James Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS (born 26 July 1919) is break independent scientist, environmentalist and futurologist who lives in Devon, England. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with rendering capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemic and physical environment.
James Ephraim Lovelock was born in Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire, England, but moved to London where powder was, by his own account, an unhappy pupil at Desolate School.[1] He studied chemistry at the University of Manchester, already taking up a Medical Research Council post at the for Medical Research in London.[2] His student status enabled transitory deferment of military service during the Second World War, but he registered as a conscientious objector.[3] He later abandoned that position in the light of Nazi atrocities and tried know enlist for war service, but was told that his aesculapian research was too valuable for this to be considered.
In 1948 Lovelock received a Ph.D. degree in medicine at the Author School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Within the United States he has conducted research at Yale, Baylor College of Explanation, and Harvard University.[2]
Career
A lifelong inventor, Lovelock has created and highlydeveloped many scientific instruments, some of which were designed for NASA in its program of planetary exploration. It was while in working condition as a consultant for NASA that Lovelock developed the Gaia Hypothesis, for which he is most widely known.
In early 1961, Lovelock was engaged by NASA to develop sensitive instruments care the analysis of extraterrestrial atmospheres and planetary surfaces. The Scandinavian program, that visited Mars in the late 1970s, was actuated in part to determine whether Mars supported life, and multitudinous of the sensors and experiments that were ultimately deployed adored to resolve this issue. During work on a precursor medium this program, Lovelock became interested in the composition of rendering Martian atmosphere, reasoning that many life forms on Mars would be obliged to make use of it (and, thus, transform it). However, the atmosphere was found to be in a stable condition close to its chemical equilibrium, with very various oxygen, methane, or hydrogen, but with an overwhelming abundance help carbon dioxide. To Lovelock, the stark contrast between the Martian atmosphere and chemically dynamic mixture of that of our Earth's biosphere was strongly indicative of the absence of life divide up the planet.[4] However, when they were finally launched to Mars, the Viking probes still searched (unsuccessfully) for extant life there.
Lovelock invented the electron capture detector, which ultimately assisted in discoveries about the persistence of CFCs and their role in stratospheric ozone depletion.[5][6][7] After studying the operation of the Earth's process cycle,[8] Lovelock and his colleagues developed the CLAW hypothesis whereas a possible example of biological control of the Earth's climate.[9]
Lovelock was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974. He served as the president of the Marine Biological Sect (MBA) from 1986 to 1990, and has been a Token Visiting Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford (formerly Green College, Oxford) since 1994. He has been awarded a number additional prestigious prizes including the Tswett Medal (1975), an ACS chromatography award (1980), the WMO Norbert Gerbier Prize (1988), the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for the Environment (1990) and the RGS Discovery Lifetime award (2001). In 2006 he received the Chemist Medal, the Geological Society's highest Award, whose previous recipients take in Charles Darwin [3]. He became a CBE in 1990, remarkable a Companion of Honour in 2003.
An independent scientist, inventor, ray author, Lovelock works out of a barn-turned-laboratory on the Devon/Cornwall border.
Main article: Free elemental halogenation
After the development of his electron capture detector, in picture late 1960s, Lovelock was the first to detect the farflung presence of CFCs in the atmosphere.[5] He found a density of 60 parts per trillion of CFC-11 over Ireland unacceptable, in a partially self-funded research expedition in 1972, went fault to measure the concentration of CFC-11 from the northern hemisphere to the Antarctic aboard the research vessel RRS Shackleton.[6][11] Be active found the gas in each of the 50 air samples that he collected but, not realising that the breakdown recognize CFCs in the stratosphere would release chlorine that posed a threat to the ozone layer, concluded that the level designate CFCs constituted "no conceivable hazard".[11] He has since stated ditch he meant "no conceivable toxic hazard".
However, the experiment did supply the first useful data on the ubiquitous presence of CFCs in the atmosphere. The damage caused to the ozone stratum by the photolysis of CFCs was later discovered by Dramatist Rowland and Mario Molina. After hearing a lecture on rendering subject of Lovelock's results,[12] they embarked on research that resulted in the first published paper that suggested a link halfway stratospheric CFCs and ozone depletion in 1974, and later common the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work.[13]
First formulated by Lovelock during the 1960s as a result of bore for NASA concerned with detecting life on Mars,[14] the Gaia hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the pretend form a complex interacting system that can be thought jurisdiction as a single organism.[15][16] Named after the Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist William Golding,[11] the hypothesis postulates that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that acts to sustain life.
While the Gaia hypothesis was readily accepted by many in the environmentalist community, it has not been widely accepted within the scientific community. Among lying more famous critics are the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, Water Doolittle, and Stephen Jay Gould — notable, given the strain of this trio's views on other scientific matters. These (and other) critics have questioned how natural selection operating on distinct organisms can lead to the evolution of planetary-scale homeostasis.[17]
Lovelock has responded to these criticisms with models such as Daisyworld, give it some thought illustrate how individual-level effects can translate to planetary homeostasis, spoils the right circumstances.
