An inconceivable 'truth?'
Written: Apr 30 '07 (Updated May 04 '07)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: It is short
Cons: Throw a dart as I like to say
The Bottom Line: Lots of problems, no solutions. Lots of bad news that is not always accurate, so impossible to believe.
|
|
|
| paulsavage's Full Review: James Lovelock et al - The Revenge of Gaia: Earth'... |
The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity is, in a word, bad.
Before I go into anything else, I need to define Gaia (the Earth Mother goddess in ancient Greece). At its most simple and least controversial, it means the systems of a self-regulating planet. A wider understanding is that all forms of life and all forces on the planet are part of the same system. It isn’t really a religious deity but many in the New Age have sort of resurrected her for that purpose.
Revenge is written by the man who basically brought the concept of Gaia theory to the forefront: Dr. James Lovelock. As far as a look backward, this book is no better or worse than any environmental book that does the same. The problem comes, as happens with these books, when he starts to take the backward glance and tries to apply it to current day. He spends about fifty pages discussing how resilient a young earth was and how much less resilient it is now in its older age. One of the things that he points out looking backward becomes awkward and ignored during his forward pitch: when the earth was at its most resilient, the sun was less hot and less intense than it is now (he says it is 25% hotter today just from the sun’s intensity alone). When I get to the analysis, this will become important.
He spends another forty pages looking at forms of energy. He explains why most of the alternative fuels are no better than fossil fuels. Bio-fuels still release carbon when burned; wind turbines can change the mini-climate around them and they are unreliable since wind itself is unreliable and the backup would always have to be a fossil fuel or similar plant on idle which saves little with regard to carbon emissions; ditto this with sea current driven turbines; solar energy is like wind in that it is unreliable, but it is also not remotely cost effective and the batteries that would need to exist to hold power for night and bad weather do not yet exist; river and dam driven turbines are fine, but damming up huge sections of land for power is wasteful, dangerous, and few countries could afford to give up the land even if they had enough rivers to provide the energy needed. He points to nuclear fusion and fission as the only alternatives that are Gaia-friendly (more on this in the analysis).
He spends a chapter explaining our use of cropland and how monocultural fields not only cause more damage to the soil than not, they also require the removal of forests which are needed to help cool the planet. I think few of us would have problems with this idea. He goes farther though. He says, a couple of times actually, that the insistence of removing sulfur from the atmosphere—you know the stuff that leads to acid rain—should not be removed. Aerosol particulates like sulfur help reflect sunlight back into space. I cannot argue with this fact, but he doesn’t bother to go into the costs (more on this below). He calls for a sustainable retreat from burning fossil fuels. Great. The problem is . . . now it is time for the analysis.
The problem is that Dr. Lovelock calls for the creation of a meta-religion, meta-government that will insist that all we do we do with Gaia in mind. At times throughout the book he says we have probably already gone past the tipping point of global temperature maximums. So take the absurd idea of a wholly synthesized religion that would require more faith than any of us, but those likely to join the Jim Jones People’s Temple ilk, have. Climate information comes in so fast and is at times so baffling contradictory that it isn’t possible to get a room full of Green’s together that agree on more than just: it’s getting hotter. Add to that idea the notion he puts forward more than once that we may be past doing anything about it and you get a 160 page lamentation worthy of anything Jeremiah would have had the vocabulary to use to complain.
He commits the first world sin without making any of the concomitant first world contrition/atonement. The world cannot hold the number of people now on it living in first world conditions; since globalization and just standard human upward mobility, more and more people strive for this level of lifestyle. Dr. Lovelock basically implies that it is too bad they missed out on that—yes the West screwed up the environment without really knowing it, but now we do and we can say that the methods you use are bad and you will just have to stop; too bad if you starve, that’s just how the cosmic cards are dealt. The contrition would have taken . . . well . . . as long as this: We would need to work very closely with our partners in the emerging economies to replace their coal and oil fired power plants with cleaner fuels and newer technology; if one fusion plant or two fission plants can power all of New York City with power, then one fission plant could provide all the energy needs for places like Malawi, Botswana, Yemen, Belize and so on. That is less than a paragraph and is not covered. If I, a thoughtful person who has accepted the more esoteric concepts of Gaia at times, who has neither a PhD nor an MD can come up with that first world contrition, then why cannot someone who has spent the last half of his life arguing for recognition of Gaia?
