Lethal Heating: 12/26/15

26/12/2015

Why Addressing Climate Change Is Not Enough

Huffington Post - Mariajosé Aguilera*

The celebratory mood accompanying the recent Paris Accord, in which the entire UN membership agreed to hold global temperature increases to no more than 2°C, is quickly dissipating. As the Accord itself acknowledges, there is a "significant gap" between countries' climate change mitigation pledges and the 2°C goal (not to mention the more aspirational 1.5° C limit). This means that promised reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, even if realized, will be insufficient to stave off major consequences of climate change.
Yet bolder pledges alone will not prevent impending failure because the Paris Accord reproduces the flaws of the Kyoto Protocol. Although reporting is binding, countries face no penalties for missing their targets. Most of all, market-based schemes for emissions reductions enable wealthy countries and corporations to continue "business as usual" by paying low emitters for their pollution rights, ultimately stalling real and equitable progress. As we write, environmental groups across the world are gearing up to challenge these shortcomings.
But before this struggle -- and the planet -- gets even more heated, it is worth examining the larger context of environmental stewardship. The central issue, which goes beyond climate change, is degradation -- that is, the depletion and contamination of the earth's resources.
Climate change both exacerbates environmental degradation, and results from a growth-at-all-costs economic system that makes certain groups -- especially indigenous peoples and marginalized and low-income populations -- particularly vulnerable to both climate change and resource scarcity and contamination. Recognizing this fact can help climate-related activism and policymaking do a better job of protecting the planet and all who depend on it.
Focusing on single temperature-change targets (and the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions levels required to achieve them) is a handy, unifying strategy for social movements and governments, but it sidesteps other important environmental problems and their underlying, economic, social, and political determinants.
The most pressing environmental degradation problems, leading to a colossal 10 million deaths and untold illness each year, include:

Depletion, contamination, and unfair distribution of water
Two-and-a-half-billion people lack access to safe water and adequate sanitation, resulting in up to 3 million annual deaths. Meanwhile, the agricultural sector, dominated by large agribusiness, is responsible for 70% of world water consumption.
Threats to air quality
The important focus on industrial and vehicular emissions overlooks the problem of indoor air pollution. According to the World Health Organization, three billion people use open stoves burning biomass (wood, dung, and crop waste) to cook and heat their homes. Smoke and soot inhalation causes a staggering 4.3 million annual deaths from cardiovascular and lung diseases, including half of all childhood pneumonia mortality.
Ongoing deforestation and contamination of ecosystems
Forests are essential to livelihoods, ecosystems, and mitigating climate change and other environmental damage (such as soil erosion), but they are severely threatened by corporate interests such as agribusiness (e.g. massive palm oil plantations in Indonesia and West Africa), mining, and oil and gas development. Worldwide, net forest coverage declines by about 5.2 million hectares per year, concentrated in loss of tropical forests.
Chemical contamination
Since World War II, over 85,000 new chemicals have been manufactured and released into the environment. When the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act was enacted in 1976, the powerful chemical industry ensured that 62,000 existing chemicals were "grandfathered" into the program without health or environmental impact assessments. To this day, only a fraction of chemicals have been assessed. In the farming sector, about 2 million tons of pesticides are used annually, causing 7 million non-fatal poisonings and 70,000 fatalities each year among farmworkers across the globe.
Toxic waste disposal
Hundreds of millions of people, especially in low-income countries, are exposed to toxic waste, leading to outcomes such as cancer and acute poisonings. High-income countries are perpetrators of this injustice (and consumers, accomplices) by illegally exporting millions of tons of chemical hazards. For example, each year, 50 million metric tons of e-waste (e.g. cell phones, computers) end up in landfills in Ghana, Nigeria, China, and other low-income settings, where surrounding environments and local populations are contaminated with toxins.

Underpinning all of these problems is an unfair economic system that privileges profits over people's lives, exploiting the environment and humans alike.

