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”.

In the 1960s he developed Gaia theory, the idea that evolution was a collaborative process among millions of species rather than the Darwinian view of the “survival of the fittest”. The name was suggested to him by William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies.

Although Lovelock, a supporter of nuclear power who worked for Nasa, is lionised by greens, he was highly critical of them, regarding their politics as being anti-science. 

He claimed to be the inventor of the microwave oven and experimented with techniques to freeze and then re-animate cell tissue. He registered 40 patents and delivered more than 200 learned scientific papers.

Above the entrance to his old school in Brixton, South London, is a famous relief sculpture entitled “Wisdom teaches youth".  

We need brains of his scale and imagination if the world is to navigate the rest of this century. In his last book, in 2019, he hoped that they would come from artificially intelligent cyborgs who would know enough to save the planet.