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Lovelock: Covid is Earth's attempt to kill us before we kill everything else

C

Carvaged

Former member
And no, he doesn't mean this literally (as in, the Earth had a little brainstorming session and came up with a virus to kill us), but more in the kind of holistic sense he was channeling when he first came up with the Gaia hypothesis in the 60s. I have plenty of time for this chap and his often rather insightful thoughts and conclusions, and found this interesting as well.

Beware: Gaia may destroy humans before we destroy the Earth
James Lovelock

Covid-19 may well have been one attempt by the Earth to protect itself. Gaia will try harder next time with something even nastier

I don’t know if it is too late for humanity to avert a climate catastrophe, but I am sure there is no chance if we continue to treat global heating and the destruction of nature as separate problems.

That is the wrongheaded approach of the United Nations, which is about to stage one big global conference for the climate in Glasgow, having just finished a different big global conference for biodiversity in Kunming.

This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics. It is impossible to understand these subjects in isolation because they are interconnected. The same is true of living organisms that greatly influence the global environment. The composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and the temperature of the surface is actively maintained and regulated by the biosphere, by life, by what the ancient Greeks used to call Gaia.

Almost 60 years ago, I suggested our planet self-regulated like a living organism. I called this the Gaia theory, and was later joined by biologist Lynn Margulis, who also espoused this idea. Both of us were roundly criticised by scientists in academia. I was an outsider, an independent scientist, and the mainstream view then was the neo-Darwinist one that life adapts to the environment, not that the relationship also works in the other direction, as we argued. In the years since, we have seen just how much life – especially human life – can affect the environment. Two genocidal acts – suffocation by greenhouse gases and the clearance of the rainforests – have caused changes on a scale not seen in millions of years.
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Read on below:
www.theguardian.com

Beware: Gaia may destroy humans, before we destroy the Earth | James Lovelock

Covid-19 may well have been one attempt by the Earth to protect itself. Gaia will try harder next time with something even nastier
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
killer b said:
I stopped reading at Gaia
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Why?

The Gaia hypothesis (/ˈɡaɪ.ə/), also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.
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I mean, that's not so much a theory as a fact accepted by almost all scientists since the 1970s. It's the reason we have a breathable atmosphere, for example, and without this synergistic organic <--> inorganic interaction, there would likely be no life on earth at all.
 
Lovelock is a clever guy and I like him.

I don't see any conflict between that thought and also thinking that the Gaia idea (which I studied and critiqued in University, so I do have some familiarity with his work) is silly religious nonsense.
Even in that snippet of quoted text he has conflated the idea of being affected by something with the idea of adapting to something.

Might as well talk to Linus Pauling about vitamin C (if he were still alive) - everyone has an Achilles heel.
 
Pickman's model said:
being famous is in itself no guarantee of being right
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He was 100% right in 1965 about global warming.
And again in 1980 about how bad it waa going to get.

"
Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his."

From an article in 2008.
www.google.com

James Lovelock: 'Enjoy life while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the fan'

The climate science maverick believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do, asks Decca Aitkenhead
www.google.com www.google.com
 
Sugar Kane said:
www.google.com

James Lovelock: 'Enjoy life while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the fan'

The climate science maverick believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do, asks Decca Aitkenhead
www.google.com www.google.com
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Can't argue with the second two points.
I also agree with him that we need to change our focus massively re: nuclear power.

The article gets several things wrong, though, as you'd expect from a non-science journalist trying to get their head round scientific issues.
 
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8ball said:
Can't argue with the second two points.

I also agree with him that we need to change our focus massively re: nuclear power.
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Yep. It is the best option. Probably too late though to stop the impending shitstorm
 
Covid-19 may well have been one attempt by the Earth to protect itself. Gaia will try harder next time with something even nastier
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Take it he's not heard of Ebola then. :( Lots of nastier viruses as in more fatal than covid around. Fortunately they aren't as easily transmittable but could be in nature wanted it to be.
 
girasol said:
That covid isn't some kind of punishment from our sins. Just like AIDS wasn't a punishment for being gay or using needles...
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nor even for our sins. but it is something we can hope to see more of, and almost certainly will do as formerly buried viruses in siberia, for example, emerge
 
Sugar Kane said:
He was 100% right in 1965 about global warming.
And again in 1980 about how bad it waa going to get.
Click to expand...
He predicted by 2100 global warming would have caused the world's population to have reduced by 80%, with those remaining living in the arctic regions. He later claimed this was alarmist and misguided.
 
platinumsage said:
He predicted by 2100 global warming would have caused the world's population to have reduced by 80%, with those remaining living in the arctic regions. He later claimed this was alarmist and misguided.
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i look forward with eager anticipation to see whether this 2100 prediction is on the money

of course few people will be living in the arctic then, what with the way it's warming more rapidly than most other parts of the planet.
 
Pickman's model said:
nor even for our sins. but it is something we can hope to see more of, and almost certainly will do as formerly buried viruses in siberia, for example, emerge
Click to expand...
Well, obviously intruding and destroying natural environments comes with consequences. That much is obvious. Millions of indigenous people were killed by viruses brought in by colonisers (common cold, flu?). Greed kills. It's just that it's nothing new, and, yes, it will keep happening.

edit: Found this article... European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth's climate
 
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It makes sense to look at things from many angles and so I have some time for looking at earth as a complete system.

