Just what it says on the tin, 16 Sep 2008
This is a wonderful book. As the title suggests, it is cool, reasonable, and patient, looking carefully at all the evidence and coming to conclusions which it is hard to disagree with.

Like other reviewers, I find it hard to take excerpts from the book because I would have to quote the whole thing! However, perhaps I may try to help anyone who is wondering whether to read it. One way to look at the global warming/climate change debate is to ask oneself three questions.

First, is the world getting warmer?
Second, is human activity, and specifically CO2, a major cause?
And third, does it matter? Will there be harmful consequences? And if so, what should we do about them?

Much of the angry debate between believers and sceptics rages round the first two points. Lawson surveys the evidence on both, and comes to a conclusion. But what makes this book so powerful is its focus on the third question: whether a warmer world is one that will harm people, animals, plants, and our descendants. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) argues that it will. Lawson disagrees. He takes us through the IPCC scenarios, and their range of predictions relating to five potential impacts of a warmer world: on water, ecosystems, food, coasts, and health. In each case he demonstrates, with evidence, that a warmer world will either be neutral or even beneficial. What makes this evidence particularly persuasive is that much of it is drawn from the IPCC's own 4th report (2007)!.

It would be wrong to think of this book as complacent, a kind of 'I'm all right, Jack, pull up the ladder'. As Lawson points out, the single major cause of ill-health and death in the world is poverty, and if we take the standpoint of human welfare, the surest way to benefit humans is to lift them out of poverty. Lawson sees many serious problems facing the world, and many things that urgently need putting right. The view of this compelling and convincing book is that global warming isn't one of them.


A call for solid science to replace the hype and hysteria, 14 Sep 2008
A well written and thought provoking book that attempts to speak above the hysterical din that dominates the subject.

The author calls for a considered approach and appeals to organisations to address the issues we face in a sensible and practical way.



Lawson knows best apparently, 23 Aug 2008
The combined wisdom of the world's leading climate change scientists is clearly no match for Nigel Lawson. He alone is clear sighted enough to see these clever people are all wrong. Stop worrying you people on coastlands and islands as you watch the tide rising. Stop fussing about those droughts Africa and Australia! Trust Nigel, everything will be well because...er because he says so.

Thought-provoking contribution, 19 Aug 2008
In this thought-provoking book, Nigel Lawson asks key questions about global warming. Is the world warming and if so, why? How much warmer will it get? What will be the consequences? What can and should we do about it? What is the most cost-effective way to tackle it?

He looks at the temperature record. Surprisingly, temperatures have not risen since 2001, even though global CO2 emissions have been rising faster than ever. There was a 0.7oC rise over the last century while the CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 30%, largely caused by industrialisation driven by the rapid worldwide growth of carbon-based energy consumption (burning coal, oil and gas). Some, possibly most, of the warming is due to this growth of CO2 emissions and so of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report predicted a sea-level rise of between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100. (Its 1990 report predicted a 3.67 metre rise.) The IPCC predicted a 1.8o-4oC temperature rise by 2100, a mean of less than 3oC. (At 3oC, it says, "Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase.") 3oC is 0.03oC a year, compared to 1975-2000's 0.02oC a year.

The IPCC says the one `virtually certain' impact of global warming is `reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure'. A 2003 Department of Health study confirmed this, predicting a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 and an increase in heat-related mortality of 2,000 by the 2050s.

On the IPCC's worst case scenario, of 1% growth a year in the developed countries and 2.3% in the developing countries, global warming could cost us 5% of world GDP by 2100. This would make developed countries' GDP 2.6 times today's rather than 2.7 and developing countries' GDP 8.5 times today's rather than 9.5.

Lawson argues that we should drop the precautionary principle because it is wrong to take decisions on the basis of worst-case possibilities: probabilities, not possibilities, should be our guide.

He looks at the prospects of some specific disasters. He notes that Antarctic ice-sheets are growing, that the IPCC's 2007 report said that an `abrupt transition' of the Gulf Stream is `very unlikely' and that the World Meteorological Organization said of climate change's effects on hurricanes, "no firm conclusion can be made on this point."

The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has increased profits for selected emitters and not cut emissions. Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism has done no better. The EU promotes growing biofuels, yet the Chinese government has suspended the production of the biofuel ethanol because it has raised food prices.

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said that meeting the EU's agreed target of 20% of energy from renewables by 2020 would raise our electricity costs by £18-22 billion a year.

In June 2007 Merkel and Blair tried to get the G8 to agree to cut emissions by 50% by 2050. The rest rejected the idea. Six months later, Britain and Germany lost again when they proposed a mandatory global emissions cut of 25-40% by 2020.

We could control the world's temperature by severely limiting carbon dioxide emissions through raising prices of carbon-based energy, to make non-carbon-based energy more competitive. But this would force our energy-intensive industries out to China and other countries. (Although China's, and India's, emissions per head are still far less than the West's.) 1990s Russia showed that the only way to meet the Kyoto targets is to destroy your industries.

Lawson argues for an across-the-board carbon tax, even if it forces our remaining energy-intensive industries abroad, and for ending subsidies to all carbon-based energy. Instead, we need to keep our industries, se we need new carbon-based power stations and new gas storage facilities, which the market has not provided and will not provide.




Deluded amateur challenges the science, 12 Aug 2008
Lawson flies in the face of scientific consensus with no solid basis for his position. An unhelpful book.

Just what it says on the tin, 16 Sep 2008
This is a wonderful book. As the title suggests, it is cool, reasonable, and patient, looking carefully at all the evidence and coming to conclusions which it is hard to disagree with.

Like other reviewers, I find it hard to take excerpts from the book because I would have to quote the whole thing! However, perhaps I may try to help anyone who is wondering whether to read it. One way to look at the global warming/climate change debate is to ask oneself three questions.

First, is the world getting warmer?
Second, is human activity, and specifically CO2, a major cause?
And third, does it matter? Will there be harmful consequences? And if so, what should we do about them?

Much of the angry debate between believers and sceptics rages round the first two points. Lawson surveys the evidence on both, and comes to a conclusion. But what makes this book so powerful is its focus on the third question: whether a warmer world is one that will harm people, animals, plants, and our descendants. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) argues that it will. Lawson disagrees. He takes us through the IPCC scenarios, and their range of predictions relating to five potential impacts of a warmer world: on water, ecosystems, food, coasts, and health. In each case he demonstrates, with evidence, that a warmer world will either be neutral or even beneficial. What makes this evidence particularly persuasive is that much of it is drawn from the IPCC's own 4th report (2007)!.

It would be wrong to think of this book as complacent, a kind of 'I'm all right, Jack, pull up the ladder'. As Lawson points out, the single major cause of ill-health and death in the world is poverty, and if we take the standpoint of human welfare, the surest way to benefit humans is to lift them out of poverty. Lawson sees many serious problems facing the world, and many things that urgently need putting right. The view of this compelling and convincing book is that global warming isn't one of them.


A call for solid science to replace the hype and hysteria, 14 Sep 2008
A well written and thought provoking book that attempts to speak above the hysterical din that dominates the subject.

The author calls for a considered approach and appeals to organisations to address the issues we face in a sensible and practical way.



Lawson knows best apparently, 23 Aug 2008
The combined wisdom of the world's leading climate change scientists is clearly no match for Nigel Lawson. He alone is clear sighted enough to see these clever people are all wrong. Stop worrying you people on coastlands and islands as you watch the tide rising. Stop fussing about those droughts Africa and Australia! Trust Nigel, everything will be well because...er because he says so.

Thought-provoking contribution, 19 Aug 2008
In this thought-provoking book, Nigel Lawson asks key questions about global warming. Is the world warming and if so, why? How much warmer will it get? What will be the consequences? What can and should we do about it? What is the most cost-effective way to tackle it?

He looks at the temperature record. Surprisingly, temperatures have not risen since 2001, even though global CO2 emissions have been rising faster than ever. There was a 0.7oC rise over the last century while the CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 30%, largely caused by industrialisation driven by the rapid worldwide growth of carbon-based energy consumption (burning coal, oil and gas). Some, possibly most, of the warming is due to this growth of CO2 emissions and so of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report predicted a sea-level rise of between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100. (Its 1990 report predicted a 3.67 metre rise.) The IPCC predicted a 1.8o-4oC temperature rise by 2100, a mean of less than 3oC. (At 3oC, it says, "Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase.") 3oC is 0.03oC a year, compared to 1975-2000's 0.02oC a year.

The IPCC says the one `virtually certain' impact of global warming is `reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure'. A 2003 Department of Health study confirmed this, predicting a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 and an increase in heat-related mortality of 2,000 by the 2050s.

On the IPCC's worst case scenario, of 1% growth a year in the developed countries and 2.3% in the developing countries, global warming could cost us 5% of world GDP by 2100. This would make developed countries' GDP 2.6 times today's rather than 2.7 and developing countries' GDP 8.5 times today's rather than 9.5.

Lawson argues that we should drop the precautionary principle because it is wrong to take decisions on the basis of worst-case possibilities: probabilities, not possibilities, should be our guide.

He looks at the prospects of some specific disasters. He notes that Antarctic ice-sheets are growing, that the IPCC's 2007 report said that an `abrupt transition' of the Gulf Stream is `very unlikely' and that the World Meteorological Organization said of climate change's effects on hurricanes, "no firm conclusion can be made on this point."

The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has increased profits for selected emitters and not cut emissions. Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism has done no better. The EU promotes growing biofuels, yet the Chinese government has suspended the production of the biofuel ethanol because it has raised food prices.

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said that meeting the EU's agreed target of 20% of energy from renewables by 2020 would raise our electricity costs by £18-22 billion a year.

In June 2007 Merkel and Blair tried to get the G8 to agree to cut emissions by 50% by 2050. The rest rejected the idea. Six months later, Britain and Germany lost again when they proposed a mandatory global emissions cut of 25-40% by 2020.

