THE Gaia hypothesis first proposed by British scientist James Lovelock – the notion that all living things are interlinked as a single self-regulating body – is popular with some scientists and accords with the idea that because human activity has changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere we are likely to be interfering with the climate and upsetting the balance of nature.
Paleontologist, Peter Ward, rejects the notion of Gaia, and is running a contrarian but equally hubris argument in his new book, ‘The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?’ [1]. Professor Ward suggests because there is no balance of nature mankind will needs to intervene and thus advocates geoengineering solutions including to climate change.
I suspect the comments in a recent review [2] are all together too kind, but nevertheless give some insights into The Medea:
“Looking at the evidence of past extinctions – written in fossils and in the chemical makeup of deeply buried rock sediments – as well as the workings of today’s oceans, atmosphere, and myriad food chains, he [Peter Ward] finds evidence of a planet that tends not toward harmony but toward extremes. Although windows of stability are possible, they are simply respites between catastrophic boom-and-bust cycles. He attributes one of the largest extinctions in history to the out-of-control proliferation of plankton feeding on upwellings of nutrients from the ocean floor. Rather than being elegantly brought back to equilibrium, the tiny organisms reproduced until they choked off much of the life in the upper ocean. Exhausting their newfound food supply, they died en masse, and decaying by the trillions used up all the oxygen in the water, killing off everything else.
As for the earth’s temperature control, Ward, drawing on the writing of the environmental scientist James Kirchner, points out that more often than not the thermostat seems to be hooked up backward, with warming triggering more warming, and cooling more cooling. In a process we’re seeing today, as the planetary temperature rises, warming increases the rate at which soil releases greenhouse gases – not only carbon dioxide, but methane and nitrous oxide. It leads to more forest growth in places that formerly were barren tundra, even as more carbon dioxide in the air makes plants hardier and better able to grow in areas once given over to desert. More plants in more places means a darker earth, and therefore a more heat-absorbent and warmer one. It’s an escalating feedback loop that becomes even more powerful as the planet’s white, ice-covered poles give way to darker open water.
The dangerous positive feedback can run the other way, too, Ward argues. He blames a planetary glut of plant life for the two prehistoric “snowball earth” episodes, 2.3 billion and 700 million years ago, when the planet froze from pole to pole. In a reverse greenhouse effect, the earth’s plants, photosynthesizing madly, sucked so much carbon dioxide out of the air that temperatures plunged. Far from nurturing life, the world’s plants nearly froze it to death.”
I agree with the evolutionary biologists, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, that the Gaia hypothesis, which some want elevated to a theory, is nonsense. Indeed anyone who subscribes to the general principles of Darwinian evolution must reject the concept of “self-regulating homeostasis” which is central to Gaia. In the same way a hypothesis, that suggests chaos without human intervention, underestimates the resilience of natural systems and also their ability to adapt and change including with extremes of climate.
Indeed both Professors Lovelock and Ward seem to have missed an essential feature of the natural world – change.
**************
Peter Ward’s many books include the highly acclaimed Rare Earth: ‘Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe’ and ‘Under a Green Sky’ (Collins). He is professor of biology and Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, and an astrobiologist with NASA.
[1] The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? by Peter Ward, Princeton University Press http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8855.html
[2] Dark green: A scientist argues that the natural world isn’t benevolent and sustaining: it’s bent on self-destruction. By Drake Bennett, January 11, 2009 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/01/11/dark_green?mode=PF
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
These are “Educated” individuals.
Is there ANY hope for civilization??
Life has been muddling through for ~4 billion years. Higer order vertebrates have been getting by for >50 million years. H. Sapiens has been around for many tens of thousands of years, at the least.
What time horizon are these guys looking at?
>accords with the idea that because human activity has changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere we are likely to be interfering with the climate and upsetting the balance of nature…
Warming is a result of physics. This has nothing to do with Gaia.
I think this guy expresses the anthroponarcissism very well http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw.
David: “Warming is a result of physics. This has nothing to do with Gaia.”
There goes metabolism then.
Jen,
Why hubris? Looks more like nemesis to me.
Jim Lovelock was (is) a brilliant scientist. He invented the electron capture detector, for which he could have won a Nobel prize. In any case, he deserved it more than some. Nevertheless, his Gaia is a little off.