But the covid angle was incredibly lazy opportunism that didnt even bother to put any flesh on the bones. The article doesnt even bother to go on about animal-human interfaces, human encroachment into animal habitats etc. Or equivalent human follies and arrogance if the virus instead came to humanity via a lab accident.

His pro-nuclear stance also treads the well worn propaganda path of keeping the angle very narrow - make it all about individual radiation dose risk comparisons ("I've flown millions of miles blah blah bollocks") and, like Monbiot years ago, just neatly avoids mentioning at all the forced evacuations and loss of homes and land on the rare occasion that a nuclear power station does melt. He likely isnt going to live long enough to u-turn on that stance so perhaps I can take up the baton next time a reactor melts by claiming that the Ents kicking a nuclear power stations arse was another sign of the Gaia phenomenon in effect.
 
elbows said:
It makes sense to look at things from many angles and so I have some time for looking at earth as a complete system.

But the covid angle was incredibly lazy opportunism that didnt even bother to put any flesh on the bones. The article doesnt even bother to go on about animal-human interfaces, human encroachment into animal habitats etc. Or equivalent human follies and arrogance if the virus instead came to humanity via a lab accident.

His pro-nuclear stance also treads the well worn propaganda path of keeping the angle very narrow - make it all about individual radiation dose risk comparisons ("I've flown millions of miles blah blah bollocks") and, like Monbiot years ago, just neatly avoids mentioning at all the forced evacuations and loss of homes and land on the rare occasion that a nuclear power station does melt. He likely isnt going to live long enough to u-turn on that stance so perhaps I can take up the baton next time a reactor melts by claiming that the Ents kicking a nuclear power stations arse was another sign of the Gaia phenomenon in effect.
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In his defence, I think it's only fair to assume the Graun's editing habits when dealing with anything even on the peripheries of science may have had an impact.
 
Oh and speaking of opportunity, I suppose this thread is another opportunity for me to blather on about how peak oil and other energy issues were one of the reasons I decided to get clued up about pandemics 15 or so years ago. Not because I thought there was a sinister plot that linked such things, but because I am not fond of looking at massive challenges and disasters in isolation. I figured that the big story of the century would probably encompass a variety of consequences from humanity pushing its luck too far, rather than just one, and I wanted to get a grip on some of the possible contenders. And its hard not to fixate on the idea of 'wake up calls' that could shake humanity from its complacency, reignite a sense that much more than the status quo is possible or even inevitable, when feeling depressed at the relative lack of positive change in my lifetime so far. And so far in this particular pandemic I am fond of going on about it being a demonstration of why we should "never say never" in terms of what responses authorities are forced to resort to when the unsustainable cannot be sustained for a moment longer.

Also I am very much not a fan of much of the politics of population control, but its hard not to ponder what sort of total population level the planet will actually support once we arent exploiting many thousands of years of ex-life in the form of fossil fuels.

But for now I struggle to do much more than carrying on repeating these same thoughts, join various dots and see what concepts emerge but dont be afraid to use the eraser frequently. Some of what I stumble into as a result is probably well compatible with how Lovelock thinks, even when we disagree strongly about certain specifics. I do question how much use this is though, especially when we are still trapped in a phase where there are endless bullshit attempts to greenwash and delay, saying the right things whilst still trying to cling onto unsustainable profiteering and the traditional structures of power and concentrated wealth. With many on the left offering no real solutions as far as I can tell because I dont know as they really accept the scale of the problem and all the implications. Because whilst there is well founded and understandable suspicion about some of the implications of the policies espoused by the well connected and comfortable, talk of how socialism can still offer an abundance of riches for all makes me question whether the scale of the problem and its ramifications have really been accepted.
 
platinumsage said:
He predicted by 2100 global warming would have caused the world's population to have reduced by 80%, with those remaining living in the arctic regions. He later claimed this was alarmist and misguided.
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I think he has gone on record as saying he reined in some of his theories because people just dont want to know. He also said that people in general were stupid and dont want to hear the truth. He could be right there.
Humans playing on their phoned while the world burns
 
Well the pandemic is a good demonstration that very many people do want to know, and want to do the right thing, so long as the danger seems real and immediate.

I think thats fairly well understood which is why there is a tendency, when trying to change attitudes and come up with compelling propaganda, to make the threat seem imminent.

Another human tendancy involves illusions of control. Back when peak oil seemed to be where some of the action was to be found in terms of fretting about our plight and the unsustainability of it all coming home to roost this century, there was a moment I thought I noticed. A moment where it became clear that the authorities and the commentators found it so much easier to tell a story when humanity was positioned as being the full author of its destiny, in the driving seat. So the obvious truth of the finite nature of such resources, and limits to the extent to which extraction could be scaled up ever higher, was something to bury and replace with an alternative version where humans had instead chosen to use less of the resource, or where 'entirely unrelated' economic events just happened to have reduced demand.
 
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