We could control the world's temperature by severely limiting carbon dioxide emissions through raising prices of carbon-based energy, to make non-carbon-based energy more competitive. But this would force our energy-intensive industries out to China and other countries. (Although China's, and India's, emissions per head are still far less than the West's.) 1990s Russia showed that the only way to meet the Kyoto targets is to destroy your industries.

Lawson argues for an across-the-board carbon tax, even if it forces our remaining energy-intensive industries abroad, and for ending subsidies to all carbon-based energy. Instead, we need to keep our industries, se we need new carbon-based power stations and new gas storage facilities, which the market has not provided and will not provide.




Deluded amateur challenges the science, 12 Aug 2008
Lawson flies in the face of scientific consensus with no solid basis for his position. An unhelpful book.

A Fabulous Grumpy Old Man, 23 Oct 2008
I remember first hearing James Lovelock's Gaia theory (that the Earth is a self regulating entity) on the BBC in the 1970's and thinking it was quite convincing. I was really disappointed reading this book to find that he seems to have very little additional evidence for Gaia after nearly 40 years. This lack of hard science behind Gaia undermines the authority of the book. As a result it reads like a fabulous and fabulously well researched grumpy old man rant.

Lovelock has a go at just about everything - population growth, climate change, nitrates, the green movement and so on. His is a counsel of almost complete despair, he has only two positive suggestions to make, one is to support nuclear energy and the other is to reduce the Earth's population from 6bn to 1.5bn.

He is very lucid on the problems, even if not fully convincing on the Gaia-ness of them, but I can see that if you were a policymaker this book would be of no help at all and frequently it's exasperating. He's an important scientist, so it's a book that should be read, but don't expect to come away any clearer about how to shape the future.

Essential Reading, 11 Apr 2008
We should salute the (now) 89 -year-old author, James Ephraim Lovelock (Ephraim is Hebrew for fruitful): an independent, dissenting voice in science. Rebelling against reductionist philosophies, he took an inclusive, systems view of the planet, publishing his Gaia Hypothesis in 1970. It took over 30 years for the international scientific community to come round.

Having studied chemistry at Manchester U and received his PhD in medicine at London U, Lovelock was engaged in the 1960s by NASA to find ways to detect life on Mars. He realized that life would influence the atmosphere and designed an instrument to detect trace gases. Thinking about the reason why Mars is so barren and Earth so fruitful, he arrived at his Hypothesis.

In brief the Hypothesis stated that the Earth is not just a rock that happens to have things living on it: it is a complex interacting system of soil, sea, atmosphere and living things that shows a tendency to keep itself stable in a way that supports life. In particular this complex web has acted to hold temperature within a narrow range over hundreds of millions of years even as the sun warms and the planet wobbles in its orbit.

Lovelock calls this system Gaia after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth and persists in referring to Gaia as a person who acts with intent. Some find this annoying and unscientific. This reader accepts it as poetry and metaphor.

In summary, in his latest book, Lovelock revisits his Hypothesis and argues that:

1. Not only is climate change an impending disaster but an irreversible tipping point may already have been reached
2. The single most important step to take now is a major switch to nuclear power
3. Too many people simply do not understand the issues correctly: the well-meaning Greens are also at fault
4. Gaia's revenge will be to restore the equilibrium of the planet by removing most of the human population

On page 1 he states bluntly: `we are now so abusing the Earth that it may..move back to the hot state it was in 55 m years ago and most of us and our descendants will die.'

He starts with a by-now familiar history of the issue of climate change and goes on to say: ` we are now approaching one of those tipping points and (are) like passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.'

He reminds us how huge are the effects of what seem like minor temperature shifts: only 3 degrees separates us from the last ice age; the same scale of increase now seems likely this century: very rapid change indeed in geological time.

The tipping point factors of climate change are by now well-known:

1. The poles melt and less sun is reflected: this seems to be happening now
2. The bogs thaw and methane is released (a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2)
3. The seas warm and the algae stop fixing carbon and making clouds
4. The forests bake and catch fire
5. Methane clathrates are released from the deep sea bed

What makes Lovelock distinctive is his Gaian perspective. He argues that:

1. A `cold' planet' is healthier than a `hot' one. If the Earth was 5 C cooler than now (as it has often been) , there would be glaciers down to the English Channel. But the Atlantic would be teeming and Africa would be a green garden.
2. We are mistaken to think that the Earth is in a Goldilocks orbit. It started out too cold for life. The sun is slowly warming and now the Earth is becoming too hot. So Gaia keeps tilting to coldness. There have been 11 recent ice-ages in the British Isles. We are in the `fever' of a warm interglacial and would normally be heading to the `cure' of the ice-age.
3. But man has disrupted the balance, not just by burning fossil fuel but also by replacing forest with farm. Gaia will do what it must to restore the balance.
4. The underlying problem is that the sustainable human population is probably under 1 billion. Today it is 6 billion, forecast to be 11 billion by 2050.

His argument for nuclear power is simple: all the other solutions produce lots of CO2 or don't work well and/or take too long (new approaches such as carbon sequestration take 20-40 years to mature):

1. Nuclear power is tried, tested and economical and produces very little CO2
2. Wind power is unreliable and costly. It would take 56000 large wind-mills plus fossil fuel back-up just to replace current nuclear capacity (20% of our total needs)
3. Solar is poor for the UK: unreliable and 3x more expensive than conventional methods
4. Wave power apart from a Severn barrage is expensive .....

And so on.

He believes that popular misconceptions of cancer risk militate against nuclear. (It's arguably worse than that: the UK government has ducked the issue for over a decade. Only in the last few months, stampeded by the risk that (a) the lights will go off around 2012 and/or (b) we will depend on a hostile Russia for gas, has the UK government moved). Lovelock bemoans the fact that our political classes do not have any feel for nature or the planet. (They also know little of science or business and there is often a grim determination among temporary ministers to avoid difficult decisions.)

He feels that the Green movement has lost its way: for example by wanting `sustainable development' when much more radical action is needed and for promoting low-productivity organic farming when this means eating up yet more of the countryside. This is putting a lifestyle choice ahead of the planet. He detests the Green wish to cover the land with tens of thousands of windmills.

He offers several examples of similarly faulty decisions: including the massive error of banning DDT. Because the vocal western middle-classes did not want pesticide in its food, Africans died. Yet the use of DDT to kill human disease vectors posed little food risk: it was abuse of DDT by farmers.

Lovelock explores some blue-sky technical fixes to global warming: planetary sun-shades, for example, but without real enthusiasm. Perhaps because it would distract from his here and now message: go nuclear.

So are his arguments complete and wholly compelling? No. The central question of power sources deserves a large book in its own right. Do you have to accept Gaia to believe that climate change is likely to destroy us? No. Do you have to accept Lovelocks' wistful argument for a countryside free of windmills? No.

But although bits of the book can be faulted, the whole seems to me to succeed. It is a well-written, lively, provocative book on a critical subject and a key idea of our times written by one our most gifted and original thinkers.

****

It's nice to know that when climate Armageddon arrives: the poles and the permafrost melt, the bogs and tropics catch fire and much of Southern Europe, Asia, Africa and the USA and Australia starve and fry, the Atlantic Conveyor will also switch off resulting in a local temperature drop. The result could well be that the UK climate remains equable. On the other hand the UK will be a shrunken archipelago, with our major cities submerged, tens of millions of people looking for a home and many millions of refugees landing on our beaches.

Sentimental nonsense, 23 Mar 2008
Nature is simply indifferent to our fate: it is neither malicious, nor benevolent. If humanity's time is up, it's up. We won't be the first species to die, nor the last. Let the polar bears look after themselves. Carpe diem.

Forget Windfarms - Go Nuclear!, 11 Feb 2008
I first read "The Revenge of Gaia" two years ago, when it was published. By early 2006, of course, we were all becoming aware of a progressively strident chorus about the imminent catastrophe that global warming was going to cause and how there was a scientific consensus on the matter. Lovelock was the first book I read on the subject.

I was suitably alarmed by Lovelock's analysis, and particularly by his identification of "tipping points", whereby a relatively modest increase in temperature would lead to positive feedbacks, e.g. from a hotter Amazon rainforest dying and releasing its stored CO2, by a greening Greenland absorbing rather than reflecting heat, and thus causing further, and unstoppable, global warming. Lovelock envisaged humanity reduced to a few million "breeding pairs" on the Arctic and Antarctic fringes.

Two years on, I have re-read in a more critical way and have a number of observations about the way Lovelock states the case for there being a major and immediate problem.

Firstly, Lovelock makes no reference to any experimental work to justify the feared quantitative relationship between a rise in "greenhouse gases" and average global temperature. There is much reference to computer modelling - Lovelock is a keen computer modeller, and the Gaia theory is supposedly validated by it - and correlations. (What experimental, as opposed to modelling, work has been done? If you have any recommendations do let me know via a "comment".)

Secondly, he makes some sweeping leaps of logic. Having stated that climatic prediction is easier than forecasting the weather on the basis that we an predict that it will be colder in Berlin on December 2010 than it was in the previous July, he states that an increase in CO2 to 500ppm will accompanied by "profound climate change".

I was struck by his personal reliance on Michael Mann's so-called "hockey stick" graph, adopted uncritically in the 2001 IPCC 3rd Report, which had been pretty thoroughly discredited by the time the book was written (and which has all but disappeared from the 2007 IPCC 4th Report). If his fear of man made global warming is based primarily on this work, then I am reassured that it is probably not as bad as it seemed.

Lovelock quotes Dick Taverne (March of Unreason) warmly for criticising the greens' "impractical romanticism". I would disagree that that is a fair synopsis of Taverne's book, but in any case in his recommendation of the adoption of the "precautionary principle" he ignores one of Taverne's principal criticisms, that overcaution without a scientific basis threatens economic progress that can lift millions out of poverty.

