James Lovelock Quotes

One thing being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope you get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don't know it.

The climate and the chemical properties of the Earth now and throughout its history seem always to have been optimal for life. For this to have happened by chance is as unlikely as to survive unscathed a drive blindfold through rush hour traffic.

We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.

Our planet... consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb...Within our bodies, no less than three million atoms rendered unstable in that event still erupt every minute, releasing a tiny fraction of the energy stored from that fierce fire of long ago.

In the current fashionable denigration of technology, it is easy to forget that nuclear fission is a natural process. If something as intricate as life can assemble by accident, we need not marvel at the fission reactor, a relatively simple contraption, doing likewise.

In Gaia, there's no such thing as pollution. The rules of the game are that any species that produces something noxious that affects the environment is doomed. Imagine there's some green bug … that decides it would be a neat trick to make chlorine. That bug is not going to succeed. If it doesn't kill itself off, it will certainly kill off its progeny, and destroy the environment around it and have no food to eat.

Bacteria … have been here for three and a half billion years, and without them we have no chance whatsoever of survival. Humans are something very recent, like the froth on top of a glass of beer.

If you were an artist or novelist, or a poet or somebody like that, nobody would think it odd if you worked in your own home. In science there's none of this at all. I'm almost the only independent scientist in Britain. Everybody else works in large institutions, universities, or industrial labs. Why should one expect scientists to work that way?

Life has to take charge of its environment and evolve with it.

Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

Neither Lynn Margulis nor I have ever proposed a teleological hypothesis. Nowhere in our writing do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves planetary foresight or planning by the biota. … Yet we met persistent, almost dogmatic, criticism that our hypothesis is teleological.

Challenging the conventional wisdom is the way to make waves in science.

Life has to be a planetary phenomenon. You could no more have a partially occupied planet than you could half a cat or half a dog.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

If there were a billion people living on the planet, we could do whatever we please. But there are nearly seven billion. At this scale, life as we know it today is not sustainable.