James Lovelock

For each of our actions there are only consequences.

Summary

James Lovelock (1919 - ), FRS, is an independent scientist, author, researcher and environmentalist who lives in Cornwall, in the west of England.

He is most famous for proposing and popularizing the Gaia Hypothesis, in which he postulates that the Earth functions as a kind of super organism. This leads to the Unity of Humanity/Nature (see Vital Unconscious and Biocentric Principle).

Ideas

• Medical Research - he developed a quantitative theory of the damage suffered by living cells when they were frozen and thawed at slow or moderate rates. Experiments showed that damage was due to the concentration of salt and other solutes when ice separated as a pure substance. Previously it was thought that damage was solely due to the piercing of cells and tissue by ice crystals. Later participated in a team that successfully froze and thawed whole animals, hamsters.
• Electron Capture Detector - invented by Lovelock. This device, use in gas chromatography, made possible the detection of CFCs and other atmospheric nano-pollutants.
• Global Warming - he was among the first prominent scientists to sound the alarm over global warming, caused by man-made industrialization and pollution.
• Gaia Hypothesis - proposes that living and nonliving parts of the earth are a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. This hypothesis postulates that all living things have a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that promotes life overall.

Gaia Hypothesis

Working with Dr Lynn Margulis, he developed the idea of the Biosphere as a sort of self-organizing superorganism (Dr Margulis' term). Following the advice of his neighbor, author William Golding, he named this conjecture after the Greek earth goddess, Gaia. He coined the term Geophysiology for the study of the life science of the earth as a whole.

He 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.

His initial hypothesis was that the biomass modifies the conditions on the planet to make conditions on the planet more hospitable - the Gaia Hypothesis properly defined this "hospitality" as a full Homeostasis. The atmosphere is kept in homeostasis by and for the biosphere.

He proposed the existence of a global control system of surface temperature, atmosphere composition and ocean salinity. His arguments were:

• The global surface temperature of the Earth has remained constant, despite an increase in the energy provided by the Sun.
• Atmospheric composition remains constant, even though it should be unstable.
• Ocean salinity is constant.

Whether this sort of system is present on Earth is still open to debate. However, some relatively simple homeostatic mechanisms are generally accepted:

• When atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, certain plants are able to grow better and thus act to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
• When sunlight is plentiful and atmospheric temperature climbs, the phytoplankton of the ocean surface waters thrive and produce more dimethyl sulfide, DMS. The DMS molecules act as cloud condensation nuclei, which produce more clouds, and thus increase the atmospheric albedo and this feeds back to lower the temperature of the atmosphere.

As scientists discover more about Gaia, vast numbers of positive and negative feedback loops are being discovered, that, together, maintain a metastable condition, sometimes within very broad range of environmental conditions.