Finally, Lovelock's arguments encompass warming and cooling trends over a variety of timescales, from the geological epochs, the last 100,000 years and the last hundred. He states that we are in an interglacial period, then that it has been hotter in he past. I found it hard to identify a pattern in this. He talks about a gradually warming sun, but not of any other cycles that might affect the sun's warming of the Earth. Svensmark's (more recent) book provides a coherent explanation of solar and galactic effects, and I am aware of others.

That having been said, the book is evidence that, back in 2005, Lovelock and others predicted that warming was occurring, (however it was caused). He predicted the opening of the North-West Passage, which indeed did happen this year. CO2 and CH4 may be contributing to this, and (by my reading at least) science cannot reliably tell us how much and to what eventual effect. What, then, of what Lovelock recommendations as to what we do about it?

I am struck, on re-reading Lovelock, at how little notice the global scientific consensus and its British offshoots have taken of his recommendations: forget wind turbines, go nuclear. The downsides of wind turbines have been covered more recently, and extensively, by the sceptical Booker and North. Lovelock writes on the basis that we need technological solutions to manage a "sustainable retreat" to a world living within Gaia's means, ideally with just 500 to 1,000 million people - he quite clearly hankers after the "idyll" of 1800AD. (1800AD in England might have been bearable for Jane Austen, great for Mr Darcy, but for the rest of us...?) I fear he underestimates the difficulty of making nuclear fusion a viable solution, and even of using plutonium for fission reactors, but there is much to be said for trying if you think that CO2 emissions are going to destroy life on the planet. Lovelock also advocates the Severn Tidal Barrage, and one wonders why this proven and predictable technology is not being implemented instead of the plan for thousands of off-shore wind turbines. Some of his other sustainable retreat solutions are less appetising - notably the suggestion that we should synthesize our food so that more of the planet can be allowed to revert to the wild.

Lovelock's book is short and well written. The courteous way in which he refers to global warming "sceptics" and other opponents is commendable, and is quite unusual in this polarised debate between "alarmists" and "deniers". His summary of possible positive feedbacks is compelling (in a frightening way) irrespective of the extent to which warming might be being driven in the first instance by man made or other effects, and his arguments as to which alternative energy sources to pursue are delivered with scientific objectivity. As to the extent to which he represents that there is an immediate and catastrophic problem, however, the way that Lovelock rubbishes the over-reaction to the fear of acid rain is illuminating. "It is", he says, "all to easy it seems to lose our sense of proportion." Consumed by the Gaia theory that he finds difficult not to imbue with new-age spiritualism despite his rational scientific basis, it is possible that Lovelock has done so himself.


Essential, 05 Jan 2008
This book served as my introduction to the concept of Gaia. A friend suggested I should read it and politely I agreed. Quite simply, Lovelock's arguement makes a lot of sense and the messages conveyed within the volume should be considered by all. Especially politicians and (well meaning) greens. Only this week the news was dominated by debate regarding a new fossil fuel power station. This book clearly explains why this must not happen (ever) and presents the alternatives available now and those that will become so in our lifetimes. Lovelock really puts current environmental issues into context. An excellent read and with content that will touch the lives of every human being, present and future. READ THIS BOOK!

Just what it says on the tin, 16 Sep 2008
This is a wonderful book. As the title suggests, it is cool, reasonable, and patient, looking carefully at all the evidence and coming to conclusions which it is hard to disagree with.

Like other reviewers, I find it hard to take excerpts from the book because I would have to quote the whole thing! However, perhaps I may try to help anyone who is wondering whether to read it. One way to look at the global warming/climate change debate is to ask oneself three questions.

First, is the world getting warmer?
Second, is human activity, and specifically CO2, a major cause?
And third, does it matter? Will there be harmful consequences? And if so, what should we do about them?

Much of the angry debate between believers and sceptics rages round the first two points. Lawson surveys the evidence on both, and comes to a conclusion. But what makes this book so powerful is its focus on the third question: whether a warmer world is one that will harm people, animals, plants, and our descendants. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) argues that it will. Lawson disagrees. He takes us through the IPCC scenarios, and their range of predictions relating to five potential impacts of a warmer world: on water, ecosystems, food, coasts, and health. In each case he demonstrates, with evidence, that a warmer world will either be neutral or even beneficial. What makes this evidence particularly persuasive is that much of it is drawn from the IPCC's own 4th report (2007)!.

It would be wrong to think of this book as complacent, a kind of 'I'm all right, Jack, pull up the ladder'. As Lawson points out, the single major cause of ill-health and death in the world is poverty, and if we take the standpoint of human welfare, the surest way to benefit humans is to lift them out of poverty. Lawson sees many serious problems facing the world, and many things that urgently need putting right. The view of this compelling and convincing book is that global warming isn't one of them.


A call for solid science to replace the hype and hysteria, 14 Sep 2008
A well written and thought provoking book that attempts to speak above the hysterical din that dominates the subject.

The author calls for a considered approach and appeals to organisations to address the issues we face in a sensible and practical way.



Lawson knows best apparently, 23 Aug 2008
The combined wisdom of the world's leading climate change scientists is clearly no match for Nigel Lawson. He alone is clear sighted enough to see these clever people are all wrong. Stop worrying you people on coastlands and islands as you watch the tide rising. Stop fussing about those droughts Africa and Australia! Trust Nigel, everything will be well because...er because he says so.

Thought-provoking contribution, 19 Aug 2008
In this thought-provoking book, Nigel Lawson asks key questions about global warming. Is the world warming and if so, why? How much warmer will it get? What will be the consequences? What can and should we do about it? What is the most cost-effective way to tackle it?

He looks at the temperature record. Surprisingly, temperatures have not risen since 2001, even though global CO2 emissions have been rising faster than ever. There was a 0.7oC rise over the last century while the CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 30%, largely caused by industrialisation driven by the rapid worldwide growth of carbon-based energy consumption (burning coal, oil and gas). Some, possibly most, of the warming is due to this growth of CO2 emissions and so of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report predicted a sea-level rise of between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100. (Its 1990 report predicted a 3.67 metre rise.) The IPCC predicted a 1.8o-4oC temperature rise by 2100, a mean of less than 3oC. (At 3oC, it says, "Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase.") 3oC is 0.03oC a year, compared to 1975-2000's 0.02oC a year.

The IPCC says the one `virtually certain' impact of global warming is `reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure'. A 2003 Department of Health study confirmed this, predicting a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 and an increase in heat-related mortality of 2,000 by the 2050s.

On the IPCC's worst case scenario, of 1% growth a year in the developed countries and 2.3% in the developing countries, global warming could cost us 5% of world GDP by 2100. This would make developed countries' GDP 2.6 times today's rather than 2.7 and developing countries' GDP 8.5 times today's rather than 9.5.

Lawson argues that we should drop the precautionary principle because it is wrong to take decisions on the basis of worst-case possibilities: probabilities, not possibilities, should be our guide.

He looks at the prospects of some specific disasters. He notes that Antarctic ice-sheets are growing, that the IPCC's 2007 report said that an `abrupt transition' of the Gulf Stream is `very unlikely' and that the World Meteorological Organization said of climate change's effects on hurricanes, "no firm conclusion can be made on this point."

The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has increased profits for selected emitters and not cut emissions. Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism has done no better. The EU promotes growing biofuels, yet the Chinese government has suspended the production of the biofuel ethanol because it has raised food prices.

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said that meeting the EU's agreed target of 20% of energy from renewables by 2020 would raise our electricity costs by £18-22 billion a year.

In June 2007 Merkel and Blair tried to get the G8 to agree to cut emissions by 50% by 2050. The rest rejected the idea. Six months later, Britain and Germany lost again when they proposed a mandatory global emissions cut of 25-40% by 2020.

We could control the world's temperature by severely limiting carbon dioxide emissions through raising prices of carbon-based energy, to make non-carbon-based energy more competitive. But this would force our energy-intensive industries out to China and other countries. (Although China's, and India's, emissions per head are still far less than the West's.) 1990s Russia showed that the only way to meet the Kyoto targets is to destroy your industries.

Lawson argues for an across-the-board carbon tax, even if it forces our remaining energy-intensive industries abroad, and for ending subsidies to all carbon-based energy. Instead, we need to keep our industries, se we need new carbon-based power stations and new gas storage facilities, which the market has not provided and will not provide.




Deluded amateur challenges the science, 12 Aug 2008
Lawson flies in the face of scientific consensus with no solid basis for his position. An unhelpful book.

A Fabulous Grumpy Old Man, 23 Oct 2008
I remember first hearing James Lovelock's Gaia theory (that the Earth is a self regulating entity) on the BBC in the 1970's and thinking it was quite convincing. I was really disappointed reading this book to find that he seems to have very little additional evidence for Gaia after nearly 40 years. This lack of hard science behind Gaia undermines the authority of the book. As a result it reads like a fabulous and fabulously well researched grumpy old man rant.

Lovelock has a go at just about everything - population growth, climate change, nitrates, the green movement and so on. His is a counsel of almost complete despair, he has only two positive suggestions to make, one is to support nuclear energy and the other is to reduce the Earth's population from 6bn to 1.5bn.

He is very lucid on the problems, even if not fully convincing on the Gaia-ness of them, but I can see that if you were a policymaker this book would be of no help at all and frequently it's exasperating. He's an important scientist, so it's a book that should be read, but don't expect to come away any clearer about how to shape the future.

Essential Reading, 11 Apr 2008
We should salute the (now) 89 -year-old author, James Ephraim Lovelock (Ephraim is Hebrew for fruitful): an independent, dissenting voice in science. Rebelling against reductionist philosophies, he took an inclusive, systems view of the planet, publishing his Gaia Hypothesis in 1970. It took over 30 years for the international scientific community to come round.

Having studied chemistry at Manchester U and received his PhD in medicine at London U, Lovelock was engaged in the 1960s by NASA to find ways to detect life on Mars. He realized that life would influence the atmosphere and designed an instrument to detect trace gases. Thinking about the reason why Mars is so barren and Earth so fruitful, he arrived at his Hypothesis.

