James Lovelock Quotes

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

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.

I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.

What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: 'Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?' If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours.

The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

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.

The pioneer and would-be spacefarer Elon Musk said he would like to die on Mars, though not on impact. Martian conditions suggest death on impact might be preferable.

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.

The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium.

What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up.

The Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes - Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn't surprise me at all.

I would only have been too pleased if someone had asked me for my data. If you really believed in your data, you wouldn't mind someone looking at it. You should be able to respond that if you don't believe me go out and do the measurements yourself.

So-called 'sustainable development' ... is meaningless drivel.

NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station.

Nowadays if you're dependent on a grant - and 99% of them are - you can't make mistakes as you won't get another one if you do.

Ask almost anybody if they think the climate?s changed in the last couple of decades and they will all say ?yes? and give you lots of examples.

We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science

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.

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.

Science always uses metaphor.

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.

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.

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.

Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.

Imagine a survivor of a failed civilization with only a tattered book on aromatherapy for guidance in arresting a cholera epidemic. Yet, such a book would more likely be found amid the debris than a comprehensible medical text.

Esso has been the main one in America spreading the disinformation that there is no global warming problem.

By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.

Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.

A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.

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.

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.

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades.

If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

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.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

Let's make hay while it lasts.

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.

This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief.

If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

The oil companies regard nuclear power as their rival, who will reduce their profits, so they put out a lot of disinformation about nuclear power.

You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.

China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution.

I wouldn't be against them (large wind turbines) if they actually worked.

Composing computer programs to solve scientific problems is like writing poetry. You must choose every word with care and link it with the other words in perfect syntax. There is no place for verbosity or carelessness. To become fluent in a computer lnaguage demands almost the antithesis of modern loose thinking. It requires many interactive sessions, the hands-on use of the device. You do not learn a foreign language from a book, rather you have to live in the country for year to let the langauge become an automatic part of you, and the same is true for computer languages.

One pound of uranium is worth about 3 million pounds worth of coal or oil.

Our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.