Those concerned about the long-term sustainability and health of humans and the planet need to look beyond reducing greenhouse gas concentrations and adapting to climate change impacts, and recognize the role of the extraction, production, and consumption processes that drive all aspects of environmental degradation and cause tremendous social injustice.

*This post was coauthored by Anne-Emanuelle Birn, MA, ScD, Ben Brisbois, MES, PhD and Timothy H. Holtz, MD, MPH:

Anne-Emanuelle Birn is Professor of Critical Development Studies and Global Health at the University of Toronto. She is the lead author of Oxford University Press's Textbook of Global Health (forthcoming 2016). In 2014, she was recognized among the top 100 Women Leaders in Global Health.
Ben Brisbois is a postdoctoral fellow in the Healthier Cities and Communities Hub of the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He does research on community-based climate change adaptation, and the effects on health of large-scale agriculture and mining.
Timothy H. Holtz, MD, MPH, FACP, FACPM is an adjunct associate professor of global health at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, and has taught courses in TB and health and human rights. Dr. Holtz trained in primary care medicine at Harvard University/Cambridge Hospital, and is board certified in internal medicine as well as preventive medicine.

With Kids For Climate Action, Strength ‘Is Going To Come From Numbers’

The Globe and Mail - Mike Hager

Members of Kids for Climate Action sing a climate-change themed Christmas carol during a flash mob at the Pacific Centre food court in Vanouver. (DARRYL DYCK For The Globe and Mail)

As a precocious and sensitive Grade 9 student, Kate Hodgson was hit with a wave of fear and then anger when she was taught about how humanity is hurting the Earth's climate.
"They were telling me that there was this huge issue of climate change and they were telling me that I was to blame for it, and that was a very scary thing," she recalls. "No one around me seemed to care. It was very isolating and I felt really alone in my activism.
"I felt like I was a very small person facing a very huge problem and I didn't really have the tools to address it."
What she felt able to do was begin nitpicking through her family's consumption habits as a way to counter this increasing anxiety about the role they were playing in the warming of the world.
The problem was her parents had a relatively responsible carbon footprint: They had already switched their home in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood over to thermal heating and solar power, biked to work and bought organic groceries.
Ms. Hodgson didn't begin training her focus on the structural problems driving climate change until she decided "off the cuff" to join a 2012 anti-Enbridge rally outside Premier Christy Clark's MLA office in her former Vancouver riding.
"I remember walking down the street holding a protest sign chanting, 'The people united will never be defeated!'" she said in an interview recently. "That was the first time I felt like I could make a difference."
She became the director of the activist group Kids for Climate Action in Grade 11, and organized other Vancouver-area students to protest against regional economic activity they felt was hurting the environment, such as Surrey Fraser Docks proposal to expand a terminal for exporting thermal coal.
Now, as a first-year University of British Columbia arts student, Ms. Hodgson is one of roughly two dozen core members of UBCC350, the campus club pushing the institution to fully divest its $1.3-billion endowment of all firms producing fossil fuels. After helping organize debates for local candidates and drumming up the youth vote on campus during the federal election, her immediate goal is to help the group mobilize people to respond in the event that the university's board of governors votes against divesting $100-million of its investments.
A seasoned veteran of campaigning by the age of 18, Ms. Hodgson says social media "provides a really powerful and really helpful tool for mobilizing people." But she eschews the "clicktivism" of some of her peers for "real action," such as protesting in person, which she said helps people truly learn about an issue.
"It's really important to think about climate change as a movement," she says. "Our strength is going to come from numbers."
Still, forgoing the normal activities of a typical frosh student is not an easy task.
"I never asked to have to spend my evenings organizing forums and meetings," she says. "But I knew that this was my responsibility, that this was so much more important.
"I've had to sacrifice a lot for this fight and I wish I hadn't had to."
She says to be a "climate activist is to feel pain and disappointment so powerfully," but she chalks up her resilience to these "troughs" of hopelessness to her Anglican religion.
"I don't know how people without faith are able to continue to fight because I find so much of my hope, so much of my ability to soldier on, through the hope that is promised by Christianity," she says.
Ms. Hodgson plans to get a geography degree in environmental sustainability, and says she is inspired by writer and activist Naomi Klein and politicians Elizabeth May and David Eby.
Asked what she will do after her studies, all she knows is "that environmental and social work is where my career lies."