In brief the Hypothesis stated that the Earth is not just a rock that happens to have things living on it: it is a complex interacting system of soil, sea, atmosphere and living things that shows a tendency to keep itself stable in a way that supports life. In particular this complex web has acted to hold temperature within a narrow range over hundreds of millions of years even as the sun warms and the planet wobbles in its orbit.

Lovelock calls this system Gaia after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth and persists in referring to Gaia as a person who acts with intent. Some find this annoying and unscientific. This reader accepts it as poetry and metaphor.

In summary, in his latest book, Lovelock revisits his Hypothesis and argues that:

1. Not only is climate change an impending disaster but an irreversible tipping point may already have been reached
2. The single most important step to take now is a major switch to nuclear power
3. Too many people simply do not understand the issues correctly: the well-meaning Greens are also at fault
4. Gaia's revenge will be to restore the equilibrium of the planet by removing most of the human population

On page 1 he states bluntly: `we are now so abusing the Earth that it may..move back to the hot state it was in 55 m years ago and most of us and our descendants will die.'

He starts with a by-now familiar history of the issue of climate change and goes on to say: ` we are now approaching one of those tipping points and (are) like passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.'

He reminds us how huge are the effects of what seem like minor temperature shifts: only 3 degrees separates us from the last ice age; the same scale of increase now seems likely this century: very rapid change indeed in geological time.

The tipping point factors of climate change are by now well-known:

1. The poles melt and less sun is reflected: this seems to be happening now
2. The bogs thaw and methane is released (a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2)
3. The seas warm and the algae stop fixing carbon and making clouds
4. The forests bake and catch fire
5. Methane clathrates are released from the deep sea bed

What makes Lovelock distinctive is his Gaian perspective. He argues that:

1. A `cold' planet' is healthier than a `hot' one. If the Earth was 5 C cooler than now (as it has often been) , there would be glaciers down to the English Channel. But the Atlantic would be teeming and Africa would be a green garden.
2. We are mistaken to think that the Earth is in a Goldilocks orbit. It started out too cold for life. The sun is slowly warming and now the Earth is becoming too hot. So Gaia keeps tilting to coldness. There have been 11 recent ice-ages in the British Isles. We are in the `fever' of a warm interglacial and would normally be heading to the `cure' of the ice-age.
3. But man has disrupted the balance, not just by burning fossil fuel but also by replacing forest with farm. Gaia will do what it must to restore the balance.
4. The underlying problem is that the sustainable human population is probably under 1 billion. Today it is 6 billion, forecast to be 11 billion by 2050.

His argument for nuclear power is simple: all the other solutions produce lots of CO2 or don't work well and/or take too long (new approaches such as carbon sequestration take 20-40 years to mature):

1. Nuclear power is tried, tested and economical and produces very little CO2
2. Wind power is unreliable and costly. It would take 56000 large wind-mills plus fossil fuel back-up just to replace current nuclear capacity (20% of our total needs)
3. Solar is poor for the UK: unreliable and 3x more expensive than conventional methods
4. Wave power apart from a Severn barrage is expensive .....

And so on.

He believes that popular misconceptions of cancer risk militate against nuclear. (It's arguably worse than that: the UK government has ducked the issue for over a decade. Only in the last few months, stampeded by the risk that (a) the lights will go off around 2012 and/or (b) we will depend on a hostile Russia for gas, has the UK government moved). Lovelock bemoans the fact that our political classes do not have any feel for nature or the planet. (They also know little of science or business and there is often a grim determination among temporary ministers to avoid difficult decisions.)

He feels that the Green movement has lost its way: for example by wanting `sustainable development' when much more radical action is needed and for promoting low-productivity organic farming when this means eating up yet more of the countryside. This is putting a lifestyle choice ahead of the planet. He detests the Green wish to cover the land with tens of thousands of windmills.

He offers several examples of similarly faulty decisions: including the massive error of banning DDT. Because the vocal western middle-classes did not want pesticide in its food, Africans died. Yet the use of DDT to kill human disease vectors posed little food risk: it was abuse of DDT by farmers.

Lovelock explores some blue-sky technical fixes to global warming: planetary sun-shades, for example, but without real enthusiasm. Perhaps because it would distract from his here and now message: go nuclear.

So are his arguments complete and wholly compelling? No. The central question of power sources deserves a large book in its own right. Do you have to accept Gaia to believe that climate change is likely to destroy us? No. Do you have to accept Lovelocks' wistful argument for a countryside free of windmills? No.

But although bits of the book can be faulted, the whole seems to me to succeed. It is a well-written, lively, provocative book on a critical subject and a key idea of our times written by one our most gifted and original thinkers.

****

It's nice to know that when climate Armageddon arrives: the poles and the permafrost melt, the bogs and tropics catch fire and much of Southern Europe, Asia, Africa and the USA and Australia starve and fry, the Atlantic Conveyor will also switch off resulting in a local temperature drop. The result could well be that the UK climate remains equable. On the other hand the UK will be a shrunken archipelago, with our major cities submerged, tens of millions of people looking for a home and many millions of refugees landing on our beaches.

Sentimental nonsense, 23 Mar 2008
Nature is simply indifferent to our fate: it is neither malicious, nor benevolent. If humanity's time is up, it's up. We won't be the first species to die, nor the last. Let the polar bears look after themselves. Carpe diem.

Forget Windfarms - Go Nuclear!, 11 Feb 2008
I first read "The Revenge of Gaia" two years ago, when it was published. By early 2006, of course, we were all becoming aware of a progressively strident chorus about the imminent catastrophe that global warming was going to cause and how there was a scientific consensus on the matter. Lovelock was the first book I read on the subject.

I was suitably alarmed by Lovelock's analysis, and particularly by his identification of "tipping points", whereby a relatively modest increase in temperature would lead to positive feedbacks, e.g. from a hotter Amazon rainforest dying and releasing its stored CO2, by a greening Greenland absorbing rather than reflecting heat, and thus causing further, and unstoppable, global warming. Lovelock envisaged humanity reduced to a few million "breeding pairs" on the Arctic and Antarctic fringes.

Two years on, I have re-read in a more critical way and have a number of observations about the way Lovelock states the case for there being a major and immediate problem.

Firstly, Lovelock makes no reference to any experimental work to justify the feared quantitative relationship between a rise in "greenhouse gases" and average global temperature. There is much reference to computer modelling - Lovelock is a keen computer modeller, and the Gaia theory is supposedly validated by it - and correlations. (What experimental, as opposed to modelling, work has been done? If you have any recommendations do let me know via a "comment".)

Secondly, he makes some sweeping leaps of logic. Having stated that climatic prediction is easier than forecasting the weather on the basis that we an predict that it will be colder in Berlin on December 2010 than it was in the previous July, he states that an increase in CO2 to 500ppm will accompanied by "profound climate change".

I was struck by his personal reliance on Michael Mann's so-called "hockey stick" graph, adopted uncritically in the 2001 IPCC 3rd Report, which had been pretty thoroughly discredited by the time the book was written (and which has all but disappeared from the 2007 IPCC 4th Report). If his fear of man made global warming is based primarily on this work, then I am reassured that it is probably not as bad as it seemed.

Lovelock quotes Dick Taverne (March of Unreason) warmly for criticising the greens' "impractical romanticism". I would disagree that that is a fair synopsis of Taverne's book, but in any case in his recommendation of the adoption of the "precautionary principle" he ignores one of Taverne's principal criticisms, that overcaution without a scientific basis threatens economic progress that can lift millions out of poverty.

Finally, Lovelock's arguments encompass warming and cooling trends over a variety of timescales, from the geological epochs, the last 100,000 years and the last hundred. He states that we are in an interglacial period, then that it has been hotter in he past. I found it hard to identify a pattern in this. He talks about a gradually warming sun, but not of any other cycles that might affect the sun's warming of the Earth. Svensmark's (more recent) book provides a coherent explanation of solar and galactic effects, and I am aware of others.

That having been said, the book is evidence that, back in 2005, Lovelock and others predicted that warming was occurring, (however it was caused). He predicted the opening of the North-West Passage, which indeed did happen this year. CO2 and CH4 may be contributing to this, and (by my reading at least) science cannot reliably tell us how much and to what eventual effect. What, then, of what Lovelock recommendations as to what we do about it?

I am struck, on re-reading Lovelock, at how little notice the global scientific consensus and its British offshoots have taken of his recommendations: forget wind turbines, go nuclear. The downsides of wind turbines have been covered more recently, and extensively, by the sceptical Booker and North. Lovelock writes on the basis that we need technological solutions to manage a "sustainable retreat" to a world living within Gaia's means, ideally with just 500 to 1,000 million people - he quite clearly hankers after the "idyll" of 1800AD. (1800AD in England might have been bearable for Jane Austen, great for Mr Darcy, but for the rest of us...?) I fear he underestimates the difficulty of making nuclear fusion a viable solution, and even of using plutonium for fission reactors, but there is much to be said for trying if you think that CO2 emissions are going to destroy life on the planet. Lovelock also advocates the Severn Tidal Barrage, and one wonders why this proven and predictable technology is not being implemented instead of the plan for thousands of off-shore wind turbines. Some of his other sustainable retreat solutions are less appetising - notably the suggestion that we should synthesize our food so that more of the planet can be allowed to revert to the wild.

Lovelock's book is short and well written. The courteous way in which he refers to global warming "sceptics" and other opponents is commendable, and is quite unusual in this polarised debate between "alarmists" and "deniers". His summary of possible positive feedbacks is compelling (in a frightening way) irrespective of the extent to which warming might be being driven in the first instance by man made or other effects, and his arguments as to which alternative energy sources to pursue are delivered with scientific objectivity. As to the extent to which he represents that there is an immediate and catastrophic problem, however, the way that Lovelock rubbishes the over-reaction to the fear of acid rain is illuminating. "It is", he says, "all to easy it seems to lose our sense of proportion." Consumed by the Gaia theory that he finds difficult not to imbue with new-age spiritualism despite his rational scientific basis, it is possible that Lovelock has done so himself.


