James Lovelock Quotes & Sayings

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. — James Lovelock

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. — James Lovelock

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. — James Lovelock

We'd never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn't been for space exploration and NASA. — James Lovelock

If a power station were to be built down the road, I'd prefer a nuclear plant over an oil burner, and definitely over a coal burner. We simply have to lessen our consumption of fossil fuels. — James Lovelock

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it. — James Lovelock

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

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. — James Lovelock

Imagine a survivor of a failed civilization with only a tattered book on aromatherapy for guidance in arresting a cholera epidemic. Yet, such a book would more likely be found amid the debris than a comprehensible medical text. — James Lovelock

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

Science always uses metaphor. — James Lovelock

Let's make hay while it lasts. — James Lovelock

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. — James Lovelock

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

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

China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution. — James Lovelock

I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful. — James Lovelock

We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price. — James Lovelock

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. — James Lovelock

What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up. — James Lovelock

If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space. — James Lovelock

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. — James Lovelock

This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief. — James Lovelock

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. — James Lovelock

Ask almost anybody if they think the climate?s changed in the last couple of decades and they will all say ?yes? and give you lots of examples. — James Lovelock

What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: 'Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?' If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours. — James Lovelock

The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. — James Lovelock

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

Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational. — James Lovelock

Composing computer programs to solve scientific problems is like writing poetry. You must choose every word with care and link it with the other words in perfect syntax. There is no place for verbosity or carelessness. To become fluent in a computer lnaguage demands almost the antithesis of modern loose thinking. It requires many interactive sessions, the hands-on use of the device. You do not learn a foreign language from a book, rather you have to live in the country for year to let the langauge become an automatic part of you, and the same is true for computer languages. — James Lovelock

For each of our actions there are only consequences. — James Lovelock

No one who has experienced the intense involvement of computer modeling would deny that the temptation exists to use any data input that will enable one to continue playing what is perhaps the ultimate game of solitaire. — James Lovelock

All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it. — James Lovelock

The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now. — James Lovelock

One thing that 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 to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don't know it. — James Lovelock

It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don't think people have noticed that, but it's got all the sort of terms that religions use ... The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can't win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air. — James Lovelock

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long. — James Lovelock

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

A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time. — James Lovelock

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

Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now. — James Lovelock

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

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards. — James Lovelock

We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science — James Lovelock

I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty. Revere and respect Gaia. Have trust in Gaia. But not faith. — James Lovelock

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. — James Lovelock

I'm not a pessimist, even though I do think awful things are going to happen. — James Lovelock

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

I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn't surprise me at all. — James Lovelock

I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway. — James Lovelock

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

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

Those of us who consider ourselves to be somehow involved in the birthing of a new age, should discover Gaia as well. The idea of Gaia may facilitate the task of converting destructive human activities to constructive and cooperative behavior. It is an idea which deeply startles us, and in the process, may help us as a species to make the necessary jump to planetary awareness. — James Lovelock

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. — James Lovelock

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it. — James Lovelock

Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it ... Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it. — James Lovelock

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

Only nuclear power can now halt global warming. — James Lovelock

So-called 'sustainable development' ... is meaningless drivel. — James Lovelock

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

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

Nowadays if you're dependent on a grant - and 99% of them are - you can't make mistakes as you won't get another one if you do. — James Lovelock

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so. — James Lovelock

The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts. — James Lovelock

NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station. — James Lovelock

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. — James Lovelock

Climatologists are all agreed that we'd be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average. — James Lovelock

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

The oil companies regard nuclear power as their rival, who will reduce their profits, so they put out a lot of disinformation about nuclear power. — James Lovelock

Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year. — James Lovelock

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

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

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. — James Lovelock

Life clearly does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes. Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia. — James Lovelock