Lovelock, April 15th 2009

Wrote the following after the climate scientist James Lovelock talked in UCD last year. (The whole talk itself is available at the link.) Thought I should put it up. Read it carefully! I'm not Jeremy Clarkson. The piece might have overdone the exhilarated mockery. But I could hardly fail to have been sickened by people who were more interested in implying Lovelock was so evil, rather than asking: Are we really so bad? This is what the philosopher Graham Harman made of it.

On April 15th, the climate-change scientist and Gaia theorist James Lovelock was in town (“to promote his book,” some might feel the need to add). There was a packed crowd at the very big Smurfit Hall in UCD who wanted to have a bit of fun hearing about the end of the world, and we weren't disappointed.

The Q and A was brilliant. If Lovelock weren’t already so pessimistic for the near-future, he would have been after politely answering the concerns of the concerned.

Let me state right here that I (no more than yerself, perhaps) have no idea whether man-made climate change (or the “heating,” as Lovelock science-fictionally calls it) is happening. And I don’t know if it is reversible, or can be mitigated.

Living in ignorance is no excuse, to be sure, and this summer I’m going to read Lovelock’s and others books and get a serious fix on it. What’s important so far as this meeting was concerned is that the questioners were all sure of what they thought on these things, and that they still didn't get the point.

Newspapers have used terms like “member of the awkward squad” and “genial prophet of climate doom,” regarding Lovelock. I might add that in some ways he seems like a very English “hell in a handcart” type of conservative. But really he is a dead-serious anti-humanist. All that means is that he doesn’t think humans are the centre of the universe, or even the world.

We don’t even have much control over our own natures. So we can’t pretend to control the climate. “Would any of you trust the United Nations to control the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere?” Despite the current context, this is not just an anti-public-sector opinion. Instead, controlling the oxygen is what the earth itself has always spontaneously done.

“Hell in a handcart” types like to blame someone: immigrants, politicians, industrialists… But Lovelock isn't a bitter misanthrope, and he isn’t blaming anybody. We do what we do, seems to be his attitude. He is just a little sorry that we “do” blame. On the contrary, on a video available on YouTube, he shows the most tender concern for the future of his grandchildren. On the radio interview that alerted me to the visit, he said he had wanted to give his book the subtitle, “Enjoy it while you can.”

In the past week, I saw a house with two Jaguars and a BMW convertible outside it! I thought various things like “Christ!” and “a bit much, isn’t it?” and “that would be really exciting!” I mean to say, it would be fun to ride around in a Jag and think: “If the worst of the worst should come to pass, as they say in insurance adverts, and this one gets totalled, I’ll still be able to drive the other one…”

It would be nice to knock on the door of that house and ask: “Do you guys believe in man-made global-warming?” And I’d say it's 50-50 that they do. But this is where things become too-easily-parodiable. Most of us don’t have three luxury cars, and it seems things are still going to be fucked up. “That's why I've got the cars,” the owner might say. And Lovelock subscribes to this essentially tragic view of things.

He intends to enjoy it while he can: Sir Richard Branson has offered Lovelock (who’s 90-years-old, but seemed to have the energy of a sixty-year-old) the chance to fly into space for free on his Virgin-Cola-powered spaceship. The interviewer at UCD, Professor Frank Convery, asked him about the carbon footprint. Lovelock said, “I don't give a damn!” and that he wanted to see all of Gaia before he died.

Doing his own thing has been the thing for him. Convery of the privately-financed UCD was quick to reassure us that Lovelock had preferred being in the private sector throughout his career, for reasons that are indeed intelligible to anybody honest.

He worked in Shell, and in the 70's bravely set up as an independent scientist on the Beara peninsula, where he discovered the build-up of CFC's in the atmosphere. Getting them banned was easy: all the CFC products in the world were produced by just seven corporations.

Reducing carbon emissions is harder, because we’re all doing it. Lovelock isn't clear that it shouldn’t be. He pointed to the ban on DDT, in reaction to the death of birds in the States in the 60's and the famous “Silent Spring”. But DDT was used to combat malaria in Africa, which went straight back to bad old “normal” levels.

Lovelock thinks it was as natural for us to start using fossil-fuels as it was to start farming. Greens who propose 1-2-3 solutions are a permanent target of Lovelock’s ire. Partly to avoid offending local cultural sensitivities, Lovelock didn’t advise the Irish to go nuclear, but he thinks the British should adopt it as the only realistic option. There’s another reason why we don’t need to go nuclear, but I’ll save the good news for later.

The bad news (which is to say, the science bit) is as follows. It’s not only that carbon is “heating” things up, melting the polar ice caps, and raising sea levels. It's that, literally, with the reflective “whiteness” of the ice caps gone, the sea will take in more heat. Algae, a bit absorber of CO², will die, making things that bit worse. (With the algae gone, the northern seas will have the clarity of the Caribbean.)

And the northern permafrost will melt, releasing more of the stuff. And the rainforests are out of the picture as well. It's a chain reaction in the way that you might consider a destruction derby a chain reaction.

Lovelock gamely best-cases human population at 1 billion by 2100, as a relatively high-tech society. The other scenario is 100 million hunter-gatherers, “just a few breeding pairs dotted around Arctic Ocean,” as Lovelock said with perhaps some pleasure in the image.

The good news is: Go on the lads! The Irish will do grand! Lovelock thinks that the British Isles will be “life-boats to humanity” whose climate will be untouched. (Temperate islands are the places to be: New Zealand and Tasmania are also favoured.) Britain is overpopulated, and needs nuclear power to support its big cities. But Ireland can do as it pleases, with space aplenty.