Essential, 05 Jan 2008
This book served as my introduction to the concept of Gaia. A friend suggested I should read it and politely I agreed. Quite simply, Lovelock's arguement makes a lot of sense and the messages conveyed within the volume should be considered by all. Especially politicians and (well meaning) greens. Only this week the news was dominated by debate regarding a new fossil fuel power station. This book clearly explains why this must not happen (ever) and presents the alternatives available now and those that will become so in our lifetimes. Lovelock really puts current environmental issues into context. An excellent read and with content that will touch the lives of every human being, present and future. READ THIS BOOK!

Great Way to View the Earth!, 25 Aug 2008
I read this book sometime ago and is impacted me significantly as it has with many others. I enjoyed the explanation of the huge organism (Earth) that is self- regulating. I also enjoyed that Lovelock points out that we humans are part of the environment and belong here. We will produce waste.

Having said that, any system can overload. Thus, we need to be good stewards of our planet.

As the astronauts left the earth in the 1960's and headed towards the moon they looked back at our planet and did not see borders or countries. They saw the earth as a single unit...beautiful and fragile. It rotated on an invisible string in the blackness of night. It affected many of the astronauts profoundly.

The book has already helped many more people see the earth as a single unit. If it can continue to do that, hopefully we will find a way to live more harmoniously with the environment on our planet.

Gaia is a great read and a way of looking at things that is both fascination and enlightening!

The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide To: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking

A masterful and poetic scientific break-through. James Lovelock is a visionary of the highest order., 07 Nov 2007
It didn't have the direct and dramatic impact of Newton's Principia - a book that radically changed the world, nevertheless James Lovelock's book Gaia - a New Look at Life on Earth, did have a more subtle influence on our world - particularly that of science. In a sense the Gaia Hypothesis prefigured - culturally and symbolically - the evolution of pure science from that classical, mechanistic world view inspired by the uncanny genius of Newton, to a less linear, more holistic awareness of the irreducible relationships (`gestalts') that permeate apparently discreet phenomena. Indeed this kind of more `organic' approach is radically renewing the scope of Science.

What this unique book may also prove to have done is act as a pivotal stepping stone in time: a step back into our most atavistic, indigenous roots, a time when we lived in harmony with the Earth - talk to any Inuit, Aborigine, or Sioux elder and they retain that deeply intuitive and spiritual connection; but just as significantly, a step into the future - towards a re-newed awareness of our responsibility and acute vulnerability as part of the Earth's 'living' ecology. Climate change is the moment that latter reality is returned home to us with the harshest and most dangerous of lessons. And in a sense, climate change was the mighty prediction James Lovelock issued with his Gaia Hypothesis.

More recently he's said his hope lies "in that powerful force that takes over our lives when we sense that our tribe or nation is threatened from outside". However, he's also said "I do think it will take a disaster to wake us up''. Let's hope, on that score at least, and for all our sakes, he's wrong.


Problem with intent, 22 Mar 2006
Firstly I will say this, if you are considering buying this book then do so. If nothing else it will make you think and thats always a worthwhile thing in a publication. That being said I have issues with the text.

The data is thought provoking, the hypothesis, that the planet can be modelled by thinking of it in terms of a homeostatic (Self regulating) organism is certainly supported byy the evidence presented and the top-down look at the world makes a refreshing and worthwile change from the 'standard' reductionist approach. Now for the 'but';

Lovelock makes the common, unfortunate and in this book serial mistake (to my mind at least)of confusing effect with intent. For example he cites the chemically unstable composition of the atmosphere, maintained by life, as evidence that Gaia - the world organism - is self regulating for the benefit of life. His argument runs that if this atmospheric balance was not maintained life would die out, therefore Gaia must have lifes best interests at heart and work for the benefit and propagation of life.

This is an all too common confusion accidentaly propagted by many, the underpinning science is engaging, interesting and enlightening but the unfortunate phrasing in terms of the planets intent irritates throughout the book. Just because we can interpret things more easily by considering the planet in terms of an organism does not mean it thinks and feels as a human psyche. Conversly it also doesn't mean it doesn't think like us, it may, but I would prefer this isn't assumed when there is no evidence to support it.

Overall, well worth reading but beware the anthromorphic phrasing. I'm interested to see how his more science orientated book turns out. In the post as I type.

Interesting Hypothesis in Somewhat Convoluted Form, 27 May 2004
James Lovelock has created a powerful and interesting argument in this book that will keep scientists busy for centuries. He notices that there is an ability for the Earth to maintain relatively constant conditions in temperature, atmosphere, salinity and pH of the oceans, and reductions in pollutants that defies the simple observations of what "should" happen. From this, he concludes that there is a complex of physical, chemical and biological interrelationships that work like a living organism, which he defines as the Gaia Hypothesis. For defining that concept and providing some of the measurements to establish its premises, he deserves a 7 star rating.

Unfortunately, the argument is expressed in overlong and convoluted fashion. He deliberately limits himself to a nonscientific explanation in this book. The scientific version of the argument is in The Ages of Gaia. Although the book is not long, it certainly could have been condensed into a longish article for Scientific American or The Atlantic Monthly. My second quibble is that the editor was nowhere in sight in creating the organization of the book. The key point is often buried in the third sentence of the last paragraph in a chapter. The argument in between wanders into all kinds of places where it doesn't need to go. For organization and editing, I give this book a one star rating.

So the average is a 4 star rating. The writing itself is pleasant enough. Don't let the lack of organization and editing put you off, for it is worth your while to read this book. It will remind you of the benefits of the sort of sytems thinking that Peter Senge talks about in The Fifth Discipline.

The other thing you will learn is the weakness of scientific work that fails to develop enough field data and to connect enough with other disciplines. I was struck by the same observations recently while visiting environmental scientists at the Smithsonian Institution. The basics in many of these areas have yet to be measured and evaluated. This book will point countless generations forward in understanding how our plant maintains its environment that permits life to flourish. Clearly, it is a stallbusting effort to replace "stalled" thinking about the history and future of the Earth. I found the key questions (such as why doesn't the ocean become more saline?) to be irresistible. I think you will, too. Enjoy and think!

a great book...., 31 Jul 2002
The idea that the planet is a self-balancing system is clearly presented for non-scientists. Fully explained, this model is in fact complementary to other enviromental models rather than contradictory. I think that this book usefully fills a gap between economics, biology and physics, and it is a sobering message that if we do not take sufficient care, we could tip the planet into a new equilibrium (but without the human race).

Just what it says on the tin, 16 Sep 2008
This is a wonderful book. As the title suggests, it is cool, reasonable, and patient, looking carefully at all the evidence and coming to conclusions which it is hard to disagree with.

Like other reviewers, I find it hard to take excerpts from the book because I would have to quote the whole thing! However, perhaps I may try to help anyone who is wondering whether to read it. One way to look at the global warming/climate change debate is to ask oneself three questions.

First, is the world getting warmer?
Second, is human activity, and specifically CO2, a major cause?
And third, does it matter? Will there be harmful consequences? And if so, what should we do about them?

Much of the angry debate between believers and sceptics rages round the first two points. Lawson surveys the evidence on both, and comes to a conclusion. But what makes this book so powerful is its focus on the third question: whether a warmer world is one that will harm people, animals, plants, and our descendants. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) argues that it will. Lawson disagrees. He takes us through the IPCC scenarios, and their range of predictions relating to five potential impacts of a warmer world: on water, ecosystems, food, coasts, and health. In each case he demonstrates, with evidence, that a warmer world will either be neutral or even beneficial. What makes this evidence particularly persuasive is that much of it is drawn from the IPCC's own 4th report (2007)!.

It would be wrong to think of this book as complacent, a kind of 'I'm all right, Jack, pull up the ladder'. As Lawson points out, the single major cause of ill-health and death in the world is poverty, and if we take the standpoint of human welfare, the surest way to benefit humans is to lift them out of poverty. Lawson sees many serious problems facing the world, and many things that urgently need putting right. The view of this compelling and convincing book is that global warming isn't one of them.


A call for solid science to replace the hype and hysteria, 14 Sep 2008
A well written and thought provoking book that attempts to speak above the hysterical din that dominates the subject.

The author calls for a considered approach and appeals to organisations to address the issues we face in a sensible and practical way.



Lawson knows best apparently, 23 Aug 2008
The combined wisdom of the world's leading climate change scientists is clearly no match for Nigel Lawson. He alone is clear sighted enough to see these clever people are all wrong. Stop worrying you people on coastlands and islands as you watch the tide rising. Stop fussing about those droughts Africa and Australia! Trust Nigel, everything will be well because...er because he says so.

Thought-provoking contribution, 19 Aug 2008
In this thought-provoking book, Nigel Lawson asks key questions about global warming. Is the world warming and if so, why? How much warmer will it get? What will be the consequences? What can and should we do about it? What is the most cost-effective way to tackle it?

He looks at the temperature record. Surprisingly, temperatures have not risen since 2001, even though global CO2 emissions have been rising faster than ever. There was a 0.7oC rise over the last century while the CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 30%, largely caused by industrialisation driven by the rapid worldwide growth of carbon-based energy consumption (burning coal, oil and gas). Some, possibly most, of the warming is due to this growth of CO2 emissions and so of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report predicted a sea-level rise of between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100. (Its 1990 report predicted a 3.67 metre rise.) The IPCC predicted a 1.8o-4oC temperature rise by 2100, a mean of less than 3oC. (At 3oC, it says, "Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase.") 3oC is 0.03oC a year, compared to 1975-2000's 0.02oC a year.

The IPCC says the one `virtually certain' impact of global warming is `reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure'. A 2003 Department of Health study confirmed this, predicting a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 and an increase in heat-related mortality of 2,000 by the 2050s.

