Gaia hypothesis creator dies on 103rd birthday
Scientist behind the Gaia theory of Earth as a self-regulating ecosystem who invented a device that detected the threat to the ozone layer
James Lovelock, the environmental scientist who formulated the Gaia hypothesis, has died at home on his 103rd birthday.
His wife and children said he died at home in Dorset on Tuesday. They said: “To the world he was best known as a scientific pioneer, climate prophet and conceiver of the Gaia theory. To us he was a loving husband and wonderful father with a boundless sense of curiosity, a mischievous sense of humour and a passion for nature.”
Mr Lovelock’s Gaia theory suggests that the Earth acts as a self-regulating organism made up of all its life forms.
PROFESSOR JAMES LOVELOCK, who has died on his 103rd birthday, developed the Gaia theory, which suggests that Earth and all the living things on it are inextricably bound together, interacting in complex ways to ensure that the environment can sustain life.
Lovelock’s theory was regarded with hostility by many scientists who saw it as more New Age religion than empirically-based science. Yet Lovelock was a respected scientist whose other achievements, notably his invention of the electron capture detector, a device capable of measuring tiny amounts – parts per trillion – of dangerous toxins, might well have earned him a Nobel Prize.
Indeed without the detector, Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland would not have won the 1995 prize for chemistry for their work warning that Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCS) were a danger to the ozone layer. Many thought it unfair that Lovelock did not share in the award.
Lovelock’s Gaia odyssey began in 1961 when, on the strength of his detector, he was recruited from the National Institute for Medical Research laboratories in north London to work for Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Nasa wanted to develop light, portable instruments to find out if there was life on the planets with a view to sending a space probe to Mars.
For several years Lovelock had been using his detector to investigate the chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere and he had come to realise that on Earth, living things were constantly absorbing and releasing gases and that the atmosphere was full of highly reactive chemical mixtures. So much so, that he concluded that Earth’s atmosphere was in a state of chronic chemical disequilibrium, caused by life itself.
The same conditions, he suggested, would apply on any planet capable of sustaining life. By contrast, where life did not exist, the atmosphere would reach a state of chemical equilibrium. By analysing the atmosphere of Mars, therefore, scientists would know whether the planet could sustain life.
It was not necessary to send a probe to Mars, he suggested, because infra-red telescopes on Earth had already analysed the atmosphere and found that Martian “air” was stable, inert and dominated by a single gas, carbon dioxide. Therefore, Lovelock concluded, whether or not there had ever been life on Mars, there is no life on Mars now.
Lovelock’s message was not one Nasa scientists wanted to hear and he eventually found himself surplus to requirements. But his insight led Earth scientists and biologists to question the traditional Darwinian theory that living things evolved simply by adapting to their environment.
Lovelock’s theory suggested that life itself fundamentally influences its own environment – so much so that it seemed to have maintained stable conditions over hundreds of millions of years, even though the chemistry of the atmosphere was itself unstable.
Earth’s life support system, Lovelock observed, could even apparently respond to outside events. The temperature of the atmosphere, for instance, had barely changed during a period of two or three billion years when the Sun had grown 25 per cent hotter. If that extra heat had been transferred to the planet’s surface, life would have come to an end. That it did not, Lovelock reasoned, could not have been a matter of mere chance.
One afternoon in 1965, the thought came to him “in a flash” that such constancy required the existence of an active control system. Life on Earth, he felt, was controlling its environment for its own good. A friend of Lovelock’s, the novelist William Golding, coined the name Gaia to describe this hypothesis, after the Greek Earth goddess.
First on his own in 1972, and then later in 1973 with American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock formally proposed the idea of Gaia as a control system. In 1979 his book, Gaia presented the hypothesis to the wider public.
The Gaia hypothesis was seized on by churchmen and by many environmentalists, who saw it as a way of bringing together science and religion. But – partly for the same reason – journals such as Nature and Science refused Gaian papers. Richard Dawkins accused Lovelock of “teleology” – supporting the idea that natural processes work with some sort of deliberate purpose. Lovelock later admitted he had sometimes been provocative in the language he used: “I like telling biologists ‘the earth is alive’.” In fact, he merely meant that the earth operated as a self-regulating system.
Later, he invented a simple computer model – Daisyworld – to explain the Gaia process. In Daisyworld, a vast meadow, white daisies and black daisies spontaneously operate their own thermostat. If it gets hotter, the black daisies suffer, but white daisies, which reflect more heat, prosper. The result is a world dominated by white daisies that reflect so much heat back into space they cool the planet down again. By contrast, if the world cools, black daisies do well and absorb more heat. The world warms. Thus a planet can become self-regulating without natural selection or some sort of deity.
Gradually, Lovelock’s ideas began to find support, particularly among climatologists, as the theory seemed to be borne out by physical evidence of the interaction between biology, geology and atmospherics. For example, it is now known that when the climate gets warmer, bacteria in soils work faster and speed up the weathering of rocks. That weathering absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as the gas reacts with silicate rocks to produce carbonates. So faster weathering reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and lowers temperatures again.
