James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change

Good grief, more fostering of stark extremes....

Frustrated Mess wrote:

George Victor wrote:

There you go, all anal and agitated again, FM.  You have nothing to say on the revelation about the effect of bad science at the time of the ozone hole controversy?   Oh, forgot, mustn't meddle with the virtuous in their moral ascendancy. 

Holier than thou, by the way, is saying that others were not concerned with the terrible effects of Chernobyl. You condemn Lovelock for his superior tone, but he is no match for your image of self.  

It was HIS bad science you dope. He invented the device to detect the CFCs. He was the one who recognized CFCs everywhere. He is the one who reported CFCs as being prevalent. He made the bad scientific finding, based on no evidence but his own belief, that CFCs were of "no conceivable hazard".

Jesus! Are you truly this obtuse? Now leave me alone.

Actually it wasn't just his belief or bad science. I give Lovelock credit for showing that CFCs are pervasive and do not break down in the troposhpere. That lead to Rowland and Molina's work in the early '70s that they were eventually awarded the Noble prize for (shared with Cruzen). I have no idea what Lovelock is talking about when he is comparing the science of ozone depletion to the science of climate change, as his opinion does not seem to be based on anything concrete about either, especially given the investigations that have exonerated Jones and Mann. The "ozone hole" over the Antarctic wasn't recognized until the mid '80s, so there was still some question prior to then as to how serious the problem was. I don't know when he testified at Senate hearings.

His comments about the state of climate science are ridiculous. There are uncertainties about the impact of clouds and aerosols, but I don't think that they would give climatologists nightmares, unlike say methane clathrates.

Policywonk wrote:

Actually it wasn't just his belief or bad science. I give Lovelock credit for showing that CFCs are pervasive and do not break down in the troposhpere. That lead to Rowland and Molina's work in the early '70s that they were eventually awarded the Noble prize for (shared with Cruzen). I have no idea what Lovelock is talking about when he is comparing the science of ozone depletion to the science of climate change, as his opinion does not seem to be based on anything concrete about either, especially given the investigations that have exonerated Jones and Mann. The "ozone hole" over the Antarctic wasn't recognized until the mid '80s, so there was still some question prior to then as to how serious the problem was. I don't know when he testified at Senate hearings.

His comments about the state of climate science are ridiculous. There are uncertainties about the impact of clouds and aerosols, but I don't think that they would give climatologists nightmares, unlike say methane clathrates.

It wasn't just, but that was certainly a big part of it. Look, if you were a scientist, who developed an instrument to detect CFCs in the atmosphere, found them plentiful, and then embarked on a partially self-funded mission to Antarctica, and again found them in abundance, would you conclude, "oh, no big deal," or would you wonder, "what is the impact?"

And it is not just on that question. Lovelock's history is replete with the sorts of unfounded, kneejerk judgments that are anathema to good science (revisionism notwithstanding)  which requires a mind that is always open. And, of course, it is not just there. I'm not sure in which of the linked articles above you will find it, but Lovelock informs us the UN was founded to dissemble the British Empire. Once you get past the absurdity of that rather nationalistic conspiracy theory, your next question might be, but why would he want to preserve the British Empire, founded on violence and colonialism? Perhaps because, as befitting his class, he supports the idea of Empire and the British Empire in particular.

There is another quote, not linked above, where he glorifies war-what a great time it was. For him. The many victims might disagree.

I don't dispute Lovelock can be brilliant. But for those easily given to hero worship and quick to drink from the kool aid, he is a poor choice of messiah. There are great thinkers out there who believe we can change the world, who believe a fate of catastrophic climate change need not be inevitable, who believe social justice, environmental justice, and truth are not alien to one another. Lovelock is not one of those people.

Lovelock is a schill for industry, nuclear power, what was and what shall never be again. He is a living fossil. He has a long record of being wrong and fully intends to extend it to his last living breath.

I am a fatalist. But I believe that comes from not believing in a silver bullet nor techno fixes nor fairy dust. I believe the end of hope is not necessarily despair, but action. Lovelock preaches a message of inevitable destruction. He dismisses renewables, dismisses the harm of nuclear and the souls of the Chernobyl dead, and offers a faustian bargain: "Yes, hell is your future but the path there can be well lit and warmed with cheap, plentiful nuclear energy". I reject his deal with the devil. I reject his claim to the credentials of those he despises, environmentalists. And I reject his alliance with an industry that would gladly pave the road to the hell he would have us travel.

I would rather go down fighting in the dark and cold than sit in the cold comfort of Lovelock's dystopian future of nonchalantly pushing the sick and drowning from the lifeboat HMS Great Britain.

You folks have only read the press releases of his critics.  You have turned him upside down, FM, and like Pw, I suspect you are animated largely by his support of nuclear as an alternative to burning fossil fuels in an attempt to save the lifestyle which, I'm sure, you all enjoy, without apology - but which you pretend to believe can be preserved by wind and sun on a deadly calm January night, in this northern latitude.   

The hypocricy is yours, Pw, until you can make as honest an attempt as Lovelock does to explain to us how we can find our way gradually into that future period when only a billiion of our species lives a sustainaable lifestyle on a planet that Lovelock says we have made very ill (he was  trained first as a medical scientist, and his writing is full of medical analogies).  Your science undoubtedly will tell us that our saviour is hatching in the mind of someone at the Perimeter Institute, here in the valley of the Grand.Sure hope it hatches any day now - before the icewater reaches the incubator.  But that's just Waiting for Godot, the public theatre fed as a sop to the peasantry to replace the pre-Darwinian dependence on a Maker.

But carry on with your attack.  The scientific community out there is waiting with bated breath for the next instalment of your alternative visions.

In the closing paragraphs of the chapter, "The Contemporary Environment" in the 1988 edition of The Ages of Gaia, Lovelock writes: "It may turn out that I was very wrong to have opposed those who sought instant legislation to stop the emission of CFCs. I regard the strange phenomenon over the south polar regions as a warning of other more serious surprises yet to come. It seems possible that other changes, including the concomitant increase of CO2 and methane from hman industry and agriculture, are responsible for the extra effect of chlorine compounds in polar regions, but there is little doubt in my mind that without the chlorine from industrial gases there would be no thinning of the ozone layer at the South Pole.  The CFCs and other industrial halocarbons have increased by 500 percent since I first measured them in 1971 (ed. in parts per trillion). They were harmless then, but now there is too much halocarbon gas in the air. The first symptoms of poisoning are now felt. I now (ed. 1988) join with those who would regulate the emissions of the CFCs and other carriers of chlorine to the stratosphere.

"To return to our clinical analogy...Could fears about the CFCs and the ozone layer have presaged discovery of the ozone hole and the climate-threatening greenhouse effect of CFCs?"

Not a bad mia culpa...but quite wasted on the anti-nuclear-at-any-cost "scientists" out there, even as polar ice goes by the board.

And why do you suppose I "posted the Guardian quotes"?   So as not to let the old guy be hung by people who unfairly vilify him, and who do so without offering one goddam alternative.   You who accuse him of hypocricy must have found a way to live with your own. You "think"   there are very good economic, social, and environmental reasons for opposing nuclear power expansion in favour of renewable energy and conservation...       So the base load challenge to solar and wind in mid-winter Canada has been solved. 

What twaddle.  

William M. Connolley, software engineer:

WUWT reader Dennis Kuzara wrote to Wikipedia in response to our earlier article on Wikibullies prompted by Lawrence Solomon of the National Post. He has received an eye-opening reply. Emphasis mine - Anthony
=================
Wikipedia replies
notable excerpt:
> > 4. Has William Connolley been removed as a Wikipedia administrator? If so who has taken his place?
In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley's administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming. This has now been added to his article
You can find dependable sources like that in any comic book, Transplant. Got any serious sources?

ad hominem! but that makes two so-called experts on this board with their credibility questioned!

George Victor wrote:

You can find dependable sources like that in any comic book, Transplant. Got any serious sources?

Poor George, hit nerve did I?

Actually, it had nothing to do with nuclear energy that convinced me that Lovelock is a fraud. I was already considering the nuclear arguments due more cogent and reasoned ones put forward by Howard Kunstler in the Long Emergency. Kunstler doesn't greenwash nuclear energy's toxic legacy nor does he whitewash the tragedy of Chernobyl nor does he pretend nuclear is clean energy. Rather, he argues simply, we can journey into the long emergency (the decline of cheap fossil fuel energy) with the lights on or the lights off.

I have listened to the proponents of nuclear and I am not convinced. I'm not convinced because there are the arguments that if nuclear is adopted to the extent it is being sold, uranium will become scarcer than light, sweet crude and potentially on a steeper curve; that nuclear means the end of coal no less than does wind or solar or any combination, and; franklly, when nuclear blows up it does so on an epic scale.