On the IPCC's worst case scenario, of 1% growth a year in the developed countries and 2.3% in the developing countries, global warming could cost us 5% of world GDP by 2100. This would make developed countries' GDP 2.6 times today's rather than 2.7 and developing countries' GDP 8.5 times today's rather than 9.5.

Lawson argues that we should drop the precautionary principle because it is wrong to take decisions on the basis of worst-case possibilities: probabilities, not possibilities, should be our guide.

He looks at the prospects of some specific disasters. He notes that Antarctic ice-sheets are growing, that the IPCC's 2007 report said that an `abrupt transition' of the Gulf Stream is `very unlikely' and that the World Meteorological Organization said of climate change's effects on hurricanes, "no firm conclusion can be made on this point."

The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has increased profits for selected emitters and not cut emissions. Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism has done no better. The EU promotes growing biofuels, yet the Chinese government has suspended the production of the biofuel ethanol because it has raised food prices.

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said that meeting the EU's agreed target of 20% of energy from renewables by 2020 would raise our electricity costs by £18-22 billion a year.

In June 2007 Merkel and Blair tried to get the G8 to agree to cut emissions by 50% by 2050. The rest rejected the idea. Six months later, Britain and Germany lost again when they proposed a mandatory global emissions cut of 25-40% by 2020.

We could control the world's temperature by severely limiting carbon dioxide emissions through raising prices of carbon-based energy, to make non-carbon-based energy more competitive. But this would force our energy-intensive industries out to China and other countries. (Although China's, and India's, emissions per head are still far less than the West's.) 1990s Russia showed that the only way to meet the Kyoto targets is to destroy your industries.

Lawson argues for an across-the-board carbon tax, even if it forces our remaining energy-intensive industries abroad, and for ending subsidies to all carbon-based energy. Instead, we need to keep our industries, se we need new carbon-based power stations and new gas storage facilities, which the market has not provided and will not provide.




Deluded amateur challenges the science, 12 Aug 2008
Lawson flies in the face of scientific consensus with no solid basis for his position. An unhelpful book.

A Fabulous Grumpy Old Man, 23 Oct 2008
I remember first hearing James Lovelock's Gaia theory (that the Earth is a self regulating entity) on the BBC in the 1970's and thinking it was quite convincing. I was really disappointed reading this book to find that he seems to have very little additional evidence for Gaia after nearly 40 years. This lack of hard science behind Gaia undermines the authority of the book. As a result it reads like a fabulous and fabulously well researched grumpy old man rant.

Lovelock has a go at just about everything - population growth, climate change, nitrates, the green movement and so on. His is a counsel of almost complete despair, he has only two positive suggestions to make, one is to support nuclear energy and the other is to reduce the Earth's population from 6bn to 1.5bn.

He is very lucid on the problems, even if not fully convincing on the Gaia-ness of them, but I can see that if you were a policymaker this book would be of no help at all and frequently it's exasperating. He's an important scientist, so it's a book that should be read, but don't expect to come away any clearer about how to shape the future.

Essential Reading, 11 Apr 2008
We should salute the (now) 89 -year-old author, James Ephraim Lovelock (Ephraim is Hebrew for fruitful): an independent, dissenting voice in science. Rebelling against reductionist philosophies, he took an inclusive, systems view of the planet, publishing his Gaia Hypothesis in 1970. It took over 30 years for the international scientific community to come round.

Having studied chemistry at Manchester U and received his PhD in medicine at London U, Lovelock was engaged in the 1960s by NASA to find ways to detect life on Mars. He realized that life would influence the atmosphere and designed an instrument to detect trace gases. Thinking about the reason why Mars is so barren and Earth so fruitful, he arrived at his Hypothesis.

In brief the Hypothesis stated that the Earth is not just a rock that happens to have things living on it: it is a complex interacting system of soil, sea, atmosphere and living things that shows a tendency to keep itself stable in a way that supports life. In particular this complex web has acted to hold temperature within a narrow range over hundreds of millions of years even as the sun warms and the planet wobbles in its orbit.

Lovelock calls this system Gaia after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth and persists in referring to Gaia as a person who acts with intent. Some find this annoying and unscientific. This reader accepts it as poetry and metaphor.

In summary, in his latest book, Lovelock revisits his Hypothesis and argues that:

1. Not only is climate change an impending disaster but an irreversible tipping point may already have been reached
2. The single most important step to take now is a major switch to nuclear power
3. Too many people simply do not understand the issues correctly: the well-meaning Greens are also at fault
4. Gaia's revenge will be to restore the equilibrium of the planet by removing most of the human population

On page 1 he states bluntly: `we are now so abusing the Earth that it may..move back to the hot state it was in 55 m years ago and most of us and our descendants will die.'

He starts with a by-now familiar history of the issue of climate change and goes on to say: ` we are now approaching one of those tipping points and (are) like passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.'

He reminds us how huge are the effects of what seem like minor temperature shifts: only 3 degrees separates us from the last ice age; the same scale of increase now seems likely this century: very rapid change indeed in geological time.

The tipping point factors of climate change are by now well-known:

1. The poles melt and less sun is reflected: this seems to be happening now
2. The bogs thaw and methane is released (a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2)
3. The seas warm and the algae stop fixing carbon and making clouds
4. The forests bake and catch fire
5. Methane clathrates are released from the deep sea bed

What makes Lovelock distinctive is his Gaian perspective. He argues that:

1. A `cold' planet' is healthier than a `hot' one. If the Earth was 5 C cooler than now (as it has often been) , there would be glaciers down to the English Channel. But the Atlantic would be teeming and Africa would be a green garden.
2. We are mistaken to think that the Earth is in a Goldilocks orbit. It started out too cold for life. The sun is slowly warming and now the Earth is becoming too hot. So Gaia keeps tilting to coldness. There have been 11 recent ice-ages in the British Isles. We are in the `fever' of a warm interglacial and would normally be heading to the `cure' of the ice-age.
3. But man has disrupted the balance, not just by burning fossil fuel but also by replacing forest with farm. Gaia will do what it must to restore the balance.
4. The underlying problem is that the sustainable human population is probably under 1 billion. Today it is 6 billion, forecast to be 11 billion by 2050.

His argument for nuclear power is simple: all the other solutions produce lots of CO2 or don't work well and/or take too long (new approaches such as carbon sequestration take 20-40 years to mature):

1. Nuclear power is tried, tested and economical and produces very little CO2
2. Wind power is unreliable and costly. It would take 56000 large wind-mills plus fossil fuel back-up just to replace current nuclear capacity (20% of our total needs)
3. Solar is poor for the UK: unreliable and 3x more expensive than conventional methods
4. Wave power apart from a Severn barrage is expensive .....

And so on.

He believes that popular misconceptions of cancer risk militate against nuclear. (It's arguably worse than that: the UK government has ducked the issue for over a decade. Only in the last few months, stampeded by the risk that (a) the lights will go off around 2012 and/or (b) we will depend on a hostile Russia for gas, has the UK government moved). Lovelock bemoans the fact that our political classes do not have any feel for nature or the planet. (They also know little of science or business and there is often a grim determination among temporary ministers to avoid difficult decisions.)

He feels that the Green movement has lost its way: for example by wanting `sustainable development' when much more radical action is needed and for promoting low-productivity organic farming when this means eating up yet more of the countryside. This is putting a lifestyle choice ahead of the planet. He detests the Green wish to cover the land with tens of thousands of windmills.

He offers several examples of similarly faulty decisions: including the massive error of banning DDT. Because the vocal western middle-classes did not want pesticide in its food, Africans died. Yet the use of DDT to kill human disease vectors posed little food risk: it was abuse of DDT by farmers.

Lovelock explores some blue-sky technical fixes to global warming: planetary sun-shades, for example, but without real enthusiasm. Perhaps because it would distract from his here and now message: go nuclear.

So are his arguments complete and wholly compelling? No. The central question of power sources deserves a large book in its own right. Do you have to accept Gaia to believe that climate change is likely to destroy us? No. Do you have to accept Lovelocks' wistful argument for a countryside free of windmills? No.

But although bits of the book can be faulted, the whole seems to me to succeed. It is a well-written, lively, provocative book on a critical subject and a key idea of our times written by one our most gifted and original thinkers.

****

It's nice to know that when climate Armageddon arrives: the poles and the permafrost melt, the bogs and tropics catch fire and much of Southern Europe, Asia, Africa and the USA and Australia starve and fry, the Atlantic Conveyor will also switch off resulting in a local temperature drop. The result could well be that the UK climate remains equable. On the other hand the UK will be a shrunken archipelago, with our major cities submerged, tens of millions of people looking for a home and many millions of refugees landing on our beaches.

Sentimental nonsense, 23 Mar 2008
Nature is simply indifferent to our fate: it is neither malicious, nor benevolent. If humanity's time is up, it's up. We won't be the first species to die, nor the last. Let the polar bears look after themselves. Carpe diem.

Forget Windfarms - Go Nuclear!, 11 Feb 2008
I first read "The Revenge of Gaia" two years ago, when it was published. By early 2006, of course, we were all becoming aware of a progressively strident chorus about the imminent catastrophe that global warming was going to cause and how there was a scientific consensus on the matter. Lovelock was the first book I read on the subject.

I was suitably alarmed by Lovelock's analysis, and particularly by his identification of "tipping points", whereby a relatively modest increase in temperature would lead to positive feedbacks, e.g. from a hotter Amazon rainforest dying and releasing its stored CO2, by a greening Greenland absorbing rather than reflecting heat, and thus causing further, and unstoppable, global warming. Lovelock envisaged humanity reduced to a few million "breeding pairs" on the Arctic and Antarctic fringes.

Two years on, I have re-read in a more critical way and have a number of observations about the way Lovelock states the case for there being a major and immediate problem.