But Lovelock warned that man-made changes to the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of rain forests might be occurring too fast for Gaia processes to maintain a constant equilibrium. Indeed, the Daisyworld model suggested that the planetary equilibrium could change suddenly if the selfregulating system is tipped too far.
The fossil record, Lovelock argued, suggested that sudden climatic “flips” had happened periodically throughout Earth’s history. Man-made global warming might cause Gaia to “flip” into a new steady state within a matter of 100 years, threatening Man’s survival as a species.
In later books such as The Revenge of Gaia (2006) and The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009), Lovelock struck a more apocalyptic note, warning that humanity’s lack of respect for Gaia was threatening to lead to runaway global warming, bringing climatic conditions which human civilisation will find it extremely difficult to survive.
Writing in the The Independent in 2006, he argued that, as a result of global warming, by the end of the 21st century “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
Later on he retreated from this position somewhat, telling an interviewer in 2012 that he had made a mistake about the timing of climate change. He still believed it was happening, but that its worst effects will be felt farther into the future.
James Ephraim Lovelock was born into a Quaker family in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire on July 26 1919. His mother was a fervent suffragette who believed in smoking as a gesture demonstrating the equality of women. She encouraged her son to smoke, a habit he later blamed for recurrent health problems. The family moved to Brixton and he went to the Strand School, but he struggled with dyslexia and felt socially isolated for much of his childhood.
He left school early and took a job as a lab assistant while studying for his A-levels in the evenings. When war came, he was studying for a chemistry degree at Birkbeck College. He became a conscientious objector, finished his degree at Manchester University in 1941, then started working for the National Institute for Medical Research where he remained until 1961.
By 1943 he was no longer a pacifist, but in the event he was turned down for the armed services because his work was too valuable. In 1948 he received a doctorate in medicine from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and in 1959 another doctorate in biophysics from London University. Between 1946 and 1951 he worked at the Common Cold Research Unit at Harvard Hospital in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
Lovelock’s research led him to file more than 50 patents, most notably for the electron capture detector, invented in 1957, the device which virtually launched the environmental movement. With it, Lovelock conducted some of the earliest studies of CFCS and suggested how sulphur from marine algae circulated worldwide and played a part in cloud formation.
Its use also led to the discovery by others of the ubiquitous distribution of pesticide residues in the natural environment, work which inspired Rachel Carson to write The Silent Spring, the bible of the early “Green” movement. More recently, the detector has enabled meteorologists to follow the movement of air masses across continents and is also used in ocean research.
Although Lovelock became a hero to many in the environmental movement, the admiration was not reciprocated. He regarded the movement as a “potent force preventing environmental reforms”, because many of its claims about, for example, the dangers of nuclear power, were based on dubious scientific evidence.
Lovelock resigned from the National Institute in London in 1961 to take up the job with Nasa and became Professor of Chemistry at Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. After returning to Britain in 1964, he operated as an independent scientist, working in a converted barn near Launceston, Cornwall.
He was a visiting professor, first at the University of Houston and then at the University of Reading. From 1986 to 1990 he was president of the Marine Biological Association.
In his later work, Lovelock developed his Daisyworld programme to investigate why it is that Earth has a profusion of life forms. After showing on his computer how daisies could regulate temperature, he then introduced rabbits to graze on them, foxes to eat the rabbits and so on.
He found that, although the various populations of creatures risked lurching from boom to bust, because of the way they interacted with one another, they did not do so; the populations remained stable. In another experiment, he populated Daisyworld with 50 different kinds of daisies each reflecting the sun’s heat to a different degree, then increased the heat of the sun.
The stress produced a brief spurt in diversity as other daisies proliferated. This led him to suggest that when the Earth warmed a couple of degrees after the ice ages, the rich diversity now found in the tropics was the result.
A slender figure, with glasses, wavy grey hair and a quizzical expression, Lovelock had flirted with Communism in his youth, but in later life became a fan of Mrs Thatcher, after she appeared to embrace his theory in her first major speech on environmental issues.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and among other awards was a recipient of the Norbert Gerbier Prize of the World Meteorological Organisation (1988), and the first Amsterdam Prize for the Environment of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1990). Other awards included the Nonino Prize and the Volvo Environment Prize in 1996 and Japan’s Blue planet prize in 1997. He was appointed CBE in 1990 and made a Companion of Honour in 2003.
The 1970s and 1980s were difficult years for Lovelock. He had had a heart bypass operation, but during his stay in hospital there had been a strike and the hospital did not have any clean equipment. They used an old catheter sterilised with ethylene oxide which destroyed his urethra; he had to have 30 to 40 operations to repair it. At the same time, his first wife Helen, née Hyslop, whom he had married in 1942, became bedridden with Multiple Sclerosis and eventually died in 1989.
In 1991 he married, secondly, Sandy Orchard. She survives him with two sons and two daughters of his first marriage.