Irish Examiner view: The world needs more people like the father of Gaia theory

We need brains of James Lovelock's scale and imagination if the world is to navigate the rest of this century

James Lovelock in 2014, with one of his early inventions, a homemade Gas Chromatography device, used for measuring gas and molecules present in the atmosphere. Picture: PA

The polymath and brilliant scientist James Lovelock who died this week aged 103 hugely increased our understanding of the interconnected nature of the world and humankind’s impact upon it and identified the impact of industrial pollutants, the depletion of the ozone layer and the menace of global warming.

Speaking to the Royal Society in 2007 about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said its report was “the scariest official document I have ever read”.