Words matter. These are the best James Lovelock Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’m a scientist, not a theologian. I don’t know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty. Revere and respect Gaia. Have trust in Gaia. But not faith.
One pound of uranium is worth about 3 million pounds worth of coal or oil.
What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: ‘Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?’ If you don’t have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours.
If it hadn’t been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.
All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it.
There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.
Esso has been the main one in America spreading the disinformation that there is no global warming problem.
Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.
I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.
Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.
If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.
You never know with politicians what they are really saying. And I don’t say that in a negative way-they have an appalling job.
Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it… Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.
I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.
Nowadays if you’re dependent on a grant – and 99% of them are – you can’t make mistakes as you won’t get another one if you do.
The tropical rain forests are a telling example. Once cut down, they rarely recover. Rainfall drops, deserts spread, the climate warms.
Civilization in its present form hasn’t got long.
The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.
If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.
You mustn’t take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.
I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.
Let’s make hay while it lasts.
The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.
Climatologists are all agreed that we’d be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.
Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.
I’m a scientist, not a theologian. I don’t know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.
An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.
I’m not a pessimist, even though I do think awful things are going to happen.
China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution.
One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.
For each of our actions there are only consequences.
Life clearly does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes. Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.
