---
title: "James Lovelock"
chunk: 3/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:07:09.585027+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In Lovelock's 2006 book, The Revenge of Gaia, he argued that the lack of respect humans have had for Gaia, through the damage done to rainforests and the reduction in planetary biodiversity, is testing Gaia's capacity to minimise the effects of the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. This eliminates the planet's negative feedbacks and increases the likelihood of homeostatic positive feedback potential associated with runaway global warming. Similarly, the warming of the oceans is extending the oceanic thermocline layer of tropical oceans into the Arctic and Antarctic waters, preventing the rise of oceanic nutrients into the surface waters and eliminating the algal blooms of phytoplankton on which oceanic food chains depend. As phytoplankton and forests are the main ways in which Gaia draws down greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, taking it out of the atmosphere, the elimination of this environmental buffering will see, according to Lovelock, most of the Earth becoming uninhabitable for humans and other life-forms by the middle of this century, with a massive extension of tropical deserts. In 2012, Lovelock distanced himself from these conclusions, saying he had "gone too far" in describing the consequences of climate change over the next century in this book.
In his 2009 book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, he rejected scientific models that disagree with the findings that sea levels are rising and Arctic ice is melting faster than the models predict. He suggested that we may already have passed the tipping point of terrestrial climate resilience into a permanently hot state. Given these conditions, Lovelock expected that human civilisation would be hard-pressed to survive. He expected the change to be similar to the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum when the temperature of the Arctic Ocean was 23 °C.

=== Nuclear power ===

Lovelock became concerned about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 he broke with many fellow environmentalists by stating that "only nuclear power can now halt global warming".
In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that can both fulfil the large scale energy needs of humankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions. He was an open member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy (EFN).

In 2005, against the backdrop of renewed UK government interest in nuclear power, Lovelock again publicly announced his support for nuclear energy, stating, "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy". Although those interventions in the public debate on nuclear power were in the 21st century, his views on it were longstanding. In his 1988 book The Ages of Gaia, he stated: I have never regarded nuclear radiation or nuclear power as anything other than a normal and inevitable part of the environment. Our prokaryotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of fallout from a star-sized nuclear explosion, a supernova that synthesised the elements that go to make our planet and ourselves.
In The Revenge of Gaia (2006), where he put forward the concept of sustainable retreat, Lovelock wrote: A television interviewer once asked me, "But what about nuclear waste? Will it not poison the whole biosphere and persist for millions of years?" I knew this to be a nightmare fantasy wholly without substance in the real world ... One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets ... I find it sad, but all too human, that there are vast bureaucracies concerned about nuclear waste, huge organisations devoted to decommissioning power stations, but nothing comparable to deal with that truly malign waste, carbon dioxide.
In 2019 Lovelock said he thought difficulties in getting nuclear power going again were due to propaganda, that "the coal and oil business fight like mad to tell bad stories about nuclear", and that "the greens played along with it. There's bound to have been some corruption there – I'm sure that various green movements were paid some sums on the side to help with propaganda".