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James Lovelock at 100: ‘The new generation of eco-warriors are too emotional’ (Telegraph)

22 February 2020

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Telegraph title: James Lovelock at 100: ‘The new generation of eco-warriors are too emotional’

Telegraph subtitle: The ‘maverick’ scientist explains why protest alone won’t save the planet

AuthorRobin Pagnamenta

Date: 18 February 2020

“James Lovelock takes a sip of tea and glances out of his window overlooking Chesil Beach. “If we are going to solve the problem, then it’s the nest of humans who are going to solve it,” the 100-year-old scientist and futurist says quietly, as rain lashes down outside over a windswept English Channel.

“I’ve got my own view on this thing: we’re in a fairly desperate position.”

Lovelock, who first theorised that Earth is a self-balancing biological organism rather than merely a rock (the “Gaia hypothesis”) has been warning about the risks of runaway climate change since the 1970s. He compares mankind’s current predicament with the challenge facing his own generation between 1939-45.

“It’s an incredible choice before us,” he says. “Do we want life as usual now, for a few more years – and then crash? Or do we cut back now?”

Last month, two of America’s leading climate scientists said the 2010s were the hottest decade on record and predicted the trend would continue unabated during the 2020s with average temperatures poised to rise to a critical level of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2035.

And while Greta Thunberg is credited with leading the green youth charge, figures released this week shows that older generations’ stewardship of the planet is in fact superior: over-55s are more environmentally friendly than the 16-24-year-olds surveyed in every area, from buying local produce to second-hand clothes, except veganism.

Often described as a maverick – although he prefers “independent scientist” – Lovelock’s views are certainly unfashionable.

His Gaia series of books became a rallying point for environmentalists in the 1970s and 80s, but Lovelock – who worked for NASA as an engineer designing instruments for the Viking lander programme to Mars in the 1960s and 70s – is no sandal-wearing hippy.

Note LO: see article for diagram about “Warmest years in the UK since 1910”

Snuggled up in his coastguard cottage near Abbotsbury in Dorset surrounded by books and accompanied by his American wife, Sandy, he remains a determined optimist despite the scale of the challenge. “It would not be at all difficult to stop burning oil and coal,” he says. “It’s just the will to do it.”

He claims beating climate change remains eminently feasible – but only through international cooperation between governments and scientists to forge practical scientific solutions, not by wearing sack-cloth or forcing people to switch off their central heating.

The answers lie, he says, in a wholesale dash for nuclear energy and other advanced scientific solutions to help protect the climate or moderate the Earth’s atmosphere artificially.

For all the green lobby’s good intentions, Lovelock cannot hide his disdain for what he views as simple-minded solutions to highly complex scientific problems – the group being “driven more by emotions based on false ideas, than by common sense or a proper knowledge of the earth.

“The greens are like unqualified doctors.”

Lovelock dismisses the idea that his nuclear ambitions are more dangerous and expensive than those currently in use. “Nuclear is far safer – 100 times safer – than any rival industry,” he says, nibbling on a digestive. “When that tsunami hit Japan and Fukushima… there was almost no nuclear disaster. “Nuclear waste? There’s very little of it.”

Such views may be provocative but Lovelock’s mischievous streak is unmistakable. Physically frail but mentally as sharp as ever, he claims solving the world’s climate woes is about money as much as anything else: “I think the financial institutions of the world are more worried about the loss of their investments than they are about global warming. Even though global warming will kill their grandchildren, probably.”

Born in Letchworth Garden City and raised in Brixton, south London, Lovelock went on to read chemistry at Manchester University. During World War II, he worked for Britain’s Medical Research Council on ways to shield soldiers from burns – refusing to conduct experiments on live rabbits, he offered up his own limbs instead.

Now, Lovelock’s work looks forward: aside from nuclear energy, he is keen on the construction in space of a giant sunshade which could be used to moderate the amount of the sun’s energy to hit the surface of the Earth.

“You get NASA to send out into space a disk, which is in a heliocentric orbit between us and the sun. And it just reflects enough of the sunlight to offset all the effects of global warming. It is a perfectly practical thing to do, and it will be exceedingly easy to dismantle. It will be moderately expensive, but not doing it will be a hell of a lot more expensive.”

Lovelock’s latest book, Novacene – a treatise on the future impact of Artificial Intelligence – was published last July. In it, he argues the world is moving into a new era which will be dominated by the emergence of superintelligent computers which will slowly but surely seize control of Earth from their human creators, and fuse with us into cyborgs.

Far from viewing this as a sinister development which threatens a Terminator-style war between humans and machines, Lovelock offers a refreshingly upbeat view: that robots who will rule the world with our blessing and support, because they will need us just as much as we need them.

He decries our tendency to see technology as a threat, rather than a new stage in our evolutionary development – partly down to “the endless stream of stuff coming from Hollywood. It’s always ‘the cyber monsters are out to get you’. And I just think it’s time we changed that negative way of looking at things.”

The rise of superintelligent computers has anyway already begun, he says, and will accelerate. “Supercomputers exist,” he smiles. “An iPhone is a supercomputer. It fits in your pocket and has wires just a few atoms thick. It could never be made by a human.”

“It’s just a short hop from where we are already to a world of cyborgs”, he says tapping his chest. “Slowly, imperceptibly we are all being dragged into a kind of mixed animal,” he says.

“I’ve got a triple wire pacemaker in my heart and I’ve got hearing aids, so electronics is coming into my existence on quite a scale already.” He adds: “It’s nothing but advantage. It won’t be that there are monsters who are controlling us.”

Superintelligent machines, he adds, will help humans solve some of their most intractable problems – tackling a warming climate, providing sufficient food and resources and helping us to administer the increasingly complex urban civilisations in which we live.

They will need us to regulate the rest of the planet and perform many of the menial tasks required to keep Earth – or Gaia – in balance. Super intelligence will come to view us much like we ourselves view plants, he says.

“Plants are about a million times slower than we are, but the farmer doesn’t go out and get rid of them. We need them and it’s a good relationship. I don’t see why that shouldn’t be true with cyborgs.””

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Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/02/18/james-lovelock-100-new-generation-eco-warriors-emotional/

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