use the sun’s energy to make their own food from water and carbon dioxide, as plants still do. A byproduct of this process is oxygen. Those plants are the source of much of the oxygen in the air that we breathe.
Think of that plant-created oxygen, says Lovelock, as a destabilising factor for preexisting lifeforms. How did they survive on a planet whose atmosphere was changing rapidly? Well, they didn’t; they adapted or they went underground, literally, to places safe from oxygen.
In other words, when plants first started pumping out oxygen, it was “a poisonous, carcinogenic and fire-raising gas”. Then life evolved to benefit from it.
We could think similarly about carbon dioxide, says Lovelock. We are part of Gaia, and what we pump into it Gaia will adapt to, as it has before. It’s just that we may not be able to adapt.
This last point is the gist of his book. The metaphor in the title is hardly abstract. Humanity, says Lovelock, has very little time left for business-as-usual. Soon, as soon as 2100, most of us will be dead — because the Earth can and does make sudden (not gradual, predictable) shifts as part of a change in climate, as the evidence shows. And we are not prepared.
The pursuit of “green” business, Lovelock says, is a waste of time. The forecasts of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are way off the mark — because they come out of climate models worked by supercomputers that don’t take into account the myriad complexities of Gaia, organic and inorganic. The proof that the models are wrong is that they do not predict current observations. For instance, the sea level has risen 1.6 times faster since 1990 than the IPCC models predict.
Instead of going green, our governments should prepare us for catastrophe. Temperate regions like his native Britain, says Lovelock, annoyingly, will be relatively safe, like lifeboats for humanity. Crowded, hot countries like ours are doomed.
And so on. I give you the merest glimpse; Lovelock is lyrical and has a gift for the illustrative example. (For instance: visualise our Earth as a nuclear submarine sailing a cosmic ocean...)
Last month this world-famous, much-awarded scientist and writer turned 93. Earlier this year London’s Science Museum took possession of his papers and equipment to archive them for posterity. Meanwhile, shockingly and without much fuss, he has done a U-turn. We need not all be dead by 2100, he told a news channel in April. He had been “extrapolating too far”. A new book will lay out his fresh evidence.
I must say the news is a dreadful anticlimax.
Still, he was right about our unpreparedness. Really how ready is hot, overcrowded India for global warming? So far we have been content to view it as something for the government and NGOs to worry about. It isn’t.