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Solar Technology: The Us And China Look To Australian Innovators For Solutions

The Guardian - Annie Kane

Australian-owned and operated Infratech Industries has sold and will export its ground-breaking floating solar system to Holtville City in California. Similar floating solar system currently in place in Jamestown South Australia Photograph: Infratech

In the last fiscal year, Australia earned $172bn from international sales of its natural resources. But earnings are decreasing. The office of the chief economist estimates that energy commodities earnings declined by 6% to $67bn last year because of a decline in revenue from coal exports, and that exports of refined petroleum products have declined by an average of 11% a year over the last decade.
There are hopes however, that Australia could bolster its position by developing its exports of renewable energy – especially those generated through solar technology. The opportunity is there. China – one of Australia's major coal buyers – has committed to increase its share of non–fossil fuels as part of its primary energy consumption to around 20% by 2030.
Keith Lovegrove, head of solar thermal at the IT Power Group, who is currently helping to develop a roadmap on solar fuels for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), said: "Here we are in a world where, as of COP21, we're shooting to keep global warming below 2C, and we'll all have to decarbonise. Exporting coal as our major export earner has a limited future. We need to talk about swapping that coal export for a renewable export."
With more than 200 partly sunny days a year, and more than 8m square metres of land mass, solar seems like an obvious direction for Australia to take.
One company that's been successful in this regard is Infratech Industries, an Australian–owned sustainable infrastructure company, which sold and exported its innovative floating solar system – similar to the one currently in operation in Jameson, South Australia that generates around 57% more power than a fixed, land-based system – to the city of Holtville in California earlier this month.
Manufactured to mitigate the need for solar installations to be built on valuable farmland, the 1MW floating solar assembly will float on the surface of water reservoirs at the city's new water treatment facility next year. It will include 276 rafts and 3,576 solar panels, which are fitted with mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the panels and generate more power.
As well as powering the water treatment processes, the array has the added advantage of reducing surface evaporation of the water. It diminishes the penetration of sunlight below the water surface and limits the growth of blue green algae and consequently the need for chemical treatment. And it's also able to withstand earthquakes due to the assembly's ability to shift on the surface of the water, which is handy given Holtville is situated near the San Andreas fault line.
Dr Rajesh Nellore, chief executive officer of Infratech Industries, says that there is a huge market for the technology – for the anti-evaporation aspects as well as the power generation.
"Practically every water reservation is an opportunity and this could be valued in the billions of dollars," he says, adding that Los Angeles' department of power and water recently purchased 96m rubber balls at a cost of US$34.5m (AU$48.2m) to prevent water evaporation.
"With this kind of renewable infrastructure [acting as] an alternative to rubber balls, the market potential is gigantic."
The US isn't the only market investing in Australian concentrated solar photovoltaic technology (CSPV). China's state-owned power company Three Gorges corporation signed a memorandum of understanding with Australian company RayGen earlier this year for the deployment of 500MW of utility-scale CSPV power over the next five years, which could deliver approximately $1bn of sales for the solar technology provider and its Chinese partners, JuYe Solar.
Dr Nellore believes that more government action is needed to establish confidence in the renewable energy export market.
He says there has historically been "limited [government] support for such decentralised infrastructure and especially for small- and medium-sized companies, which form the backbone of the Australian economy." He calls on the federal government to "change its paradigm to become an exporter of renewable energy."
"The federal government could start to value and monetise water savings [to] encourage local governments to do the same. Policies must support and encourage water savings in view of the changing climate.
With the global climate deal resulting in increased ambition to decarbonise the energy sector worldwide, it may not be long before Australia's renewable energy export takes off.
Ian Kay, acting CEO of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), which invested $1.7m in RayGen's CSPV Australian pilot project, said: "The Australian market is relatively small in the global context. By tapping into overseas markets, Australian renewable energy innovation can be rolled out to a much larger customer base to bring down costs and become more competitive."