But am I religiously against nuclear, no? I just agree it is the most expensive and potentially dangerous way to boil water.

No, what convinced me Lovelock is a fraud was his absolute arrogance. I love the quote above: ""It may turn out that I was very wrong to have opposed those who sought instant legislation to stop the emission of CFCs."

Is that not beautiful? Has it not turned out so yet? Is the old fraud still denying the science? He says, "I was very wrong to have opposed" legislation. What legislation? In what way did he exercise his opposition? On whose behalf? The old fraud just told us he was politically, in some capacity, opposing regulating CFCs with legislation he calls "instant". Has any harmful industrial substance ever been banned "instantly"? How did CFCs get approved as benign? I bet that was closer to instant.

His language is still political and still dismissive but without evidence; just a lot of "maybes". What about the precautionary principle? Even if there was an argument about the harm of CFCs, Lovelock himself detected their prevalence. But what evidence was there they were not at all harmful? That evidence didn't exist.

That is just a hint of his arrogance. The further I got into his book the more annoyed I became and it wasn't his arguments. They're not really arguments at all. They are merely statements of fact presented as truth because they came from the pen of Lovelock. Who could argue with the pen of Lovelock? It was his arrogance and his enmity with anyone and everyone not up the ass of the industry to which he appears heavily indebted that was annoying. Everyone.

Read again from the New York Review of Books and remember these words belong to a professional reviewer I don't know, have never met, and swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster I have not influenced in any way whatsoever:

Quote:

One of the strongest impressions one gets from The Vanishing Face of Gaia is that Lovelock disagrees with almost everyone ... Yet ... there's no overt criticism of the deceit of the coal and oil industries, which continue to pollute unabated.

His arrogance goes much further. And not just his arrogance but his sense of privilege and entitlement. And that is what really drove me around the bend. He came across to me as a petulant, rich, old man, confronting his mortality and deciding he has the money go to comfortably even if the rest of you be damned.

Now he thinks he recognizes the mortality of the Earth, and he has decided he and the Great White Skinned North have the money to go comfortably and the global south, who paid for that comfort, be damned. Yes, that is the argument that pisses me off to no end.

First, it is not the planet's mortality that is in sight it is our species. And second, no one can predict, not even the Almighty Fraudulent One, how climate change will play out. Yes, the Arctic will melt. But at what rate? How soon can methane emitting permafrost become crop producing on an industrial scale? What will be the rate of change? What if there is a tipping point that sees the planet enter into a new climate state that reduces all species 90 per cent as has happened previously? It is all a guess.

Third, and lastly, we are not so entitled and we are not so privileged that we can condemn 80 per cent of the planet's population with a mere shrug. We caused the problem, we ought to damn well be solving it and a big part of that is dramatically changing our own behaviours and reducing our own living standards to what is sustainable.

And that is the crux of Lovelock's argument for nuclear. It is not an argument like Kunstler's who looks down a long, dark tunnel and argues it's best to use whatever light we can generate. It is an argument that he, and his lovely wife, I'm sure, need not be inconvenienced and put upon by the annoyances of brownouts and blackouts while enjoying an evening on the balcony with a spot of tea.

There are people all over the world who live in a mortal darkness by day and a literal darkness by night. They know only hunger and fear and climate change, for them, is already real.

If the planet was the Titanic Lovelock is traveling first class and has a seat reserved on a lifeboat. For the rest of you poor Irish in steerage:  glug, glug, glug ...

FM: "No, what convinced me Lovelock is a fraud was his absolute arrogance. I love the quote above: ""It may turn out that I was very wrong to have opposed those who sought instant legislation to stop the emission of CFCs."

Is that not beautiful? Has it not turned out so yet? Is the old fraud still denying the science? Also, he says, "I was very wrong to have opposed" legislation. What legislation? In what way did he exercise his opposition? On whose behalf? The old fraud just told us he was politically, in some capacity, opposing legislation to regulate CFCs with legislation he calls "instant". His language is still political and still dismissive but without evidence; just a lot of "maybes". What about the precautionary principle? Even if there was an argument about the harm of CFCs, Lovelock himself detected their prevalence, but what evidence was there they were not at all harmful? That evidence didn't exist."

I took great pains to note (3 times) that he was writing in 1988...that's damned near a quarter century, FM.