I read Lovelock’s forecast for Ireland last year, and had various reactions: I laughed a little (I am giggly), felt abashed a little at my relief, and thought “Well, that’s nice”. The reaction of the audience was similar. Lovelock revealed to us our special status at the end of the formal interview, saying Ireland not using fossil-fuel would be like telling the captain of a life-boat, “ ‘Oh, you can’t run the engine, it spoils our carbon footprint.’ I mean it’s just a lot of nonsense!”

Convery said “OK, I think that’s a good note to, ah…” Relieved applause. Like just about winning the Six Nations again.

Now the ugly part: a public Q and A session which I generously assume was conditioned by the first stage of grief: denial. Ingenious, polyvalent denial, of a kind that would have been boring were it not so funny. Lovelock had led us to a panorama of bracing despair; and everybody was complaining about how their feet were sore.

The first questioner was a gruesome comic turn. He asked: “Will we need nuclear weapons, to keep people from boarding the life-boat?”

It prompted a couple of reflections: Where would we bomb? France, where people might be coming from? Probably not practical; best to set up MAD and a hotline. Southern Spain? Doable, and would set up a nice safety barrier… Sub-Saharan Africa? Yeah, but how much of it? And this wouldn’t help with the heating would it?…

At the time, I couldn’t tell whether this was a sick joke, or a moron, and listening to the recording, I still can’t. Lovelock said, to appreciative laughter, “That would be overkill.” (Implication: they’re going to die anyway.) “But you will need weapons, I’m afraid!” Humans will move in response to the climate, as other animals are already doing.

Lovelock’s answer shows that “hell in a handcart” attitude. If you sat him down one-to-one, he would say something strictly empirical, like: Ireland is a place that will be able to sustain human life, whatever cultural form it might take. But he does want to shock. He does it by being honest. The actual comment isn’t even deeply cynical, because if we are to sustain a civilised life, it would indeed be necessary to take steps to preserve it. But you’d rather not think of all that.

Three wise men got up during the Q and A to avow that the problem was population. One of them said, “Three words: population, population, population.” I feel it is relevant to note here that one of them was comfortably overweight… The moral fault here is a lack of decorum. The logical fault is to pretend that we’re all throwing up the same amount of CO².

If the questioners had said, “Look, we can’t afford all those Chinese and Indians having fridges and broadband,” it would have the virtue of honesty. But these questioners, while seeming to agree with Lovelock’s direst projections, refuse to grasp the dimensions of what he is really saying: that fuel-use is what matters, and that those of us who really used it have already used too much.

Equally, Lovelock isn’t going to pretend that turning on the central heating isn’t a logical decision sometimes. “It’s the way we live… But we don’t have much option.” We do what we do.

One of the big contingents on the night was the group who thought it was an interview with Dr Strangelove: they were horrified that he wanted to “go nuclear.” At one point, a questioner asked, “What’s the half-life of nuclear waste?” Lovelock said it was about 600 years, and the questioner began to walk triumphantly to his seat. Like a parent saying, “you still live in this house, young man,” Lovelock called out, “The half-life of CO², incidentally, is also quite long.”

If it seems I am mocking heartless goons, who think there are too many of you, and Luddites who can’t recognise a good change when they see one, well, the “soulful” response isn’t much better. Some people wanted us to feel real guilty.

The Chairman of An Taisce, Charles Stanley-Smith, said he gave school presentations, and that all he did was apologise to the children for what his generation has done. What!? Apologise to snotty kids who want to be driven everywhere and spend eight hours a day on the Playstation?

An ordinary member of the Green Party asked, “Do you not think that humanity, certainly over the last 200 years, should be ashamed of itself?” It shows that the Greens are humanists after all, that they think we’re really different from the other animals. But Lovelock’s point is that we’re not. If cute fluffy rabbits could stand on their hind legs, speak, and make tools, they probably would have done the same things as us. And they would have bred even more.

The other side of feeling ashamed is feeling there has been some injustice. This happened during an interview Lovelock gave the day before on Radio 1. He said the survivors would be the strong and the intelligent. “But that’s - eugenics!” gasped Myles Dungan. Lovelock the Eugenicist said, “Yes. But nobody’s doing it.”

An “ordinary citizen,” as she presented herself, was the one who really got the point. Referring repeatedly to Lovelock’s book, she said that wind-turbines only operated at peak efficiency 17% of the time. She was concerned with the beauty of the countryside, and seeing as the turbines wouldn’t do much change the climate, wouldn’t it be better to leave things as they are?

I agree with this sentiment. Anybody going on too long about the beauty of the turbine is putting a brave face on things. But it was still horribly funny, facing into ecological collapse, to see somebody trying to get the world’s leading climate-change scientist to agree that those things shouldn’t be in her backyard! She might have been equally happy to get a prominent theologian to condemn mobile phone masts. Lovelock was happy to reaffirm what he’d earlier said on the matter, and the questioner was no doubt mollified.

George Orwell said that no Christian believes in God the way that he believes in Australia. It is probably the same with most Greens and the prospect of ecological collapse. A Green reads the latest newspaper report on the environment, and shivers. Then he goes outside, and hears some stupid birds singing and, in May, the unresting trees threshing, and thinks on some level, This isn’t going to end. Even a Green finds it hard to believe what the maths and the projections are telling him. And he, differently from the rest of us, wants to believe it.

If I was a Green, I would say: “Remember that talk two years ago about a soft landing?” The credit crunch is the Greens’ best example of how a ‘virtual’ threat can become the real deal overnight. It might have some rhetorical effect. But we didn’t choose the new circumstances. And we don't have any conception of just giving everything up for good. The bargain in the cutbacks at the moment is: it’ll all be better soon.

But after that meeting, what I feel most deeply is: strange that those who are most convinced of the threat are least prepared to face up to what it would really mean.