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Posts Tagged ‘James Lovelock’
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
Dear friends — and I do think of the people on this list as friends:
This is an important occasion for me. And I need you to do me a favour.
For the past two years, I’ve been working on a new environmental project called The Green Interview — a subscription website that presents in-depth interviews with major figures in the environmental movement, discussing their ideas in lively conversations. It’s a subscription site because we want to be supported by our members, the people we’re here to serve, and not by corporate or institutional sponsors.
Voila! The site is now ready to use, and it’s already enrolled its first few subscribers! We’ve posted the first three interviews — with James Lovelock, Vandana Shiva and Paul Watson — and we’ll soon be releasing the interviews with Farley Mowat and Elizabeth May.The “About Us” page is pasted in at the bottom of this message.
Please come and see us at www.thegreeninterview.com. I hope you’ll like the site and find it worthwhile — and of course I’ll be delighted if you join. If you do join, we’ll send you a DVD of my video The Living Beach, a $20 reward for taking out a $15 subscription.
But even if you don’t join — perhaps especially if you don’t join — I’d be grateful if you’d do me the favour of sending me your reactions. If you did join, what features of the site particularly attracted you? Where would you like it to go? Who would you like to see interviewed?
And if you didn’t join, please tell me what might have made the site more attractive to you — and please be frank. Interviews too long? Poor choice of people interviewed? Price too high? Dumb interviewer? Disapprove of this “personalized” approach to environmental issues? Is there anything we could have done differently that would have changed your reaction?
I promise I will never argue about your responses. I will certainly thank you, and I might ask you to clarify what I don’t understand. But I truly believe in the old adage that a business’ best friend is a tough and demanding customer, because a customer like that constantly drives you towards excellence.
Be our best friend, and drive TheGreenInterview.com towards excellence. And thank you in advance for your trouble.
Very greenest regards,
Don
ABOUT THE GREEN INTERVIEW
IN BRIEF:
TheGreenInterview.com is a subscription web site of extended interviews - normally about an hour in length - between Silver Donald Cameron and the thinkers, writers and observers whose ideas and perceptions are leading the way to a new era of sustainability. Most interviews (but not all) are on video, with the audio tracks available separately for subscribers to download as MP3 files.
TheGreenInterview.com site includes a forum where subscribers can discuss the interviews among themselves, and sometimes with the interviewees. When an interview has been booked but not yet recorded, members of the forum can suggest questions to be asked.
TELL ME MORE:
As a subscription site, TheGreenInterview.com essentially divides its viewers into visitors and members. Visitors are welcome to view the site, read the posted biographies of interviewees, view short segments of the interviews (which will also be posted on YouTube), and read the comments in the forum. Access to the full-length interviews, either by streaming or download, is reserved for paid-up members. Paid members also have complete access to the archive of interviews and the right to participate actively in the forum.
Regular membership costs US$14.95 per month for individuals, and $29.95 for institutions. Students, seniors and low-income members may join for $6.95 per month. Members are guaranteed at least one new major in-depth interview every month, but will normally receive many enhancements. For instance, for the first 100 members, we will include a free DVD of Silver Donald’s video documentary on shorelines, The Living Beach.
Some interviews take place in the studio of Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Copies of all interviews are deposited in the University library, where they are accessible to students and faculty. The university may also broadcast selected interviews or portions of interviews on its educational TV services.
Tags: Elizabeth May, Farley Mowat, James Lovelock, Paul Watson, The Green Interview, The Living Beach, Vandana Shiva
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
February 21, 2010
Where does the vitriol come from?
Last week, I wrote about the implosion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and about what I called “the touching faith of some climate-change critics that if they can just convince enough people that the whole thing is a hoax, then that will be reality, and we can get back to business as usual.” Alas, I said, ‘t ain’t so. Natural processes are impervious to human opinions.
Some readers went ballistic.
An Annapolis Valley reader declared that he had previously “’sensed’ MAYBE you were one of only a few North American journalists to have the gonads to speak a little truth, among the foolishness that permeates our mainstream media…Alas, the editors at the Herald must have finally trumped you, and actually got you to state that there REALLY COULD BE truth behnd the concept of human caused climate change. Wow, what a sad sellout this was. Truely disturbing to the core… you are throwing support behind an idea created and perpetuated by international criminals… It is a sad day when Silver Don sells out.”
Gosh. Actually, I’m eager to sell out, but I’ve never found a buyer. If you know people that I might sell out to, please ask them to call. I prefer cash, but annuities, bonds, real estate, luxury yachts and fine automobiles will all be considered.