Jim Lovelock was (is) a brilliant scientist. He invented the electron capture detector, for which he could have won a Nobel prize. In any case, he deserved it more than some. Nevertheless, his Gaia is a little off.
Funny thing is, Lindzen’s ‘iris’ effect sound a lot like “Gaia”.
I wish people would stop treating man and our activity as something removed from nature – we are nature!
may I just sneak this in here 🙂
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/co2_coral_warming.html
I don’t think this medea business is hubris at all. I think its science. If mainstream versions of the life-cycle of stars have predictive value then any one planet is likely only suitable for macro-scopic life for a pretty short space of time WITHOUT CAPITALIST INTERVENTION.
The sun is supposed to be on the “main sequence” hence it will supposedly increase its average output by 4% each billion years. Who knows what magnificent lushness Venus was sporting while we were going through our snowball earth? We won’t have to worry about warming for tens of millions of years and only cooling ever was or will be a worry in that sort of time period. But without capitalism we will overheat sooner or later if the predictions of the current theory are true.
We need to take control of our environment. It is buffer zones around private property that will lead to the long-term tendency towards diversity. Since that allows for the partial-but-not-total isolation that would enhance biodiversity and adaptation.l
Let me clarify that a bit without disclaimers to express doubt about the theory of the evolution of stars.
At the moment our only climate problem is cooling. Not warming. Cooling. Those who say otherwise are stooges, idiots or lying. But this will not always be the case.
Only capitalism can keep this planet past its use-by date in terms of this planet being hospitable to macroscopic life.
So at the moment some people in Florida are trying to drain off energy from the Gulf Stream for electricity. It may not cause too much of a problem, but I think this is totally inappropriate. We have awesome nuclear potential, and they could just build a couple of nuclear plants and have ten times whatever they are getting from this other scheme. Because increasing the resistance to circulation of the gulf stream is something that ought to contribute to cooling.
Now fast-forward 150 million years where, without capitalism, we may well be facing some heating problems. But what if already we have tapped out geothermal energy? Clearly that would be something that works in the opposite direction and would be a way of the planet staying livable for a lot longer.
Fast forward 150 million years from that. And maybe a lot of our manufacturing is done in orbit to save on energy and the orbiting factories act as a way of blocking excess heat making its way to the oceans of the planet.
So the idea is not to get all emotional about it. If we want a lush natural environment it is up to us to promote that. And it is the case that Capitalism quite naturally improves the environment if some land use issues are dealt with.
A Global Cooling alarmist? Graeme you are 35 years too late!!!
The Gaia idea seems to be a further development of the German Historical School, but I must agree with Janama when it is pointed out that man is a natural part of the ecosystem.
Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas might be relevant here, but I wonder if a human is nothing more than a very complex community of bacteria that in their individual state consume hydrocarbons for energy.
Oh, my apologies, I am deemed a nutter, sorry for having mentioned it.
Davey,
“Hubris” in so much as both Lovelock and Ward believe mankind can significantly impact global climate.
I assume you suggest “nemesis” because James Lovelock, Tim Flannery and others subscribe to ecocentrism. But how does “nemesis” apply to Prof Ward?
SJT,
Nature is full of self adjustments, auto corrections and negative feedback which Lindzen was on about.
If it wasn’t for this we wouldn’t have got this far.
Randall,
It’s interesting that Lovelock preached Gaia yet predicted global catastrophe.
Jennifer
What is ecocentrism?
Thanks
Peter Ward’s interpretation of the geological past is uniformitarian in its assumption that the earth is a closed system.
There are alternatives to this intepretation but I need to get hold of his book first before commenting further, since I am ignorant of his arguments at this point in time.
Any further comments from SJT, Luke, et. al. just confirms they are hypocrites:
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/569873
They may also want to consider reducing the number of breaths they take – ideally to zero!
Only persons who had missed out on a decent education could write such twittering drivel.
This planet formed about 4.5 Gy ago. For the last ~3.8 Gy i.e. roughly since the evolution of the cyanobacteria, organisms which absorb CO2 and emit oxygen the mean global surface temperature has not varied by more than about plus or minus 5 K either side of 288 K. If this isn’t good evidence for a form of homeostasis I don’t know what is.
Equally importantly, this rubbish completely ignores the major intellectual strides made in the last half century(!) in understanding the thermodynamics of internally chaotic planetary climate systems.
