The Vanishing Face of Gaia - Dr. James Lovelock Video
Corporate Knights presents Dr. James Lovelock, originator of The Gaia Hypothesis (also known as Gaia Theory), discussing the need for human adaptation and survival in a coming era of massive environmental change due to global heating based on his latest book, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia”.
Biography:
(Excerpted from Wikipedia)
A lifelong inventor, Lovelock has created and developed many scientific instruments, some of which were designed for NASA in its program of planetary exploration. It was while working as a consultant for NASA that Lovelock developed the Gaia Hypothesis, for which he is most widely known.
In early 1961, Lovelock was engaged by NASA to develop sensitive instruments for the analysis of extraterrestrial atmospheres and planetary surfaces. The Viking program, that visited Mars in the late 1970s, was motivated in part to determine whether Mars supported life, and many of the sensors and experiments that were ultimately deployed aimed to resolve this issue. During work on a precursor of this program, Lovelock became interested in the composition of the Martian atmosphere, reasoning that many life forms on Mars would be obliged to make use of it (and, thus, alter it). However, the atmosphere was found to be in a stable condition close to its chemical equilibrium, with very little oxygen, methane, or hydrogen, but with an overwhelming abundance of carbon dioxide. To Lovelock, the stark contrast between the Martian atmosphere and chemically dynamic mixture of that of our Earth’s biosphere was strongly indicative of the absence of life on the planet.[ However, when they were finally launched to Mars, the Viking probes still searched (unsuccessfully) for extant life there.
Lovelock invented the electron capture detector, which ultimately assisted in discoveries about the persistence of CFCs and their role in stratospheric ozone depletion. After studying the operation of the Earth’s sulfur cycle, Lovelock and his colleagues developed the CLAW hypothesis as a possible example of biological control of the Earth’s climate.
After the development of his electron capture detector, in the late 1960s, Lovelock was the first to detect the widespread presence of CFCs in the atmosphere. He found a concentration of 60 parts per trillion of CFC-11 over Ireland and, in a partially self-funded research expedition in 1972, went on to measure the concentration of CFC-11 from the northern hemisphere to the Antarctic aboard the research vessel RRS Shackleton. He found the gas in each of the 50 air samples that he collected but, not realising that the breakdown of CFCs in the stratosphere would release chlorine that posed a threat to the ozone layer, concluded that the level of CFCs constituted “no conceivable hazard”. He has since stated that he meant “no conceivable toxic hazard”.
However, the experiment did provide the first useful data on the ubiquitous presence of CFCs in the atmosphere. The damage caused to the ozone layer by the photolysis of CFCs was later discovered by Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina. After hearing a lecture on the subject of Lovelock’s results, they embarked on research that resulted in the first published paper that suggested a link between stratospheric CFCs and ozone depletion in 1974, and later shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work.
Gaia hypothesis
First formulated by Lovelock during the 1960s as a result of work for NASA concerned with detecting life on Mars, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist William Golding, the hypothesis postulates that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that acts to sustain life.
While the Gaia hypothesis was readily accepted by many in the environmentalist community, it has not been widely accepted within the scientific community. Among its more famous critics are the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, Ford Doolittle, and Stephen Jay Gould — notable, given the diversity of this trio’s views on other scientific matters. These (and other) critics have questioned how natural selection operating on individual organisms can lead to the evolution of planetary-scale homeostasis.
Lovelock has responded to these criticisms with models such as Daisyworld, that illustrate how individual-level effects can translate to planetary homeostasis, under the right circumstances.
Nuclear power
Lovelock has become concerned about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 he caused a media sensation when he broke with many fellow environmentalists by pronouncing that “only nuclear power can now halt global warming”. In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfill the large scale energy needs of humankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions. He is an open member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy.
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 these interventions in the public debate on nuclear power are recent, his views on it are longstanding. In his 1988 book The Ages of Gaia he states:
“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.”
James Lovelock in conversation with science editor Tim Radford.
Man-Made Crises ‘Outrunning Our Ability to Deal With Them’, Scientists Warn
A pessimistic vision of the future.
The world faces a compounding series of crises driven by human activity, which existing governments and institutions are increasingly powerless to cope with, a group of eminent environmental scientists and economists has warned.
In today’s issue of the leading international journal Science, the researchers say that nations alone are unable to resolve the sorts of planet-wide challenges now arising.
Pointing to global action on ozone depletion (the Montreal Protocol), high seas fisheries and antibiotic drug resistance as examples, they call for a new order of cooperative international institutions capable of dealing with issues like climate change – and enforcing compliance where necessary. (more…)
40th Anniversary of the First Manned Moon Landing - Today’s Scientists Point to New Frontiers
The fuzzy black and white photo is from an automatic video camera that recorded Neil Armstrong coming down the ladder and taking his first step on the moon. A few minutes later, Neil Armstrong photographed Buzz as he became the second human to walk on the moon’s surface. (NASA)
Forty years ago, on July 20, 1969, the United States achieved an historic first when Apollo 11 Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to land on the moon. Armstrong’s now famous words, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” fulfilled the challenge set out nearly a decade earlier by President John F. Kennedy to land a man on the moon.
America’s race to the moon also launched a generation of scientists. They were inspired by a sense of patriotism and the wonders of space and enabled by the country’s newfound commitment to science following the Soviets’ successful launch of the Sputnik satellite. The new R&D enterprise, built to support America’s scientific ambitions and based largely on federally-funded research conducted at universities across the country, has had a remarkable effect on society and the economy. It has produced innovations in health, technology, energy, security, and defense. It has helped fuel the nation’s economic growth. And, it has educated and trained new generations of scientists, engineers and doctors.
In anticipation of the anniversary of the first moon walk, The Science Coalition asked university researchers across the country to reflect on that event and share their thoughts about the next frontiers in science and what America must do to ensure that these scientific frontiers are reached. While each response is unique and reflective of the background of the respondent, together they make clear that there are many exciting new horizons in science. Research in such areas as energy and climate change, curing human disease, understanding the human genome, and answering questions about the Universe are, indeed, leading us to new frontiers. (more…)
Climate and Transport — What Does the Future Hold?
How will climate change affect when, where and how we travel? And how should this influence those planning the transport systems of the future? These questions are being addressed by The University of Nottingham as part of a consortium of UK universities in a new four-year, £1.5m research project — FUTURENET.
This innovative project will ask how we can make the UK’s transport system resistant to climate change, starting with what the system will look like in 2050. (more…)
James Burke: Connections, World Views and Technological Innovation
/Field Note
James Burke: "There is nothing hard-wired about the human mind. Over long periods of time, I think what we do is alter our perceptions."
Again retracing my steps a little in preparing a launch point for the first documentary in the current series, I took a fresh look at an old interview I did with science historian James Burke. It’s got a lot in it that is still very relevant today and so I’m posting it below.
Burke is possibly best known for Connections, a ten-episode documentary television series he created and narrated. It first aired in 1978 in the UK. It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrates how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events built off one another in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology. (more…)
Jane Jacobs - A Dark Age Ahead?
/Field Note
Jane Jacobs on her front porch in Toronto Canada. Photo taken by Blake Harris during one of several interviews.
I just spent the last few days in San Francisco, meeting with CIOs from some of the of larger cities and counties in the US – all related to my day job as an editor at Government Technology magazine.
Of a little relevance here given the focus of this site, I heard about some of the political wrangling related to distribution of the US stimulus money for broadband and other IT related activities. And for all the talk of change, it is still very much politics as usual in Washington, DC when it comes to meeting America’s economic challenges and addressing America’s continued lagging behind in broadband deployment and usage.
This prompted me, on the plane back, to think a little more about some of the intellectual territory I had previously covered before launching The X-Journals in the first place.
Specifically, I began thinking about conversations I had previously had with the late Jane Jacobs as well as her last book, Dark Age Ahead. (more…)
Los Alamos Researchers Create ‘Map of Science’
This "Map of Science" illustrates the online behavior of Scientists accessing different scientific journals, publications, aggregators, etc. Colors represent the scientific discipline of each journal, based on disciplines classified by the Getty Research Institute's Art and Architecture Thesaurus, while lines reflect the navigation of users from one journal to another when interacting with scholarly web portals. (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have produced the world’s first Map of Science—a high-resolution graphic depiction of the virtual trails scientists leave behind when they retrieve information from online services. The research, led by Johan Bollen, appears this week in PLoS ONE (the Public Library of Science).
“This research will be a crucial component of future efforts to study and predict scientific innovation, as well novel methods to determine the true impact of articles and journals,” Bollen said.
While science is of tremendous societal importance, it is difficult to probe the often hidden world of scientific creativity. Most studies of scientific activity rely on citation data, which takes a while to become available because both the cited publication and the publication of a particular citation can take years to appear. In other words, citation data observes science as it existed years in the past, not the present. (more…)
Fringe Science: Looking for Balance
A scientist working alone is now, just as in the past, able to make a discovery that can influence the fate of humanity and change the face of the whole planet.
Okay. I’ve got this blog up and running, which given my general lack of php skill, has been a feat of sheer blind luck. Diving in to modify the theme’s code or database parameters and such has made the process one of trying to fix what I broke as much as it involved reconfiguring or changing. However, after handling the last glitch I discovered this morning, everything now seems stable and pretty much what I wanted – at least for the time being.
So where to go from here? What’s the plan moving forward?
First, over the last few weeks, I’ve started to pay much more attention to a wide range of scientific and technological developments in universities and other research institutions, and I’ve started to post blog entries on those I find interesting or significant in some way. Over time, this should help to give a much better sense of where scientific discovery is shooting ahead, as well as some of the technological developments we should expect in the years to come. (more…)
Academia’s Suppression of Novel Ideas
AGAINST THE TIDE
A Critical Review by Scientists of
How Physics and Astronomy Get Done
Martín López Corredoira &
Carlos Castro Perelman (Eds.)
A book about scientists’ struggle against academia’s suppression of novel ideas:
Nobody should have a monopoly of the truth in this universe. The censorship and suppression of challenging ideas against the tide of mainstream research, the blacklisting of scientists, for instance, is neither the best way to do and filter science, nor to promote progress in the human knowledge. The removal of good and novel ideas from the scientific stage is very detrimental to the pursuit of the truth. There are instances in which a mere unqualified belief can occasionally be converted into a generally accepted scientific theory through the screening action of refereed literature and meetings planned by the scientific organizing committees and through the distribution of funds controlled by “club opinions”. It leads to unitary paradigms and unitary thinking not necessarily associated to the unique truth. This is the topic of this book: to critically analyze the problems of the official (and sometimes illicit) mechanisms under which current science (physics and astronomy in particular) is being administered and filtered today, along with the onerous consequences these mechanisms have on all of us. (more…)
Eric McLuhan: The End of Geography
by Blake Harris
Originally published in Vision magazine several years ago.
Much of what Eric McLuhan says about the social effects of the Internet — and much of what his father, Marshall McLuhan, said before him regarding the social effects of electronic media and computers — challenge some of our most basic assumptions about the fundamentals of democratic society.
Like his father, Eric McLuhan talks about many of the social effects of new media as if they already have happened. Indeed, a fundamental premise of the McLuhan perspective is that new technologies and new media create hidden environments whose social effects are generally not seen by most people until superseded by a new medium or a new technology. Hence, what we become sharply aware of are the effects of the old media rather than the new. 