From another reader who similarly accused me — along with Gwynne Dyer — of selling out, I asked for an explanation of why Dyer or I would consciously promote untruth. Even if we were hopelessly corrupt, what were we getting out of it? A fat stipend from a windmill manufacturer? Secret cheques from Al Gore?
A third reader revealed that “a small group of politicians and scientists have forced a ‘false reality’ on the world and have thwarted (falsified, denigrated) the hard work of many responsible scientists (i.e. ‘the skeptics’) from even bringing these facts to light…. You are now on the same side as the false reality makers. Is that where you want to be?”
Ah. Once more, evil people are manipulating public affairs in pursuit of their own ends. But why? And what are those ends?
Look, I replied, despite the rot at the IPCC, many eminent and honest scientists do believe that climate change is real, that humans are responsible for much of it, and that its impact may be catastrophic. If they are right, and we don’t take action, many people will die. If they’re wrong, and we do take action, we’ll spend a lot of money on things that will still be useful, like restoring forests, reducing our fossil fuel consumption, and cleaning up our air quality which is already killing people. Is that bad?
Expensive? We spill torrents of money on failed banks and automakers, and on wars. Why cavil at spending on changes that would unquestionably be beneficial, whatever the truth about climate change?
My favourite reader response was this:
“Your a liar and full of sh*t, if you were with-in reach right now I’d slap you. Many names on the IPCC reports are there fraudulently, they don’t agree, many more have no more knowledge of Climate than my Cat and are not climatologists. It’s not just a few scientists either, it’s every single one that has any ties to this scam, they are all fraudsters. Sorry you fell for the scam., but buddy I’ve followed this since before Mo strong first came up with the scam to create the IPCC and gave the UN nod to WWF and others to spread the lie.
“Your an idiot or a fool, period. CO2 does not effect temps, temps effect CO2. IMO you should all be jailed and have your assets seized and sold off by the Governments to repay the citizens who have already been scammed out of billions.”
Wonderful. Imitating Stephen Leacock, I wrote:
Dear Sir:
I thought it would be a kindness to let you know that a lunatic is writing abusive messages on your computer, and is sending them out to people over your signature. You may want to take action to put a stop to this.
Best regards,
SDC
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Tags: climate change, Gwynne Dyer, IPCC, James Lovelock, Stephen Leacock
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
February 14, 2010
“It sounds silly when you say it out loud,” said Ram Myers, “but they seemed to have a notion that you could sit in Ottawa and make up reality. If you could enforce a scientific consensus, that would be reality.”
That’s Dr. Ransom A. Myers, Dalhousie University’s late, great, and sorely-missed marine biologist, talking about the federal bureaucrats who “gruesomely mangled and corrupted” the research of their own scientists, to quote an internal DFO report, and thus allowed three imperilled groundfish stocks to be fished almost to extinction.
Ram Myers’ comment has echoed in my mind since the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change began imploding in the blizzard of compromising emails that escaped from the University of East Anglia in December. That episode was followed by the disclosure that several findings in the IPCC’s report of 2007 were based on faulty evidence.
These were not trivial findings. One was the widely-reported prediction that, based on current trends, the glaciers of the Himalayas would melt away by 2035. Since Asia’s nine largest rivers arise in those glaciers, the result would have been a nightmare sequence of catastrophic flooding and lethal droughts for the one billion people who live downstream.
But the prediction was based on anecdotes, not on peer-reviewed science — and it was “so wrong that it’s not worth discussing,” says Georg Kaser, a leading Austrian glaciologist who flagged the error before the report was issued, and was dumbfounded to find it in the text. Maybe part of the reason is that the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, also heads a New Delhi research group that has scooped up millions of dollars in grants to study the melting of the Himalayan glaciers.
The IPCC’s scientists now stand accused of shabby science, selective reporting, naked self-interest and the intimidation of skeptics. And of course the climate change skeptics are all over the issue: See? These guys are liars and cheaters and thieves — and therefore, climate change is all humbug.
Not so fast, bub. To begin with, the IPCC report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries, and only a few have been impugned. Georg Kaser himself was a lead author of the section of the report dealing with the physical science of climate change. Despite the furor, Kaser says the report’s central contention that climate change is an established reality and a major threat is absolutely sound.
What reminds me of Ram Myers is the touching faith of some climate-change critics that if they can just convince enough people that the whole thing is a hoax, then that will be reality, and we can get back to business as usual. I’d love to believe it, but it’s nonsense. Somewhere out there, beyond all the noise and clamour, the real world is evolving according to its own nature, no matter what we may hope, wish or believe.