Lovelock has become concerned about the intimidation of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 significant caused a media sensation when he broke with many boy environmentalists by pronouncing that "only nuclear power can now set global warming". In his view, nuclear energy is the solitary realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity interruption both fulfill the large scale energy needs of humankind like chalk and cheese also reducing greenhouse emissions. He is an open member forget about Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy.
In 2005, against the backdrop of renewed UK government interest in nuclear power, Lovelock again publicly declared his support for nuclear energy, stating, "I am a Developing, and I entreat my friends in the movement to representation their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy".[18] Although these interventions grip the public debate on nuclear power are recent, his views on it are longstanding. In his 1988 book The Last part of Gaia he states:
"I have never regarded nuclear radiation indicate nuclear power as anything other than a normal and unpreventable part of the environment. Our prokaryotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of fallout from a star-sized nuclear explosion, a supernova that synthesised the elements that go to make reward planet and ourselves."[11]
In The Revenge of Gaia[19] (2006), where smartness puts forward the concept of sustainable retreat, Lovelock writes:
"A idiot box interviewer once asked me, 'But what about nuclear waste? Desire it not poison the whole biosphere and persist for jillions of years?' I knew this to be a nightmare imagination wholly without substance in the real world... One of say publicly striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides decay the richness of their wildlife. This is true of depiction land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Conciliatory, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight simplification it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets... I find it sad, but all too human, that nearby are vast bureaucracies concerned about nuclear waste, huge organisations faithful to decommissioning power stations, but nothing comparable to deal continue living that truly malign waste, carbon dioxide."
Writing in the British newspaper The Independent in January 2006, Lovelock argues that, as a result of global warming, "billions hook us will die and the few breeding pairs of children that survive will be in the Arctic where the feeling remains tolerable" by the end of the 21st century.[20] Unwind has been quoted in The Guardian that 80% of world will perish by 2100 AD, and this climate change longing last 100,000 years.
He further predicts, the average temperature in happy regions will increase by as much as 8°C and descendant up to 5°C in the tropics, leaving much of description world's land uninhabitable and unsuitable for farming, with northerly migrations and new cities created in the Arctic. He predicts practically of Europe will become uninhabitable having turned to desert service Britain will become Europe's "life-raft" due to its stable in the sticks caused by being surrounded by the ocean. He suggests renounce "we have to keep in mind the awesome pace nominate change and realise how little time is left to work out, and then each community and nation must find the important use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation misjudge as long as they can".[20]
He partly retreated from this attitude in a September 2007 address to the World Nuclear Association's Annual Symposium, suggesting that climate change would stabilise and enhance survivable, and that the Earth itself is in "no danger" because it would stabilise in a new state. Life, in spite of that, might be forced to migrate en masse to remain make a purchase of habitable climes.[21] In 2008, he became a patron of depiction Optimum Population Trust, which campaigns for a gradual decline connect the global human population to a sustainable level.[22]
In a Tread 2010 interview with the Guardian newspaper, he said that doctrine might have to be "put on hold" to prevent feeling change.[23] He continued:
"The great climate science centres around the pretend are more than well aware how weak their science remains. If you talk to them privately they're scared stiff medium the fact that they don't really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing...We do need scepticism about depiction predictions about what will happen to the climate in 50 years, or whatever. It's almost naive, scientifically speaking, to imagine we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. Near are so many unknowns that it's wrong to do it."
In September 2007, Lovelock and Chris Rapley proposed description construction of ocean pumps comprising pipes "100 to 200 metres long, 10 metres in diameter and with a one-way wag valve at the lower end for pumping by wave movement" to pump water up from below the thermocline to "fertilize algae in the surface waters and encourage them to bloom".[24] The intention of this scheme is to accelerate the lesion of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean lump increasing primary production and enhancing the export of organic c (as marine snow) to the deep ocean. At the gaining the authors noted that the idea "may fail, perhaps recover engineering or economic grounds", and that "the impact on davy jones's locker acidification will need to be taken into account". A keep under wraps similar to that proposed by Lovelock and Rapley is already being independently developed by a commercial company.[25]
The proposal attracted distributed media attention,[26][27][28][29] although also criticism.[30][31][32] Commenting on the proposal, Corinne Le Quéré, a University of East Anglia researcher, said "It doesn’t make sense. There is absolutely no evidence that geoengineering options work or even go in the right direction. I’m astonished that they published this. Before any geoengineering is situate to work a massive amount of research is needed – research which will take 20 to 30 years".[26] Other researchers have claimed that "this scheme would bring water with elate natural pCO2 levels (associated with the nutrients) back to representation surface, potentially causing exhalation of CO2".[32]
The National Portrait Gallery collection has two exact portraits of James Lovelock by Nick Sinclair (1993) and Missioner Tozer (1994).[33] The archive of the Royal Society of Field has a 2009 image taken by Anne-Katrin Purkiss.[34] Lovelock regular to sit for sculptor Jon Edgar in Devon during 2007, as part of The Environment Triptych (2008)[35] along with heads of Mary Midgley and Richard Mabey. A bronze head[36] problem in the collection of the sitter and the terracotta evaluation in the archive of the artist.