Marshall McLuhan’s metaphor of the “global village,” coined decades ago, seems a highly prophetic description of today’s new realities. Yet, as Eric explained to me, his father actually used the term to describe the effects of radio in the 1920s. (more…)
John and Nana Naisbitt: Unintended Consequences
John Naisbitt
John Naisbitt has been heralded as one of America’s leading thinkers on the future. He is the recipient of 12 honorary degrees, is a former executive with IBM and Eastman Kodak, and also served as a presidential appointee in the Kennedy administration and as a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson. Previously, Visions talked with John Naisbitt as he was beginning work on a new book. That book, High Tech, High Touch: Technology and Our Search for Meaning, co-authored with his daughter Nana Naisbitt and Douglas Philips, has now hit the streets. (more…)
Redefining Leadership in the Digital Age
“Each new age has required a new breed of leader to create and manage its success and progress.”
Government leaders and managers face unique and unprecedented challenges in the decades ahead. Some leaders, recognizing the extent to which times are indeed changing, will rise to these tremendous challenges. But many may not, something that should concern us all, for in times of very rapid social transformation, we need not just good government, but great government. (more…)
Eric McLuhan: The End of Geography
Eric McLuhan
Much of what Eric McLuhan says about the social effects of the Internet — and much of what his father, Marshall McLuhan, said before him regarding the social effects of electronic media and computers — challenge some of our most basic assumptions about the fundamentals of democratic society.
Like his father, Eric McLuhan talks about many of the social effects of new media as if they already have happened. (more…)
John Naisbitt: High Tech/High Touch
John Naisbitt
Futurist John Naisbitt’s insightful analysis of the primary forces shaping tomorrow’s world has earned him worldwide recognition. His books Megatrends, Megatrends 2000 and Global Paradox all have been international bestsellers.A new book, now in the works, is likely to have just as far-reaching an impact as his earlier publications. John Naisbitt took some time to share some of his latest cutting-edge thoughts with Government Technology’s Editor at Large Blake Harris. (more…)
James Burke: Government for a World Long Gone
For more than 30 years James Burke has written, produced and presented television programs on science and society. He was the BBC’s chief correspondent to NASA’s Apollo space missions and is author and host of the highly acclaimed documentary series Connections 2.
Burke is also the best-selling author of Connections, The Pinball Effect and co-author of The Axemaker’s Gift — all books that, one way or another, change how we think about technology and our culture. (more…)
Peter Schwartz: Scenerios of Prosperity and The Long Boom
by Blake Harris
Originally published in Visions magazine several years ago.
Peter Schwartz is co-founder and chairman of the Global Business Network, a think tank and consulting firm in the San Francisco Bay area. For decades he has been one of the leading proponents of scenario development, working for both government and private corporations. He is author or co-author of the best-selling books, The Age of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World and The Long Boom.
Q: You’ve written quite a bit about the use of scenarios, including your book The Art of the Long View. And one point you’ve made is that the purpose of scenarios is not just to predict the future, but also to see more the current environment more clearly and to more accurately the consequences of your own actions – how those actions will fit in or stand against prevailing forces, trends, attitudes and influences.
A: Yes, one of the main functions of good scenarios is to actually see the present more clearly. Almost all the important signals of the future are already present. Somebody once said, “The future has already happened, it is just not evenly spread.” And so if you look around carefully, you can almost always see the early signs of coming changes. So what good scenarios often tend to do for us is to help us become much more sensitive to the forces at work in the present environment – the forces that we are actually dealing with right now, rather than the things that are yet to come. (more…)
Entrepreneurial Government
The following was a speech delivered by Blake Harris at the 24th Annual Conference of the US National Association of State Treasurers, August 2, 1999.
I once heard of an MIT professor who the students used to refer to as 99 percent Johnson. The reason was that this professor was constantly telling his students, “If you can ask the right question of the universe, the problem is 99 percent solved.”
He was constantly trying to teach his students that the key to solving any problem lay not in finding answers, but rather finding the right question to ask. (more…)
Loading... 
