BEING GREEN and good-intentioned “can be more disastrous than doing nothing” about the state of the planet, according to scientist James Lovelock, who was the first to describe the earth as a self-regulating system he called “Gaia”.
In a public interview at UCD last night with Prof Frank Convery, chairman of Comhar, the Government’s sustainable development council, he cited the banning of pesticide DDT – blaming this for two million deaths from malaria every year.
The ban was imposed 10 years after publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Springin 1962. "DDT may be a bad thing for birds, but the person who invented it was given a Nobel prize because it had done more to save lives by killing mosquitoes", he said.
Lovelock also complained that the scientific community was too divided “not for any bad reason, but because biologists don’t speak to chemists”. Even within biology, there were now 30 branches “almost proud of the fact that they don’t talk to each other”.
In the 1970s, when he propounded his Gaia theory of how the earth works, "the biologists so hated it that it was impossible to publish" at first in scientific journals such as Nature. "They thought Gaia was not only wrong, but dangerous to science, even evil." He told a large audience at the O'Reilly Hall that anyone doing science needed to be "as hands-on as possible", rather than relying on "fancy models of the world". They should go out into the real world and measure things in nature, as he himself had done.
Turning to global warming, Lovelock said the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had “got it disastrously wrong” on sea-level rise in its recent (2007) assessment. In fact, the oceans were rising twice as fast due to the melting of Arctic Sea ice.
Asked by Prof Convery if “geo-engineering” could help solve the problem, he said there were a number of possible ways to reduce the rate at which the earth is warming by curtailing the volume of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere.
He also clarified his controversial espousal of nuclear energy by saying it was a question of “horses for courses”. In his view, Iceland wouldn’t need nuclear because it had geo-thermal energy, while Norway could continue to rely on hydro-power to meet its needs.
But an “over-populated” country such as Britain without such natural resources in abundance would have no option but to build more nuclear power stations, because 95 pc of its population live in cities that need electricity. “Nothing works if you don’t have it.”