And yes, we've both read Kunstler...and he leaves us with some hope (nice trout in those upstate NY streams too). And you and I have also gone into depth in comparing notes on Jeff Rubin's Why Your World Is..... And that, too, unfolds very naturally as an extension of the present after fossil fuels run out. Hell, we even rebuild our indistrual economy because its going to be too costly to most those container ships across the Pacific. But, jeez, what if China goes nuclear with its shipping too...you know, like the oil tanker Manhattan that Uncle Sam sailed across the "Canadian" Arctic ...what was it, four decades or more ago? And we also know about the daily deprivation of a billion people out there (and at home) who go to bed very hungry, and I'm for revolution. But a few more people have to believe there's a big environmental problem facing us, first. And then there's the Irish of 1847...but I'm not exactly sure why they were placed here when the Satanic Mills of Britain would have done as well. Or elsewhere. Throw a dart. Damned snotty English country gents anyway. He did try to protect the hedrerows against the destructive forces of large scale agriculture though, you'll recall as a reader. Something about preserving bird life to do away with insects rather than....oops, abut then a half century back he though Silent Spring was a bit over the top, too. Jeez, they should have just shot him on the spot. Such contradictions over a lifetime. Ah well , we can't all be perfect.

George Victor wrote:

j.m. wrote:

ad hominem! but that makes two so-called experts on this board with their credibility questioned!

Have you bothered to read what Connelley did?  The bastard is psychotic, unpalatable even to the National Post.

What is the exquisite meaning that one should draw from "ad hominem! but that makes two so-called experts.... "    just what in hell are you attempting to say in rebuttal to the exposure of someone who corrupted so many hundreds of Wiki entries?   Are you well?

A history of mental illness, but other than that I'm fine thanks!

So let me get this straight:

We have two academics being discussed here. One acts as an authoritarian in knowledge production on his field of study. The other one uses his prestige from knowledge production to unproblematically espouse authoritarian politics, which lay well outside his expertise.

And I should only be concerned with the smell of one's shit?

Pw, if you are ready to dam all of the waterways with a head of more than 20 feet, you are indeed into serious (but completely unreasonable) territory. And the matter of storage of electricity...that is a broken reed that NO reputable scientist advocates...there is not even a reasonable basis in physics for belief that his has any hope of development.  Lovelock is talking about the real world that we have allowed to develop based on capitalism's thirst for growth...indeed, economic theory demands that we grow or "perish" (as a market economy).

I taught courses in solar thermal building design, and was the first chairman of a local chapter of the Solar Energy Society of Canada, Inc. , a third of a century back. Was involved right up to my doodads in attempts to introduce PRACTICAL innovative energy sources into a society that did not give a fiddler's fart  except about "what's in it for me?"  And of course, compared with what the market could do for them over the same time frame, the answer was "not so much."

You mistake untested "ideas" for practical answers, and the rational demands of Capitalism do not allow us to to go off into speculative never never land physics in that fashion.

And yes, that quotattion I provided from Lovelock's The Ages of Gaia, was written in 1988, and I'm sure that's  about as close as you'll get to reading the work with which he revolutionized science's views of the role of biota in maintaining Earth's thermal balance.

George Victor wrote:

 Lovelock is talking about the real world that we have allowed to develop based on capitalism's thirst for growth...indeed, economic theory demands that we grow or "perish" (as a market economy).

 

Actually, he's not. He's talking about his own rarified world he wishes to perpetuate. And speaking of perpetuating, where has Lovelock disowned that capitalistic "thirst for growth or perish" economic system? I'm not sure he has. In fact, I'd bet he still receives dividends from it.

Quote:

He did try to protect the hedrerows against the destructive forces of large scale agriculture though, you'll recall as a reader.

He did? How? By researching efficiencies in agriculture? Plowing from hedgerow to hedgerow? What did he do to stop the destruction of the hedgerows?

He is a fraud.

You are no longer attempting to speak from evidence, FM. 

This has become one helluva learning experience for me.  Dealing with diehard ideologues is an exhilerating if surreal and depressing experience. Just when you think there's hope through rational discourse. 

George Victor wrote:

This has become one helluva learning experience for me.  Dealing with diehard ideologues is an exhilerating if surreal and depressing experience. Just when you think there's hope through rational discourse. 

He wouldn't know a diehard ideologue if one came up and bit him, nor rational discourse.

Frustrated Mess wrote:

It was HIS bad science you dope. He invented the device to detect the CFCs. He was the one who recognized CFCs everywhere. He is the one who reported CFCs as being prevalent. He made the bad scientific finding, based on no evidence but his own belief, that CFCs were of "no conceivable hazard".