About halfway into the book, he points to a couple of things that would require far more material to explain than he gives them. I should note at this point that the book is nearly all opinion. He does not use footnotes or endnotes with sources. He provides a fairly skimpy suggested reading list at the back but has no citations in the book itself. So when he says that nuclear naysayers are wrong headed, he has nothing to back it up. It may be a myth that millions suffered cancer after the two atomic attacks there; however, he is going to have to say more than “That isn’t true” for people to rethink this. Same with his notion that only 45-75 people died as a result of the accident at Chernobyl and that cancer rates in the areas most closely affected are not statistically higher than at any other time. He provides a compelling chart that shows the atmospheric load of tritium (a ‘natural’ heavy hydrogen created from nuclear explosions) was hundreds of times higher when the nuclear powers tested their new weapons in the atmosphere; but he offers no other explanation, as if the chart itself was enough. To show an example by way of a control, take the book The River by Edward Hooper—this book explains that HIV/AIDS have been around much longer than originally thought and may not be the result of an infection with the HTLV-III virus. Mr. Hooper knew this was going to be controversial so he cites somewhere over a thousand sources. What Dr. Lovelock says is far more controversial and he uses nothing to back up his thoughts.
Dr. Lovelock explains how fusion reactions work and does a good job at that. He says that one fusion reactor in Britain was able to create sustainable light fusion reaction for 2 seconds. Before you scoff, this tiny interval created the equivalent of 16 megawatts. Yes fusion would be a fantastic source of power, such that once the plants were paid for could literally be free. The problem is that we are far more than the 20 years Dr. Lovelock hopes for. Fortunately an accident at a fusion site would only kill those in the immediate vicinity, but the effect to the planet would be something worse and not because of radiation which is tiny anyway, the amazing heat let into the atmosphere would have to go somewhere on its way up and out.
The second thing that would need more sources to back up is the notion that fear of cancer has now replaced fear of nuclear war. Given that cancer is not now the death sentence it was even just 30 years ago, let alone 50 or 100, I would have a hard time believing that fear of cancer is any greater now than before. But with each survivor that we know, and I know dozens, cancer becomes less frightening. Right now I fear the various mosquito borne encephalitises than cancer. You can fight something that grows pretty slowly in comparison to something that makes your brain overheat and nearly explode.
I mentioned above that, when the planet was more resilient, the sun was less hot than it is now. I’m sure I’m not at all alone when I say, I hear all of the people with climate blinders on saying “Hey if it ain’t our fault, then we don’t have anything to fix; you can’t do anything about the sun after all.” I’m certain that the sun was cooler then. The problem is, again, he presents a problem without a solution. He quickly says we need to change crop habits, travel habits, entire lifestyle changes. Dr. Lovelock seems to forget that his argument about a hotter sun vitiates his argument, especially among the unbelievers or the yet to be convinced. (One great idea discussed at a global climate action meeting is something that sounds like science fiction, but could be done and relatively inexpensively; a planetary polarized monocle. They would place a 7 mile in diameter polarized monocle in the space where the Helios satellite is—where the gravity of the sun and earth cancel each other out—this would mitigate the suns power and remove at least most of the deleterious effects of the natural warming of the sun.)
Back to the sulfur issue now. He tells us that we need sulfur in the atmosphere to reflect some of the sunlight. Fine. But how does he square this? Acid rain plays havoc on living organisms and things like houses and cars. It also makes lakes and rivers more acidic to the point where life there could end. What makes this notion of necessary sulfur so bad is that Dr. Lovelock mentions that current levels of CO2 in the lower atmosphere are leading to, you guessed it, acidic oceans that are near their tipping point. At least Jeremiah was consistent with his complaints and didn’t throw around bombastic and self-contradictory ‘science’ as he spread his laments.
He also gets perilously close to speaking the unspeakable; this is just in keeping with his practice of presenting a problem and not bothering with a solution. He says that the earth cannot support 6 billion people living as we do now. You know where this reasoning is going: who plays the role of the selector? I just finished a book on the Holocaust, so this idea is fresh. Who stands before a mass of people and say—sorry, the world doesn’t support your kind anymore, good-bye and good luck in whatever Heaven you believe in? If you come so close to breaking that unspoken law the more time you have to use to explain why what you say isn’t horrible. Or better still, why it is horrible but why it is a reality we have to face: meaning either we pick or Gaia picks, but some picking will have to occur—this is traditionally done through massive pandemics and wars. We have not had a major war since 1945 and no pandemics since 1918 (AIDS is devastating but it is relatively slow to kill where influenzas can kill in just a matter of a couple of days).
Obviously, I do not recommend this book. I cannot say, now, that I would recommend any of Dr. Lovelock’s work—this book is one of those books that can undo all work that came before it.
After I have time to consider it fully, I will write a personal essay about this topic. If anyone else has done so, please leave a comment so I can find it.
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
paulsavage
|
 in Movies |
|
Member: paul savage
Location: alabama, us
Reviews written: 516
Trusted by: 68 members
About Me:
A puny inexhaustible voice still talking
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.