James Lovelock again : "A Rough Ride to the Future"

Sorry, I didn't finish writing about this:-  The thesis of this book is called "accelerated evolution": Since Newcomen invented the steam engine in the early 18th c. there has been an age in which human activity has had a rapid and profound effect on the planet.

"The changes in the environment that we see as adverse - from rising carbon dioxide abundance, climate change and population growth are all consequences of this new evolutionary inflation; as may be economic instability and the tendency of the human species to become city or nest animals."

He also posits the idea that one consequence of accelerated evolution could be that at some point we ourselves incorporate inorganic elements in our bodies.

"... already pacemakers are starting to be thought about that use the body system to provide the energy to keep them going. [My pacemaker] is coupled to the physiology of my body more or less completely, and much more sinister, it has a radio communication with the outside world so that the technician can check it every year to see whether it's working. This really bothers me, because I can see it's only a short time before my body's on the internet and receiving spam. Once you go in for this endo-symbiosis with the mechanical world, you're in for trouble, and we've started."

Lovelock's parents were working class and ran an art shop in Brixton. He hated school like poison, and taught himself science from books in the local library. He says he wanted to be a scientist from the age of 4 when his father gave him a primitive electronics set, and reckons the sense of science as a vocation has largely disappeared.

"The whole system of teaching has lost it, because it's taught as if you were going into a career. It isn't a career and never should be."

Lovelock's new book is likely to be claimed by both sides in the climate change debate. He has pulled back from the alarmist predictions of The Revenge of Gaia, published in 2006.

"You just can't tell what's going to happen". ...."It's just as silly to be a denier as it is to be a believer. You can't be certain." So we need to take the politics out of climate science? "Oh sure, but we're tribal animals. We can't help being political."

"I'm an old-fashioned green, a person who's happy with that Selborne character, Gilbert White. I'm very old, and the British countryside up until world war two was glorious. ...we were just another animal in the place, but it got wrecked with the coming of cars."

Lovelock sees environmentalism as a form of "urban politics". "It's become a religion, he says, "and religions don't worry too much about facts." [Haha]. He is an enthusiast for nuclear power, which makes him unpopular with many greens.

Fracking: "it produces only a fraction of the amount of CO2 that coal does, and will make Britain secure in energy for quite a few years. We don't have much choice."

"Europe could get all its energy from the Sahara, but politics screws it. A solar farm 100 miles by 100 miles could supply energy for the whole of Europe, but terrorists would blow it up."

Lovelock manages to be both catastrophist and boundless optimist at the same time. He believes that humanity will suffer crises that threaten the species, but will somehow pull through.

"We are an extraordinarily special species, the first to harvest information." [what does he mean exactly? When I read news, am I harvesting information? Suppose I forget it straight away, have I still harvested it? Or is it harvested only if it is saved in an archive?] But anyway, I am a cunning bastard, thanks James.