James Lovelock Quotes

Perhaps the single most important thing that we can do to undo the harm we have done is to fix firmly in our minds the thought: the earth is alive.

The apologists for space science always seem over-impressed by engineering trivia and make far too much of non-stick frying pans and perfect ball-bearings. To my mind, the outstanding spin-off from space research is not new technology. The real bonus has been that for the first time in human history we have had a chance to look at the Earth from space, and the information gained from seeing from the outside our azure-green planet in all its global beauty has given rise to a whole new set of questions and answers.

Esso has been the main one in America spreading the disinformation that there is no global warming problem.

By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions.

You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.

I know that to personalize the Earth System as Gaia, as I have often done and continue to do in this book, irritates the scientifically correct, but I am unrepentant because metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread comprehension of the true nature of the Earth and an understanding of the lethal dangers that lie ahead.

Climate change now represents so urgent a threat to mankind that the only way to deal with it is by suspending democracy.

Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.

I would only have been too pleased if someone had asked me for my data. If you really believed in your data, you wouldn't mind someone looking at it. You should be able to respond that if you don't believe me go out and do the measurements yourself.

Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

There is no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth's surface between living and nonliving matter. There is merely a hierarchy of intensity going from the 'material' environment of the rocks and the atmosphere to the living cells.

What I tend to do is to wake about five in the morning-this happens quite often-think about the invention, and then image it in my mind in 3D, as a kind of construct. Then I do experiments with the image...sort of rotate it, and say, 'Well what'll happen if one does this?' And by the time I get up for breakfast I can usually go to the bench and make a string and sealing wax model that works straight off, because I've done most of the experiments already.

By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.

If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books - mine included - because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened.

Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.

The Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes - Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades.

Our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.

So-called 'sustainable development' is meaningless drivel.

Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.

The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.

Science always uses metaphor.

The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.

The tropical rain forests are a telling example. Once cut down, they rarely recover. Rainfall drops, deserts spread, the climate warms.

There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.

One pound of uranium is worth about 3 million pounds worth of coal or oil.

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

I wouldn't be against them (large wind turbines) if they actually worked.

You never know with politicians what they are really saying. And I don't say that in a negative way-they have an appalling job.