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Climate Change Means One World’s Death and Another’s Birth

Wired - Lizzie Wade

Fadil/Corbis

A few years ago in a lab in Panama, Klaus Winter tried to conjure the future. A plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he planted seedlings of 10 tropical tree species in small, geodesic greenhouses. Some he allowed to grow in the kind of environment they were used to out in the forest, around 79 degrees Fahrenheit. Others, he subjected to uncomfortably high temperatures. Still others, unbearably high temperatures—up to a daily average temperature of 95 F and a peak of 102 F. That’s about as hot as Earth has ever been.
It’s also the kind of environment tropical trees have a good chance of living in by the end of this century, thanks to climate change. Winter wanted to see how they would do.
The answer came as a surprise to those accustomed to dire warnings that climate change will turn the Amazon into a desert. The vast majority of Winter’s seedlings didn’t die. In fact, most thrived at significantly warmer temperatures than they experience today, growing faster and larger. Just two species succumbed to the heat, and only at the very highest temperatures. The trees’ success echoes paleontological data, which hints that warmer temperatures can be a boon for tropical forests. After all, the last time Earth experienced average temperatures of 95 F, there were rainforests in Michigan and palm trees in the Arctic.
That doesn’t mean climate change won’t affect tropical forests of today. It already is. And it definitely doesn’t mean humans needn’t worry about global warming. Climate change will be the end of the world as we know it. But it also will be the beginning of another.
Mass extinctions will open ecological niches, and environmental changes will create new ones. New creatures will evolve to fill them, guided by unforeseen selection pressures. What this new world will look like, exactly, is impossible to predict, and humans aren’t guaranteed to survive in it. (And that’s if civilization somehow manages to survive the climate disasters coming its way in the meantime, from superstorms to sea level rise to agriculture-destroying droughts). Still, experiments like Winter’s offer a glimpse.

A warmer forest
Adapting to a warmer world will be long and painful process for the rainforest, and many species won’t make it through. Even so, “there will still be tropical forests in 2100,” says Simon Lewis, a plant ecologist at University College London and the University of Leeds. They will probably even contain many of the same species ecologists know today, including some of the trees in Winter’s experiments.
It’s the relationships between those species, and the role each plays in the ecosystem, that will change—and, in turn, transform the entire forest. “The forests that come out of this change are probably going to be much different than the kinds of forests we have today,” says Christopher Dick, an evolutionary geneticist who studies tropical trees at the University of Michigan.
Winter’s data hints at one such change in forest structure. The three species that did the best under the highest temperature regime were the coralwood tree (Adenanthera pavonina) a species of fig tree called Ficus insipida, and the balsa tree (Ochroma pyramidale). Each is what Winter called “pioneer species,” fast-growing trees that can quickly move into cleared areas and take over. (F. insipida ups the ante, beginning life as vine that climbs up dead trees—and also living ones, eventually strangling them.)
These kinds of species are vital to a healthy rainforest, helping it regenerate after destructive events like a flood or the death and collapse of a large tree (when those things fall, they take out everything around them). But a mature rainforest needs the species that show up later, too. Those tend to be larger and longer-lived, stabilizing the forest and serving as ecological linchpins for insects, birds, monkeys, vines, and the rest of the ecosystem for decades or even centuries. And it was those so-called “climax species” that suffered the most under higher temperatures in Winter’s experiments.
That suggests that as climax tree species die in a warmer forest, they won’t be replaced. “One would expect that tropical forests of the future would be dominated by those nimble species that can disperse very well,” Lewis says. Pioneer trees that will put down roots anywhere, vines that grow into every nook and cranny, small rodents that reproduce quickly and scurry far, birds that can fly over vast swaths of land and aren’t too picky about where they nest. But that’s a small subset of the thousands of species found in tropical forests today. Without the rest of them, the rainforest will be a much simpler place.

