Quotes from James E. Lovelock

We need the people of the world to sense the real and present danger so that they will spontaneously mobilize and unstintingly bring about an orderly and sustainable withdrawal to a world where we try to live in harmony with Gaia.

inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe.

the breath of 7 billion people, our pets and our livestock puts into the already overburdened atmosphere 7 billion tons of CO2 a year.

To generate one gigawatt of energy a year from wind turbines requires one thousand square miles of countryside, an area equal to that of Greater London or of Dartmoor.

in England about 60 gigawatts of electricity a year. If our only supply was from wind we might need to cover the whole of England with wind farms. This is the green satanic change I fear. And worse, were we mad enough to do it and rich enough to afford it, we would still be emitting far too much CO2 from the carbon fuel we would burn during the 75 per cent of the time the wind was not set fair for the turbines.

we inhabit a universe that is nuclear powered. All the stars draw energy from nuclear reactions;

The irony of it all is that we in the developed world are the prime polluters, the most destructive of people on the planet, yet although we have the money and the means to prevent the Earth crossing the deadly threshold that will make global change irreversible, we are hampered by fear.

the IPCC now spoke comfortably of consensus and endorsed those mysterious concepts of sustainability and energy that renewed itself. We even thought that this way somehow we could save the planet and grow richer as well, a more pleasing outcome than the uncomfortable truth.

We know now that the Earth really does regulate itself, but because of the time it took to gather the evidence we discovered too late that the regulation was failing and the Earth system was fast approaching the critical state that puts all life on it in danger.

almost never mentioned by the media, no one was killed by the Fukushima accident and no one has subsequently died as a result of it, unless we add in the suicides of those driven from their homes by an overzealous application of radiation safety rules.

it would take the Earth more than a thousand years to recover from the damage we have already done,

We as a civilization are all too much like someone addicted to a drug that will kill if continued and kill if suddenly withdrawn.

We know that in the depth of the last glaciation carbon dioxide fell to 180 ppm, rose to 280 ppm after the ice age ended, and has risen now to 380 ppm as a result of our pollution.

the health of the Earth, not the health of people, in mind. This is why it is much too late for sustainable development; what we need is a sustainable retreat.

six billion hungry and greedy individuals,

Abundant life occurs where it is warm and wet on land and where it is quite cool, less then 12°C, in the ocean.

We are like passengers on a large aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean who suddenly realize just how much carbon dioxide their plane is adding to the already overburdened air. It would hardly help if they asked the captain to turn off the engines and let the plane travel like a glider by wind power alone. We cannot turn off our energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered civilization without crashing; we need the soft landing of a powered descent.

it helpful to think that what evolves are the niches, and organisms negotiate for their occupancy.

caused Gaia's regulation system to fail would lead to a hot and dead Earth

Edna St Vincent Millay said: My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends – It gives a lovely light.

There were several interesting consequences of these vast explosions. They released into the global atmosphere radioactivity as great as that from two Chernobyl disasters every week for a whole year.

dictum of Paracelsus, 'The poison is the dose',

mistakes subject to so discerning and public a post?mortem as weather forecasters.