I listen to Gwynne Dyer, who travels the world investigating the military implications of climate change. “When you talk to the people at the sharp end of the climate business, scientists and policy-makers alike,” Dyer writes, “there is an air of suppressed panic in many of the conversations. We are not going to get through this without taking a lot of casualties.”
I listen to Jim Lovelock, a towering figure in earth science, who concedes the possibility that the skeptics are right and that global warming is an illusion — but whose observations suggest that global heating is happening much faster than expected. For example, he says, the great global heat sink is the sea. When the sea gets warm, it expands, and sea level rises. Well, sea level is rising faster than predicted, so the sea is absorbing a lot of heat. That’s an observation, not an opinion.
How do we deal with all these uncertainties? In 2007, a young Oregon science teacher named Greg Craven reviewed the options in a little YouTube presentation called “The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See.” His conclusion? Acting to counter the risks of climate change will certainly cost a lot of money, perhaps needlessly. But failing to act could very well cost a lot of lives. How hard a decision is that?
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Tags: Add new tag, climate change, Dalhousie University, Georg Kaser, Greg Craven, Gwynne Dyer, Interngovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, James Lovelock, Ram Myers, Ransom Myers
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Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
January 24, 2010
“It’s important for Gaia that human beings survive,” says James Lovelock. “Our intelligence, if it can be integrated as part of the whole planetary system, would make ours the first intelligent planet in the galaxy, perhaps. What a wonderful future for humans!”
A great scientist needs great courage and a great imagination and Jim Lovelock has both, in spades. It is now 40 years since he rattled the scientific world and electrified the rest of us by publishing Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), which argued that the earth behaves like a single living organism that creates and maintains a viable environment for life.
The Gaia hypothesis — named for the Greek earth goddess– implied that the world was far more complex than modern reductionist science had imagined. It offered a coherent vision of the whole living world that echoed all our wisdom traditions, and renewed the human sense of wonder.
Mainstream scientists were horrified. Many still are. But Lovelock’s bold insights, and his continuing exploration of their implications, became the foundations of “earth system science,” the study of systems like the circulation of the oceans, the maintenance of the atmosphere and the relationships among the earth’s many systems. Noted author Gwynne Dyer considers Lovelock “the most important figure in both the life sciences and the climate sciences for the past half-century,” and compares his achievements to Darwin’s.
Slight, cheerful and white-haired, Lovelock is now 90 years old, though he looks decades younger. He published a new book last year, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. He and his American-born wife Sandy spend their summers in Devon, England, and their winters in her home town of St. Louis, Missouri, where I came calling one brilliant January morning.
Lovelock resembles a geologist in his easy navigation of the vastness of deep time, but he recalls the Enlightenment sages in his assumption that science is a single enterprise, artificially split into disciplines. He has been self-employed as a freelance scientist and instrument-maker for 50 years, largely because of “silly people who would say to me, ‘you can’t do biology, you’re a chemist.’ As if I didn’t have a brain.”
Freedom from institutional politics allowed him to indulge his preference for observation over computer modelling, and permitted him to follow the evidence fearlessly wherever it led. In 2007 he was “shocked” to learn that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had “reached a consensus on a matter of science.” Science is about nature. Consensus is about politics.
So where has the evidence led him lately?
Sea level, Arctic ice cover and ocean algae populations, he says, are the best indicators of global warming and they all reveal that the earth is heating up much faster than the IPCC’s projections. Furthermore, the evidence from the earth’s last hot period, 55 million year ago, shows that global temperatures don’t necessarily change slowly and evenly; they can flip fairly quickly to hotter or colder states. On that early occasion, most of the earth became a scorching desert. Life retreated to the shores of an Arctic Ocean with surface temperature of 21C, where crocodiles lived and bred.
Lovelock thinks that’s the kind of world we’re creating — and because of our essentially tribal politics, our efforts to avoid it will likely fail. Since a less habitable earth won’t sustain a global population of seven billion, populations will crash. Human beings should plan a “sustainable retreat” to the Arctic region. Canadians should prepare for hordes of people trying to relocate to northern Canada.
Is this inevitable? No, says Lovelock. Gaia is far more complex than we understand, and we do not even know the depth of our ignorance. A scientist can only say that this nightmare scenario is probable. But we should prepare for it now, while the world is still a reasonably civilized place. The real horror would be if our species survived, but its finest achievements were lost — science, art, culture. Lovelock believes we could be the evolutionary ancestors of an intelligent post-tribal species that will serve an aging Gaia as her consciousness.
This is a colossal vision of tragedy and redemption. Lovelock smiles.
“Gaia needs us,” he says. “What a wonderful future for humans!”
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Tags: climate change, Gaia, global warming, Gwynne Dyer, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, James Lovelock
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