UK Guardian – By Decca Aitkenhead – September 30, 2016
James Lovelock’s parting words last time we met were: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky, it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.” It was early 2008, and the distinguished scientist was predicting imminent and irreversible global warming, which would soon make large parts of the planet uninhabitably hot or put them underwater. The fashionable hope that windfarms or recycling could prevent global famine and mass migration was, he assured me, a fantasy; it was too late for ethical consumption to save us. Before the end of this century, 80% of the world’s population would be wiped out….
Eight years after our previous encounter, he appears to have aged not one bit. At 97, he’s conceived a beautifully illustrated book of essays described as a “tool kit for the future”, The Earth and I, and written the introduction and conclusion; he goes walking every day, his hearing is perfect, his focus forensic and his memory unimpaired….
What has changed dramatically, however, is his position on climate change. He now says: “Anyone who tries to predict more than five to 10 years is a bit of an idiot, because so many things can change unexpectedly.” But isn’t that exactly what he did last time we met? “I know,” he grins teasingly. “But I’ve grown up a bit since then.”
Lovelock now believes that “CO2 is going up, but nowhere near as fast as they thought it would. The computer models just weren’t reliable. In fact,” he goes on breezily, “I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy, this climate change. You’ve only got to look at Singapore. It’s two-and-a-half times higher than the worst-case scenario for climate change, and it’s one of the most desirable cities in the world to live in.”
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Lovelock on Fracking
Lovelock has withering contempt for environmentalists’ opposition to fracking. “You see, gas in America is incredibly cheap, because of fracking,” he says. But what about the risk of triggering earthquakes? He rolls his eyes.
“Sure enough, that’s true, there will be an increase. But they’re tiny little tremors, they would be imperceptible. The only trouble is that you can detect them. The curse of my life has been that I’ve spent a lot of time inventing devices that are exceedingly sensitive. And the moment somebody can detect something, they’re going to attach a number to it, and then they make a fuss about it.” He chuckles, then pauses. “I’m not anti-green in the sense that I’m in favour of polluting the world with every damn thing we make. I think we’ve got to be careful. But I’m afraid, human nature being what it is, the thing gets exaggerated out of all proportion, and the greens have behaved deplorably instead of being reasonably sensible.”
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Lovelock, on BBC TV, slams the global warming claims including those of of the United Nations climate panel. ‘They just guess. And a whole group of them meet together and encourage each other’s guesses.’
Lovelock was once one of the leading voices of climate alarm. See: 2006 Climate Shocker: Lovelock Predicted Global Warming Doom: ‘Billions of us will die; few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in Arctic’
Lovelock becomes UN IPCC’s biggest critic: Green Guru Lovelock Slams UN IPCC & Greens: ‘Whenever UN puts its finger in it seems to become a mess’ — ‘The green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion’ — James Lovelock: ”IPCC is too politicized & too internalized’ — On Green religion: ‘I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use. The greens use guilt. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting CO2 in the air’
Lovelock: ‘We don’t need to save the planet, it’s looked after itself for four billion years. It’s always been habitable and things have lived on it, so why worry.’
‘That’s one reason global warming hasn’t been so noticeable around here. Far from being an automatic warming up. If the sea starts moving the currents in different directions we get quite cold conditions.’
He added that global warming proponents stated that the earth would get hotter and hotter but “they don’t really know,” and climate models are only based on what data goes into them, so it was hard to say what would happen in the future.
Lovelock: “Environmentalists appall me”
“Fracking is a damn good idea”
“Windmills and Solar Panels …. are just Silly things to do”
“We should have kept to Nuclear”
The Interviewer asks: Do you think we should give up trying to save the Planet?
Lovelock: Exactly!
Video of Green Guru James Lovelock: 2014 Video: begin at 3:30
Journal question: ‘Will nuclear energy be part of the future, despite the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan?’
Lovelock: ‘The business with Fukushima is a joke. Well, it’s not a joke, it is very serious — how could we have been misled by anything like that? Twenty-six thousand people were killed by the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami [that caused the nuclear meltdown], and how many are known to have been killed by the nuclear accident? None.
[On the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Lovelock writes in A Rough Ride to the Future: “The most amazing lies were told, still are told and widely believed… Despite at least three investigations by reputable physicians, there has been no measurable increase in deaths across Eastern Europe.”] A lot of investment in green technology has been a giant scam, if well intentioned.’
Journal Nature question: ‘Will nuclear energy be part of the future, despite the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan?’
Lovelock: ‘The business with Fukushima is a joke. Well, it’s not a joke, it is very serious — how could we have been misled by anything like that? Twenty-six thousand people were killed by the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami [that caused the nuclear meltdown], and how many are known to have been killed by the nuclear accident? None.
[On the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Lovelock writes in A Rough Ride to the Future: “The most amazing lies were told, still are told and widely believed… Despite at least three investigations by reputable physicians, there has been no measurable increase in deaths across Eastern Europe.”] A lot of investment in green technology has been a giant scam, if well intentioned.’
Nature question: ‘Is climate change going to be less extreme than you previously thought?’
Lovelock: The Revenge of Gaia was over the top, but we were all so taken in by the perfect correlation between temperature and CO2 in the ice-core analyses [from the ice-sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, studied since the 1980s]. You could draw a straight line relating temperature and CO2, and it was such a temptation for everyone to say, “Well, with CO2 rising we can say in such and such a year it will be this hot.” It was a mistake we all made.
We shouldn’t have forgotten that the system has a lot of inertia and we’re not going to shift it very quickly. The thing we’ve all forgotten is the heat storage of the ocean — it’s a thousand times greater than the atmosphere and the surface. You can’t change that very rapidly But being an independent scientist, it is much easier to say you made a mistake than if you are a government department or an employee or anything like that.
Nature: ‘So what will the next 100 years look like?’
Lovelock: ‘That’s impossible to answer. All I can say is that it will be nowhere as near as bad as the worst-case scenario.’
A Book Review by Matt Ridley of ‘A Rough Ride to the Future’ by James Lovelock
Lovelock: ‘We Need To Stay Sceptical About The Projections Of Climate Models’ – He now thinks he “tended to exaggerate the immediacy of global warming”, that “we may muddle through into a strange but still viable new world”, and that we can “keep our cool as the Earth gently warms, and even enjoy it when we can.” He thinks it is a mistake to take the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “projections almost as if written in stone”; instead we “need to stay sceptical about the projections of climate models”.
Lovelock regrets that huge sums have been ‘squandered on the renewable energy sources”, many of which are “ugly and hopelessly impractical” and threaten a “green satanic change” to Britain’s landscape. Yup. He thinks that Greenpeace is “a great and powerful negative feedback on all that enlightened technological progress stands for.”
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Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever: ‘Global warming is a non-problem’
‘I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong.’
‘Global warming really has become a new religion.’
“I am worried very much about the [UN] conference in Paris in November…I think that the people who are alarmist are in a very strong position.’
‘We have to stop wasting huge, I mean huge amounts of money on global warming.’
Top Swedish Climate Scientist Says Warming Not Noticeable: ‘The warming we have had last a 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all’ – Award-Winning Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, formerly of UN IPCC: ‘We Are Creating Great Anxiety Without It Being Justified’
UN Scientists Who Have Turned on the UN IPCC & Man-Made Climate Fears — A Climate Depot Flashback Report – Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.
‘Some of the most formidable opponents of climate hysteria include politically liberal physics Nobel laureate, Ivar Giaever; Freeman Dyson; father of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock — ‘Left-center chemist, Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the fathers of the German environmental movement’