Lots of people thought CFCs were safe. They were created as a non-toxic, stable alternative to ammonia for refrigeration. They aren't reactive on their own so chemists felt justified in saying it was so. The truth had to wait for the research done by Molina and Rowland in 1974 (Lovelock's detection was in 1971) that considered what happens when CFCs get to the stratosphere.

The bad guy, in the books of the pathetic:

James Lovelock

Scientist, inventor and author

James Lovelock is the author of more than 200 scientific papers, distributed almost equally among topics in Medicine, Biology, Instrument and Atmospheric Science and Geophysiology. He has applied for more than 40 patents, mostly for detectors for use in chemical analysis. James Lovelock's most notable scientific work is the Gaia theory, now generally accepted under the name Earth System Science, and the discovery in l972 of the CFCs in the atmosphere and their subsequent global monitoring.

James Lovelock is born in 1919. An independent scientist for more than forty years as well as an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Green College, University of Oxford. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1974 and was made a Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003. In addition, he has received ten international awards for his work as an environmentalist; these included the Blue Planet Prize, Volvo Prize and Wollaston Medal from the Geological Society in London.

James Lovelock's most notable scientific work is the Gaia theory, now generally accepted under the name Earth System Science, and the discovery in l972 of the CFCs in the atmosphere and their subsequent global monitoring. He is the inventor of the electron capture detector (ECD), which first alerted us to the ubiquitous distribution of pesticides and PCBs. He has throughout his career as an environmental scientist supported nuclear energy as a preferred supplier of electricity. He is the author of five books and over 200 scientific papers.

James Lovelock is the author of more than 200 scientific papers, distributed almost equally among topics in Medicine, Biology, Instrument and Atmospheric Science and Geophysiology. He has applied for more than 40 patents, mostly for detectors for use in chemical analysis.

He is the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory) and has written three books on the subject: Gaia: a new look at life on Earth (Oxford University Press, 1979); The Ages of Gaia (WW Norton, 1988); Gaia: the practical science of planetary medicine (Gaia Books, 1991); and an autobiography, Homage to Gaia (Oxford University Press, 2000). His latest book is The Revenge of Gaia (Allen Lane/Penguin 2006).

He has been since 1994 an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Green College, University of Oxford.

How does one go from eco-fascism to shades of hedonism in 24 hours?

"We need a more authoritative world. We've become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It's all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can't do that. You've got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.

But it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while." - Lovelock, in G2 Interview dated March 29, 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock

"Trying to save the planet is silly because we can not do that. If saved, the Earth will save herself, which is what she always did. The most sensible thing to do is enjoy life while we can" - Lovelock, in BBC interview dated March 30, 2010

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8594000/8594561.stm

Funny that he shoots down current scientists as "data fudgers", and that he is a rare "vocational" scientist with integrity. He's drawing the guns quite quick for a man whose capriciousness fudges his own claims.

Sounds fascist to me. Also, the idea that democracies automatically suspend democracy in war time is actually false. The Sadanista government allowed elections during Contra War, and Roosevelt was elected again in 1944, at the height of WWII. Indeed Canada held elections in 1917, and in fact extended the right to vote to some women, for that election, and indeed held another in 1940, one year into WWII.

This kind of ossification of polictical thought, regardless of whatever other intellectual merits or achievements fellows like this might have are charachteristic of technocratic-authoritarian streak rampant among Oxford trained intellectuals; they simply can not abide disagreement, and stand on "authority" when challenged.

The fact that he even gets his facts wrong, as outlined above, shows the kind of anglo-centric intellectual inbreeding that occurs there.

What can I say? Winston Churchill was born in Oxfordshire... nuff said.

George Victor wrote:

And your agitated, pointless accusations only go to underline Lovelock's point - that the mob could never be trusted to arrive at a political  solution to the apocalyptic situation that our species has created. 

Which mob? The scientists that fudge data or have fickle talking points based on personal musings and not their research? The political - corporate - wealthy class nexus that thwarts democracy in all but its representational/electoral forms and which is responsible for much of the earth's destruction - and for manipulating humans into being huge wasters for their benefit? Or the disparate groups of humans who live with the actual consequences of this world, who don't have the right to shape their futures because they are mere peons to types like the former two classes?

Must retire from this bloodied field of battle and do battle with a tree I've felled - before it took away the corner of my roof.  Gaia, the axe work felt good...know what I mean?    (must be a throwback to some ancient Viking berserker)   :D

George, could you not just admit that Lovelock has stated a number of things that aren't credible?