James Lovelock Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More James Lovelock quote about:
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“The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened;”
-- James Lovelock -
“There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Those of us who consider ourselves to be somehow involved in the birthing of a new age, should discover Gaia as well. The idea of Gaia may facilitate the task of converting destructive human activities to constructive and cooperative behavior. It is an idea which deeply startles us, and in the process, may help us as a species to make the necessary jump to planetary awareness.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.”
-- James Lovelock -
“I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.”
-- James Lovelock -
“The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.”
-- James Lovelock -
“We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price.”
-- James Lovelock -
“If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.”
-- James Lovelock -
“All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Climatologists are all agreed that we'd be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.”
-- James Lovelock -
“You never know with politicians what they are really saying. And I don't say that in a negative way-they have an appalling job.”
-- James Lovelock -
“I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.”
-- James Lovelock -
“If a power station were to be built down the road, I'd prefer a nuclear plant over an oil burner, and definitely over a coal burner. We simply have to lessen our consumption of fossil fuels.”
-- James Lovelock -
“If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.”
-- James Lovelock -
“You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.”
-- James Lovelock -
“There is no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth's surface between living and nonliving matter. There is merely a hierarchy of intensity going from the 'material' environment of the rocks and the atmosphere to the living cells.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Only rarely do we see beyond the needs of humanity, and he linked this blindness to our Christian and humanist infrastructure. It arose 2,000 years ago and was then benign, and we were no significant threat to Gaia. Now that we are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth.”
-- James Lovelock -
“I wouldn't be against them (large wind turbines) if they actually worked.”
-- James Lovelock -
“By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”
-- James Lovelock -
“We'd never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn't been for space exploration and NASA.”
-- James Lovelock -
“There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.”
-- James Lovelock -
“I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.”
-- James Lovelock -
“Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.”
-- James Lovelock
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