Firstly, Lovelock makes no reference to any experimental work to justify the feared quantitative relationship between a rise in "greenhouse gases" and average global temperature. There is much reference to computer modelling - Lovelock is a keen computer modeller, and the Gaia theory is supposedly validated by it - and correlations. (What experimental, as opposed to modelling, work has been done? If you have any recommendations do let me know via a "comment".)

Secondly, he makes some sweeping leaps of logic. Having stated that climatic prediction is easier than forecasting the weather on the basis that we an predict that it will be colder in Berlin on December 2010 than it was in the previous July, he states that an increase in CO2 to 500ppm will accompanied by "profound climate change".

I was struck by his personal reliance on Michael Mann's so-called "hockey stick" graph, adopted uncritically in the 2001 IPCC 3rd Report, which had been pretty thoroughly discredited by the time the book was written (and which has all but disappeared from the 2007 IPCC 4th Report). If his fear of man made global warming is based primarily on this work, then I am reassured that it is probably not as bad as it seemed.

Lovelock quotes Dick Taverne (March of Unreason) warmly for criticising the greens' "impractical romanticism". I would disagree that that is a fair synopsis of Taverne's book, but in any case in his recommendation of the adoption of the "precautionary principle" he ignores one of Taverne's principal criticisms, that overcaution without a scientific basis threatens economic progress that can lift millions out of poverty.

Finally, Lovelock's arguments encompass warming and cooling trends over a variety of timescales, from the geological epochs, the last 100,000 years and the last hundred. He states that we are in an interglacial period, then that it has been hotter in he past. I found it hard to identify a pattern in this. He talks about a gradually warming sun, but not of any other cycles that might affect the sun's warming of the Earth. Svensmark's (more recent) book provides a coherent explanation of solar and galactic effects, and I am aware of others.

That having been said, the book is evidence that, back in 2005, Lovelock and others predicted that warming was occurring, (however it was caused). He predicted the opening of the North-West Passage, which indeed did happen this year. CO2 and CH4 may be contributing to this, and (by my reading at least) science cannot reliably tell us how much and to what eventual effect. What, then, of what Lovelock recommendations as to what we do about it?

I am struck, on re-reading Lovelock, at how little notice the global scientific consensus and its British offshoots have taken of his recommendations: forget wind turbines, go nuclear. The downsides of wind turbines have been covered more recently, and extensively, by the sceptical Booker and North. Lovelock writes on the basis that we need technological solutions to manage a "sustainable retreat" to a world living within Gaia's means, ideally with just 500 to 1,000 million people - he quite clearly hankers after the "idyll" of 1800AD. (1800AD in England might have been bearable for Jane Austen, great for Mr Darcy, but for the rest of us...?) I fear he underestimates the difficulty of making nuclear fusion a viable solution, and even of using plutonium for fission reactors, but there is much to be said for trying if you think that CO2 emissions are going to destroy life on the planet. Lovelock also advocates the Severn Tidal Barrage, and one wonders why this proven and predictable technology is not being implemented instead of the plan for thousands of off-shore wind turbines. Some of his other sustainable retreat solutions are less appetising - notably the suggestion that we should synthesize our food so that more of the planet can be allowed to revert to the wild.

Lovelock's book is short and well written. The courteous way in which he refers to global warming "sceptics" and other opponents is commendable, and is quite unusual in this polarised debate between "alarmists" and "deniers". His summary of possible positive feedbacks is compelling (in a frightening way) irrespective of the extent to which warming might be being driven in the first instance by man made or other effects, and his arguments as to which alternative energy sources to pursue are delivered with scientific objectivity. As to the extent to which he represents that there is an immediate and catastrophic problem, however, the way that Lovelock rubbishes the over-reaction to the fear of acid rain is illuminating. "It is", he says, "all to easy it seems to lose our sense of proportion." Consumed by the Gaia theory that he finds difficult not to imbue with new-age spiritualism despite his rational scientific basis, it is possible that Lovelock has done so himself.


Essential, 05 Jan 2008
This book served as my introduction to the concept of Gaia. A friend suggested I should read it and politely I agreed. Quite simply, Lovelock's arguement makes a lot of sense and the messages conveyed within the volume should be considered by all. Especially politicians and (well meaning) greens. Only this week the news was dominated by debate regarding a new fossil fuel power station. This book clearly explains why this must not happen (ever) and presents the alternatives available now and those that will become so in our lifetimes. Lovelock really puts current environmental issues into context. An excellent read and with content that will touch the lives of every human being, present and future. READ THIS BOOK!

Great Way to View the Earth!, 25 Aug 2008
I read this book sometime ago and is impacted me significantly as it has with many others. I enjoyed the explanation of the huge organism (Earth) that is self- regulating. I also enjoyed that Lovelock points out that we humans are part of the environment and belong here. We will produce waste.

Having said that, any system can overload. Thus, we need to be good stewards of our planet.

As the astronauts left the earth in the 1960's and headed towards the moon they looked back at our planet and did not see borders or countries. They saw the earth as a single unit...beautiful and fragile. It rotated on an invisible string in the blackness of night. It affected many of the astronauts profoundly.

The book has already helped many more people see the earth as a single unit. If it can continue to do that, hopefully we will find a way to live more harmoniously with the environment on our planet.

Gaia is a great read and a way of looking at things that is both fascination and enlightening!

The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide To: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking

A masterful and poetic scientific break-through. James Lovelock is a visionary of the highest order., 07 Nov 2007
It didn't have the direct and dramatic impact of Newton's Principia - a book that radically changed the world, nevertheless James Lovelock's book Gaia - a New Look at Life on Earth, did have a more subtle influence on our world - particularly that of science. In a sense the Gaia Hypothesis prefigured - culturally and symbolically - the evolution of pure science from that classical, mechanistic world view inspired by the uncanny genius of Newton, to a less linear, more holistic awareness of the irreducible relationships (`gestalts') that permeate apparently discreet phenomena. Indeed this kind of more `organic' approach is radically renewing the scope of Science.

What this unique book may also prove to have done is act as a pivotal stepping stone in time: a step back into our most atavistic, indigenous roots, a time when we lived in harmony with the Earth - talk to any Inuit, Aborigine, or Sioux elder and they retain that deeply intuitive and spiritual connection; but just as significantly, a step into the future - towards a re-newed awareness of our responsibility and acute vulnerability as part of the Earth's 'living' ecology. Climate change is the moment that latter reality is returned home to us with the harshest and most dangerous of lessons. And in a sense, climate change was the mighty prediction James Lovelock issued with his Gaia Hypothesis.

More recently he's said his hope lies "in that powerful force that takes over our lives when we sense that our tribe or nation is threatened from outside". However, he's also said "I do think it will take a disaster to wake us up''. Let's hope, on that score at least, and for all our sakes, he's wrong.


Problem with intent, 22 Mar 2006
Firstly I will say this, if you are considering buying this book then do so. If nothing else it will make you think and thats always a worthwhile thing in a publication. That being said I have issues with the text.

The data is thought provoking, the hypothesis, that the planet can be modelled by thinking of it in terms of a homeostatic (Self regulating) organism is certainly supported byy the evidence presented and the top-down look at the world makes a refreshing and worthwile change from the 'standard' reductionist approach. Now for the 'but';

Lovelock makes the common, unfortunate and in this book serial mistake (to my mind at least)of confusing effect with intent. For example he cites the chemically unstable composition of the atmosphere, maintained by life, as evidence that Gaia - the world organism - is self regulating for the benefit of life. His argument runs that if this atmospheric balance was not maintained life would die out, therefore Gaia must have lifes best interests at heart and work for the benefit and propagation of life.

This is an all too common confusion accidentaly propagted by many, the underpinning science is engaging, interesting and enlightening but the unfortunate phrasing in terms of the planets intent irritates throughout the book. Just because we can interpret things more easily by considering the planet in terms of an organism does not mean it thinks and feels as a human psyche. Conversly it also doesn't mean it doesn't think like us, it may, but I would prefer this isn't assumed when there is no evidence to support it.

Overall, well worth reading but beware the anthromorphic phrasing. I'm interested to see how his more science orientated book turns out. In the post as I type.

Interesting Hypothesis in Somewhat Convoluted Form, 27 May 2004
James Lovelock has created a powerful and interesting argument in this book that will keep scientists busy for centuries. He notices that there is an ability for the Earth to maintain relatively constant conditions in temperature, atmosphere, salinity and pH of the oceans, and reductions in pollutants that defies the simple observations of what "should" happen. From this, he concludes that there is a complex of physical, chemical and biological interrelationships that work like a living organism, which he defines as the Gaia Hypothesis. For defining that concept and providing some of the measurements to establish its premises, he deserves a 7 star rating.

Unfortunately, the argument is expressed in overlong and convoluted fashion. He deliberately limits himself to a nonscientific explanation in this book. The scientific version of the argument is in The Ages of Gaia. Although the book is not long, it certainly could have been condensed into a longish article for Scientific American or The Atlantic Monthly. My second quibble is that the editor was nowhere in sight in creating the organization of the book. The key point is often buried in the third sentence of the last paragraph in a chapter. The argument in between wanders into all kinds of places where it doesn't need to go. For organization and editing, I give this book a one star rating.

So the average is a 4 star rating. The writing itself is pleasant enough. Don't let the lack of organization and editing put you off, for it is worth your while to read this book. It will remind you of the benefits of the sort of sytems thinking that Peter Senge talks about in The Fifth Discipline.

The other thing you will learn is the weakness of scientific work that fails to develop enough field data and to connect enough with other disciplines. I was struck by the same observations recently while visiting environmental scientists at the Smithsonian Institution. The basics in many of these areas have yet to be measured and evaluated. This book will point countless generations forward in understanding how our plant maintains its environment that permits life to flourish. Clearly, it is a stallbusting effort to replace "stalled" thinking about the history and future of the Earth. I found the key questions (such as why doesn't the ocean become more saline?) to be irresistible. I think you will, too. Enjoy and think!

a great book...., 31 Jul 2002
The idea that the planet is a self-balancing system is clearly presented for non-scientists. Fully explained, this model is in fact complementary to other enviromental models rather than contradictory. I think that this book usefully fills a gap between economics, biology and physics, and it is a sobering message that if we do not take sufficient care, we could tip the planet into a new equilibrium (but without the human race).

