James Lovelock
James Lovelock
James Ephraim Lovelock CH CBE FRSis an independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist who lives in Devon, England. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth26 July 1919
years climate lifetime
Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.
second-guessing
You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.
life rocks cells
There is no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth's surface between living and nonliving matter. There is merely a hierarchy of intensity going from the 'material' environment of the rocks and the atmosphere to the living cells.
religious way standards
I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.
nuclear global-warming halt
Only nuclear power can now halt global warming.
wind-turbines wind turbines
I wouldn't be against them (large wind turbines) if they actually worked.
christian years humanity
Only rarely do we see beyond the needs of humanity, and he linked this blindness to our Christian and humanist infrastructure. It arose 2,000 years ago and was then benign, and we were no significant threat to Gaia. Now that we are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth.
people fool pairs
We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.
country book writing
Composing computer programs to solve scientific problems is like writing poetry. You must choose every word with care and link it with the other words in perfect syntax. There is no place for verbosity or carelessness. To become fluent in a computer lnaguage demands almost the antithesis of modern loose thinking. It requires many interactive sessions, the hands-on use of the device. You do not learn a foreign language from a book, rather you have to live in the country for year to let the langauge become an automatic part of you, and the same is true for computer languages.
fall knowing sailing
Our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.
morning thinking imagination
What I tend to do is to wake about five in the morning-this happens quite often-think about the invention, and then image it in my mind in 3D, as a kind of construct. Then I do experiments with the image...sort of rotate it, and say, 'Well what'll happen if one does this?' And by the time I get up for breakfast I can usually go to the bench and make a string and sealing wax model that works straight off, because I've done most of the experiments already.
future ignorance feelings
We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science
population pairs climate
By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.
world alarmists millennium
The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium.