The launch of the global environmental summit in Copenhagen has not made the planetary scientists more optimistic as it looks that it will not offer truly efficient solutions to counteract the threat of global climate changes. Rather it will offer mere declarations, albeit correct ones. Meanwhile, there is more and more evidence of the destructive consequences of climate changes.
Of course, periodical changes in the Earth’s climate conditions are a standard phenomenon to some extent. They cannot be considered something exceptional, unprecedented, or unknown in the history of mankind. Still, things that have been taking place in the past years can hardly be regarded as standard natural fluctuation of temperature falls and rises on global scope. They are something altogether new – the products of human activity.
Today’s complicated and dramatic socioeconomic processes have the chance of bringing humanity on a better road provided that no global climate catastrophe hits in the next decade, which would radically change the conditions of our existence. Meanwhile, the development of the global economy is leading to this kind of catastrophe – if it has not started it yet. Many top-ranking scientists have come to this conclusion.
Den has reported about the socioeconomic views expressed by the Danish scholar Bjorn Lomborg. It seems that for the sake of keeping to the principle of objectivity it is worthwhile to tell the readers also about the ideas of one of the main opponents to Lomborg and other anti-alarmists — the 90-year-old British professor and green guru James Lovelock, all the more so that these ideas long ago acquired worldwide recognition, found reflection in many books, and it is only in Ukraine that they remain scarcely known.
Lovelock is a member of the British Royal Society, famous for creating and popularizing the Gaia hypothesis. It postulates that the earth functions like a superorganism. This is a biosphere concept whose main point is that our planet, as an entirety of living beings and non-living matter has not only self-organization systems but also a “controlling mechanism,” which keeps the environment fit for life. The Gaia concept is presented in the form of geophysiology, a systemic organismic science about the earth. This science will likely give way to a synthetic biospheric science, which Volodymyr Vernadsky thought necessary to create. But the meaning of the Gaia concept is not limited only to shaping a scientific theory. Its metaphorical nature, polysemanticism of formulations, and level of generalization fill it with metaphysical contents.
Generally, the scientific-theoretical and philosophical dimensions of the Gaia concept, i.e., geophysiology, are quite close to Vernadsky’s biospheric concept. However, the Gaia hypothesis emerged in 1950–70, when Lovelock, as he admitted, was not yet familiar with Vernadsky’s works. He regrets his ignorance and explains it by the fact that no apt English translations of Vernadsky’s works were available until recent times and by the overall “deafness” of English-speaking authors to texts in other languages. Today Vernadsky’s theory is viewed by the Swiss researcher Jacques Grinwald as the “intellectual prehistory to the Gaia concept,” while Lovelock describes Vernadsky as his “most outstanding predecessor.”
So, Gaia is a kind of self-organizing system. According to Lovelock, metaphorically it is a superorganism that has self-regulatory geophysical characteristics, thus maintaining a whole number of parameters of its internal environment on a relatively stable level, suitable for living organisms. Actually, the main idea of the Gaia hypothesis is that on a planetary scope, life is actively maintaining relatively stable conditions on Earth, comfortable for its own existence, organizing global parameters of its environment, constantly “building them up” for its needs in the process of own evolutional development (homeorhesis). “Any species that adversely affect the environment make it less favorable to their offspring and will eventually be wiped off as the weakest species that are evolutionally ill-adapted,” Lovelock writes.
Lovelock and his fellow biologist Lynn Margulis consider that all organisms, populations, ecosystems, air, soil, and rocks are kinds of organs of a single symbiotic system, Gaia. Humanity is also a part of this single complicated multilevel symbiotic system, where the partners exchange information directly or via their environment.
According to Lovelock’s concept, Gaia has value in itself and cannot be subordinated to man. On the contrary, people should understand that they are part of Gaia, and Gaia’s health is their health, too. The best care about man is care about entire Gaia. So, the practice adopted in the industrially developed countries – when huge money is allotted for health care, whereas very weak support is rendered to the state and international efforts to preserve biosphere and environment – is a vicious circle.
The more we take care of humankind as a single biological species, using the scientific-technical potential for this purpose, the more we worsen the environment for other species and, in the long run, for ourselves. In 10 or 100 years this will produce a postponed boomerang effect. All specimens should be living in harmony within Gaia’s framework, from bacteria to man, in a kind of multilevel symbiosis, because any upstarts, which break the harmony and change the environment to the detriment of their offspring, will finally be driven out, I am repeating myself here, just like the weak, evolutionally ill-adapted species.
People believe that scientific-technical process will last forever and that they will be able to cognize the world in a rational and comprehensive way. Thus, they liken themselves to a divine force, despite being mortal by their nature. If mankind challenges Gaia, it will inevitably sustain a crushing defeat as it will be waging struggle against itself.
Lovelock believes that man’s abuse of environment makes this system work against homo sapiens. It looks as if mankind in its overall condition is a grave malady of the biosphere. The latter is trying to heal itself, changing certain parameters of its existence in order to throw out mankind or at least relegate it to the margins. Mankind has already passed the “point of no return” in the sphere of climate change, and civilization as we know it will hardly survive. “Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,” Lovelock asserts (although these few people will make nearly 500,000 million people). Of course, there remains an option of constructing dome-covered cities in deserts.
The scientist does not demand, as he did in 1980s, seeking new methods to counteract the global warming. He calls upon the British government and the governments of other countries to start massive preparation to surviving in the “climate hell,” which in his opinion will inevitably come when the temperature in Europe rises by eight degrees.
The green guru wrote in his article entitled “We are past the point of no return” for The Independent: “We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of [CO2] emissions. The worst will happen...” In his opinion, “We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can.” The leading countries of the world, he is convinced, should plan to secure regular supplies of energy and food in the “global hothouse” and defenses from the rise of the sea levels.
One of the main components of Lovelock’s book The Revenge of Gaia is “a guidebook for global warming survivors.” It addresses people who will fight for survival after the current ecological mechanism has completely fallen apart.
One could have tried to wave off the scientist’s statements as a new anti-utopia but consider these facts. He proposed his concept of biosphere self-regulation back in the 1970s, while examining under the aegis of NASA whether life on Mars is possible. He was the first to warn more than 20 years ago about the danger of radical climate change. He was among the group of scholars who made a report about the global warming for Margaret Thatcher’s government back in April 1989. Since then practically all dismal predictions made by Lovelock have been fulfilled with high precision.
Incidentally, Lovelock has never been afraid of being a heretic: he has struggled for a long time against the use of nuclear power. And three years ago he suddenly published an article in The Independent which has sparked fiery debate in scientific circles. In this article the scientist called on the ecologists to refuse from their long-standing opposition to the use of atomic energy as it does not emit greenhouse gases. The pace of global warming is very rapid, so much so it is only possible to control it through massive transition to atomic energy, he wrote then. The environmentalists, for the most part, categorically rejected his calls then and still continue to do so. The business circles, who are not eager to contravene the public opinion, also pay little attention to these ideas.
The 2001 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that the average global temperature may rise by 5.8 degrees centigrade by 2100. In high latitudes, such as Britain, the rise can make eight degrees centigrade. But, Lovelock stresses, it seems that warming is proceeding faster and the timescale of reaching those indices may be shorter. “Yet there is a possibility that the climate change is controllable if we manage to curb the emissions of greenhouse-producing gases. However, it may be too late to do something,” he emphasizes
In fact the present-day civilization has practically found itself in a trap: even if the US, which has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol and reduce the carbon dioxide emissions in compliance with it, changes its mind, China and India will stay beyond the agreement’s action as it is impossible to control them. These new powerful industrial states (each of them inhabited by over billion people) are experiencing the period of rapid economic growth; China builds a new coal power plant on a weekly basis. There are similar processes in India. If these states decide to slow down their development, which results in emitting huge doses of carbon dioxide, but helps billions of people to get out of extreme poverty, an anti-governmental social revolution will break out.
If the current tendencies remain, the rise in carbon dioxide emissions and increase of global temperature (let alone the rise of ocean levels and flooding of some big cities and agricultural areas of these countries) will lead to regular bad harvests and cause famine, again leading to social upheavals. “If the climate change continues, I am inclined to think that by mid-century China will not be able to produce enough food to feed its people. The Chinese will have nowhere to go but up into scantily populated Siberia, where it will be warmer by that time,” Lovelock says. Perhaps, some radical Ukrainian nationalists will be glad to hear that Russians will lose Siberia, but what awaits Ukraine under these global changes?
In general, Lovelock believes that it is too late to try to counter the global warming: the Earth’s ecosystem has changed and now it is working against mankind. The researcher considers that the only thing people are left with is to try to accommodate to the catastrophic ecological conditions, because it is too late to do anything else. At the same time, we have no guarantees that we will succeed to adjust ourselves.
As we can see, Lovelock’s concept, above all, is not even a complex of scientific hypotheses and theories, which enable to predict quite precisely the processes of the climate change in general as well as separate components of this change. Rather, it is a certain worldview and philosophical system which radically opposes anthropocentrism. Moreover, it mentions certain quasi-religious instructions that demand our contemporaries to consciously perceive the inevitable punishment for the past sins of humankind.
It follows from Lovelock’s concept that we cannot avoid this punishment, but we can only somewhat lighten it if the current and the coming generations will behave in the right way, essentially reducing their world-transforming arrogance and drastically cutting their thoughtless consumption of natural resources. Only this can induce Gaia not to destroy, but only move humanity to an outer verge as an element of biosphere, as an element potentially dangerous to geophysical health, and give it the last chance to harmonize itself with the global processes.