Sound information, 24 Jan 2007
This is an excellent book. Read, enjoyed, and lent to others who have also appreciated its wisdom.

Just what it says on the tin, 16 Sep 2008
This is a wonderful book. As the title suggests, it is cool, reasonable, and patient, looking carefully at all the evidence and coming to conclusions which it is hard to disagree with.

Like other reviewers, I find it hard to take excerpts from the book because I would have to quote the whole thing! However, perhaps I may try to help anyone who is wondering whether to read it. One way to look at the global warming/climate change debate is to ask oneself three questions.

First, is the world getting warmer?
Second, is human activity, and specifically CO2, a major cause?
And third, does it matter? Will there be harmful consequences? And if so, what should we do about them?

Much of the angry debate between believers and sceptics rages round the first two points. Lawson surveys the evidence on both, and comes to a conclusion. But what makes this book so powerful is its focus on the third question: whether a warmer world is one that will harm people, animals, plants, and our descendants. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) argues that it will. Lawson disagrees. He takes us through the IPCC scenarios, and their range of predictions relating to five potential impacts of a warmer world: on water, ecosystems, food, coasts, and health. In each case he demonstrates, with evidence, that a warmer world will either be neutral or even beneficial. What makes this evidence particularly persuasive is that much of it is drawn from the IPCC's own 4th report (2007)!.

It would be wrong to think of this book as complacent, a kind of 'I'm all right, Jack, pull up the ladder'. As Lawson points out, the single major cause of ill-health and death in the world is poverty, and if we take the standpoint of human welfare, the surest way to benefit humans is to lift them out of poverty. Lawson sees many serious problems facing the world, and many things that urgently need putting right. The view of this compelling and convincing book is that global warming isn't one of them.


A call for solid science to replace the hype and hysteria, 14 Sep 2008
A well written and thought provoking book that attempts to speak above the hysterical din that dominates the subject.

The author calls for a considered approach and appeals to organisations to address the issues we face in a sensible and practical way.



Lawson knows best apparently, 23 Aug 2008
The combined wisdom of the world's leading climate change scientists is clearly no match for Nigel Lawson. He alone is clear sighted enough to see these clever people are all wrong. Stop worrying you people on coastlands and islands as you watch the tide rising. Stop fussing about those droughts Africa and Australia! Trust Nigel, everything will be well because...er because he says so.

Thought-provoking contribution, 19 Aug 2008
In this thought-provoking book, Nigel Lawson asks key questions about global warming. Is the world warming and if so, why? How much warmer will it get? What will be the consequences? What can and should we do about it? What is the most cost-effective way to tackle it?

He looks at the temperature record. Surprisingly, temperatures have not risen since 2001, even though global CO2 emissions have been rising faster than ever. There was a 0.7oC rise over the last century while the CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 30%, largely caused by industrialisation driven by the rapid worldwide growth of carbon-based energy consumption (burning coal, oil and gas). Some, possibly most, of the warming is due to this growth of CO2 emissions and so of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report predicted a sea-level rise of between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100. (Its 1990 report predicted a 3.67 metre rise.) The IPCC predicted a 1.8o-4oC temperature rise by 2100, a mean of less than 3oC. (At 3oC, it says, "Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase.") 3oC is 0.03oC a year, compared to 1975-2000's 0.02oC a year.

The IPCC says the one `virtually certain' impact of global warming is `reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure'. A 2003 Department of Health study confirmed this, predicting a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 and an increase in heat-related mortality of 2,000 by the 2050s.

On the IPCC's worst case scenario, of 1% growth a year in the developed countries and 2.3% in the developing countries, global warming could cost us 5% of world GDP by 2100. This would make developed countries' GDP 2.6 times today's rather than 2.7 and developing countries' GDP 8.5 times today's rather than 9.5.

Lawson argues that we should drop the precautionary principle because it is wrong to take decisions on the basis of worst-case possibilities: probabilities, not possibilities, should be our guide.

He looks at the prospects of some specific disasters. He notes that Antarctic ice-sheets are growing, that the IPCC's 2007 report said that an `abrupt transition' of the Gulf Stream is `very unlikely' and that the World Meteorological Organization said of climate change's effects on hurricanes, "no firm conclusion can be made on this point."

The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has increased profits for selected emitters and not cut emissions. Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism has done no better. The EU promotes growing biofuels, yet the Chinese government has suspended the production of the biofuel ethanol because it has raised food prices.

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said that meeting the EU's agreed target of 20% of energy from renewables by 2020 would raise our electricity costs by £18-22 billion a year.

In June 2007 Merkel and Blair tried to get the G8 to agree to cut emissions by 50% by 2050. The rest rejected the idea. Six months later, Britain and Germany lost again when they proposed a mandatory global emissions cut of 25-40% by 2020.

We could control the world's temperature by severely limiting carbon dioxide emissions through raising prices of carbon-based energy, to make non-carbon-based energy more competitive. But this would force our energy-intensive industries out to China and other countries. (Although China's, and India's, emissions per head are still far less than the West's.) 1990s Russia showed that the only way to meet the Kyoto targets is to destroy your industries.

Lawson argues for an across-the-board carbon tax, even if it forces our remaining energy-intensive industries abroad, and for ending subsidies to all carbon-based energy. Instead, we need to keep our industries, se we need new carbon-based power stations and new gas storage facilities, which the market has not provided and will not provide.




Deluded amateur challenges the science, 12 Aug 2008
Lawson flies in the face of scientific consensus with no solid basis for his position. An unhelpful book.

A Fabulous Grumpy Old Man, 23 Oct 2008
I remember first hearing James Lovelock's Gaia theory (that the Earth is a self regulating entity) on the BBC in the 1970's and thinking it was quite convincing. I was really disappointed reading this book to find that he seems to have very little additional evidence for Gaia after nearly 40 years. This lack of hard science behind Gaia undermines the authority of the book. As a result it reads like a fabulous and fabulously well researched grumpy old man rant.

Lovelock has a go at just about everything - population growth, climate change, nitrates, the green movement and so on. His is a counsel of almost complete despair, he has only two positive suggestions to make, one is to support nuclear energy and the other is to reduce the Earth's population from 6bn to 1.5bn.

He is very lucid on the problems, even if not fully convincing on the Gaia-ness of them, but I can see that if you were a policymaker this book would be of no help at all and frequently it's exasperating. He's an important scientist, so it's a book that should be read, but don't expect to come away any clearer about how to shape the future.

Essential Reading, 11 Apr 2008
We should salute the (now) 89 -year-old author, James Ephraim Lovelock (Ephraim is Hebrew for fruitful): an independent, dissenting voice in science. Rebelling against reductionist philosophies, he took an inclusive, systems view of the planet, publishing his Gaia Hypothesis in 1970. It took over 30 years for the international scientific community to come round.

Having studied chemistry at Manchester U and received his PhD in medicine at London U, Lovelock was engaged in the 1960s by NASA to find ways to detect life on Mars. He realized that life would influence the atmosphere and designed an instrument to detect trace gases. Thinking about the reason why Mars is so barren and Earth so fruitful, he arrived at his Hypothesis.

In brief the Hypothesis stated that the Earth is not just a rock that happens to have things living on it: it is a complex interacting system of soil, sea, atmosphere and living things that shows a tendency to keep itself stable in a way that supports life. In particular this complex web has acted to hold temperature within a narrow range over hundreds of millions of years even as the sun warms and the planet wobbles in its orbit.

Lovelock calls this system Gaia after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth and persists in referring to Gaia as a person who acts with intent. Some find this annoying and unscientific. This reader accepts it as poetry and metaphor.

In summary, in his latest book, Lovelock revisits his Hypothesis and argues that:

1. Not only is climate change an impending disaster but an irreversible tipping point may already have been reached
2. The single most important step to take now is a major switch to nuclear power
3. Too many people simply do not understand the issues correctly: the well-meaning Greens are also at fault
4. Gaia's revenge will be to restore the equilibrium of the planet by removing most of the human population

On page 1 he states bluntly: `we are now so abusing the Earth that it may..move back to the hot state it was in 55 m years ago and most of us and our descendants will die.'

He starts with a by-now familiar history of the issue of climate change and goes on to say: ` we are now approaching one of those tipping points and (are) like passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.'

He reminds us how huge are the effects of what seem like minor temperature shifts: only 3 degrees separates us from the last ice age; the same scale of increase now seems likely this century: very rapid change indeed in geological time.

The tipping point factors of climate change are by now well-known:

1. The poles melt and less sun is reflected: this seems to be happening now
2. The bogs thaw and methane is released (a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2)
3. The seas warm and the algae stop fixing carbon and making clouds
4. The forests bake and catch fire
5. Methane clathrates are released from the deep sea bed

What makes Lovelock distinctive is his Gaian perspective. He argues that:

1. A `cold' planet' is healthier than a `hot' one. If the Earth was 5 C cooler than now (as it has often been) , there would be glaciers down to the English Channel. But the Atlantic would be teeming and Africa would be a green garden.
2. We are mistaken to think that the Earth is in a Goldilocks orbit. It started out too cold for life. The sun is slowly warming and now the Earth is becoming too hot. So Gaia keeps tilting to coldness. There have been 11 recent ice-ages in the British Isles. We are in the `fever' of a warm interglacial and would normally be heading to the `cure' of the ice-age.
3. But man has disrupted the balance, not just by burning fossil fuel but also by replacing forest with farm. Gaia will do what it must to restore the balance.
4. The underlying problem is that the sustainable human population is probably under 1 billion. Today it is 6 billion, forecast to be 11 billion by 2050.

His argument for nuclear power is simple: all the other solutions produce lots of CO2 or don't work well and/or take too long (new approaches suc