An acidic ocean
Disturbingly, scientists have observed something similar happening in the ocean. Much of the carbon dioxide humans release into the atmosphere is eventually absorbed by the sea, gradually making the water more and more acidic. This process of ocean acidification can wreak havoc on marine invertebrates, dissolving their shells and then their fragile bodies.
But just like in the tropical forest, “there are always the winners as well as the losers of climate change,” says Ivan Nagelkerken, a marine ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. To get an idea of which species might thrive under ocean acidification, he headed to two places where underwater vents already spew carbon dioxide into the sea: Vulcano Island in Italy and White Island in New Zealand. “These CO₂ vents are natural laboratories where you can get a peek into the future,” Nagelkerken explains.
As in Winter’s experiment, that future was far from lifeless. But the kind of life it supports has Nagelkerken worried. Carbon dioxide vents can occur in any marine ecosystem, from coral reefs to kelp forests to seagrass plains. But no matter where you are, life in the most acidic pockets looks strikingly similar. Immediately around a vent, all ecosystems “transform into systems that are dominated by turf algae—very short, fleshy algae with very little structural complexity,” Naglekerken explains. What’s more, “we did not observe a single predator on those vents.”
As a result, the food web is dramatically simplified, the number of fish species drops, and the ecosystem becomes “much less valuable and productive.” Small grazing fish that love turf algae will probably excel in the acidic oceans of the future. But as they take over, “everywhere will start to look like everywhere else,” Nagelkerken says.
The new, homogenous ocean won’t be good for humans. The fish that are likely to thrive in the oceans of the future—small, adaptable species such as gobies and blennies—are, simply, not fish people like to eat. And even if human tastes evolved, those fish wouldn’t fill us up; most gobies clock in at fewer than 4 inches long. Humans like to eat big predators, like tuna and marlin—exactly the kind of species that had disappeared from the CO₂ vents Nagelkerken studied. As ocean acidification restructures marine ecosystems, the first to go will be the fish that people rely on for money and food.

A new pecking order
Of course, Homo sapiens may be the ultimate generalist, nimble enough to survive in almost every environment. “We’re like cockroaches,” Dick says. “I think we’ll stick around. We’ll see the disaster we’ve created.” But the recovery? Maybe not. For the oceans to adapt to the new climate and regain a level of productivity they enjoy today, “it’s not going to be in a few generations,” Nagelkerken says. “You could wait around for 10,000 years.” Similarly, we might be long gone by the time the Amazon looks anything like the complex forest of today.
The flip side of mass extinction, however, is rapid evolution. And if you’re willing to take the long view—like, the million-year long view—there’s a ray of hope to be found in today’s rare species. The Amazon, in particular, is packed with plant species that pop up few and far between and don’t even come close to playing a dominant role in the forest. But they might have treasure buried in their genes.
Rare species—especially those that are only distantly related to today’s common ones—“have all kind of traits that we don’t even know about,” says Dick. Perhaps one will prove to thrive in drought, and another will effortlessly resist new pests that decimate other trees. “These are the species that have all the possibilities for becoming the next sets of dominant, important species after the climate has changed,” Dick says.
That’s why humans can’t cut them all down first, he argues. If rainforests are going to have a fighting chance of recovering their biodiversity and ecological complexity, those rare species and their priceless genes need to be ready and able to step into the spotlight. It might to be too late to save the world humanity knows and loves. But it still can still do its best to make sure the new one is just as good—someday.

James Lovelock: 'Enjoy Life While You Can: In 20 Years Global Warming Will Hit The Fan'

The Guardian - Decca Aitkenhead

The climate science maverick believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do?

James Lovelock. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Eamonn McCabe/Guardian

In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said.
"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."
Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."
Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."
Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.
"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."
This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."
Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: "People who say that about me haven't reached my age," he says laughing.
But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality."
There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?
"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas."
But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."
Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."
Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."
At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it's not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.
"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."
What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

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