Now in his 90th year, James Lovelock stays refreshingly readable and exceptionally young. Readable, because he presents a scary subject of mankind’s survival with fluent prose in The Vanishing Face of Gaia and young, because the expensive thallium-201 heart test has found him so, prior to undertaking travel to space later this year as Richard Branson’s guest abroad Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two. From 60 miles above, Lovelock will get to view the planet as it is; and not Gaia, a self-regulating system about which he propounded a theory in the late 60’s. Lovelock’s much acclaimed Gaia Theory, that took three decades before the world accepted it, propounds that the earth regulates its climate and chemistry so as to sustain habitability. Akin to Vedic thought, the idea of earth as a living being challenges the conventional climate models. Simply put, it means that the earth will take care of itself but not mankind. Lovelock says in public what climatologists are saying to each other in private – that climate change is too far along for reversal, at least with any of the solutions currently taken seriously.
Though not a contrarian, Lovelock wonders how the IPCC could reach a consensus on a matter of science: ‘I know that such a word has no place in the lexicon of science; it is a good and useful word, but it belongs to the world of politics and the courtroom, where reaching a consensus is a way of solving human differences’. No wonder, the IPCC failed to correctly forecast the course of climate change up to 2007 thereby casting serious doubt that its predictions for the future may be drastic understatement of the coming changes to our planet....more (the link will appear soon)
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