Edward Lorenz, the ‘father of chaos’ pointed out as long ago as 1960 that the work output of Earth’s atmosphere might be close to the maximum possible. Based on the observed state of the Earth, he argued that is the heat flow were lower than it is, the resulting large temerature gradients would drive motions more vigorously. The system should therefore tend to a maximum in work output.
Since then the work of our own (then CSIRO) Garth Paltridge (1975) showed that the Earth (a non-equilibrium thermodynamic system) is in an equivalent state of maximum entropy production (MEP).
More recently Dewar (2003), building on the work of Jaynes (1957) showed that the Earth operates in a state of the highest Shannon entropy (a measure of information content). As long as the system has a rich ensemble of modes top choose from, it follows that that it will most probably reside in or close to the sates with maximum dissipation of entropy.
At the peak in work production, there is room for more combinations than elsewhere, so the climate is most likely to reside in that (homeostatic) state (Lorenz, Science Vol. 299 February 2003).
Lovelock’s Gaia is simply a cruder expression of these profound intellectual concepts which have been slowly and patiently in development for all these years. In a sense the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ is correct – it is just that
There are now entire research institutes e.g. Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, University of Hamburg’s Meteorology Institute where people who are fortunate enough to have both brains and a rigorous scientific education successfully apply the MEP paradigm to a host of terrestrial systems both big and small, both abiotic and biotic and generate good mainstream scientific literature in the process.
In this context, the publications of Ward, Bennett etc and related ignorant comments are simply toilet paper.
The definitive comment on this Ward, Bennett, “oh my, Gaia is nonsense” type of stuff may be found right here:
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw
Jen,
I just wanted to pick up on your comment ““Hubris” in so much as both Lovelock and Ward believe mankind can significantly impact global climate. ”
Personally I’d say “”Hubris” in so much as some believe mankind can do whatever it wants and never significantly impact clobal climate, and even if we did we’d have the technology advances to cope with it.”
I always start this discussion with Exhibit A: Nuclear winter : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
in that if every nuclear weapon on the planet were detonated in a nuclear war we would change the climate, based on current scientific understanding:
“A global average surface cooling of –7°C to –8°C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still –4°C (Fig. 2). Considering that the global average cooling at the depth of the last ice age 18,000 yr ago was about –5°C, this would be a climate change unprecedented in speed and amplitude in the history of the human race. The temperature changes are largest over land … Cooling of more than –20°C occurs over large areas of North America and of more than –30°C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions.”
So there you have it – it is completely within our ability as a race to change the climate overnight, at the push of a few buttons no less!
An intersting (to me) aside is that I generally have this conversation with associates who are religious… ie they think it is arrogant that humans think they can change the climate (because God created the planet and he is strong and allmighty). Which runs counter to the “AGW is a religion” claim.
I am generally of the opinion that “living within our and the planet’s means” is a totally non-hubristic concept. (I may have just had the hubris to have invented a new term in non-hubristic).
Steve
I agree – though I get uncomfortable with the conclusion that the German Historical School has general authenticity – but as an inter-connected “thing”, yes, easily understood in terms of electromagnetics, and from your perspective in the chemical domain. (Louis Kevran makes some interesting points, so I am told).
I don’t support Darwinian evolution nor the flawed dating of the Earth, for reasons which I won’t go into here, (and nothing to do with Creationism) but generally tend to support the ideas, various, Michael Talbot enunciated in his book “The Holographic Universe”, as well as Amit Goswami’s book “The Self Aware Universe”. Lyall Watson’s ideas have also affected my take on life in a biological sense.
No go on Louis, I’m genuinely interested in why AGW is not the only major scientific field in which you choose to abstain from the views of those most qualified and instead follow an obscure fringe theory…
“Davey,
“Hubris” in so much as both Lovelock and Ward believe mankind can significantly impact global climate.”
We can cool the earth if we want to. We’d be crazy to try but there is really no doubt that if we were serious about it we could cool the planet. It isn’t the hardest thing to do to cool a planet that has a one-way cooling bias. Its warming the planet that would seem to be beyond our capabilities.
I think Wrong-Way Corrigans dad must have been prolific sperm donor. Where else are all these people coming from?
“No go on Louis, I’m genuinely interested in why AGW is not the only major scientific field in which you choose to abstain from the views of those most qualified and instead follow an obscure fringe theory…”
Qualified at WHAT blockhead?
MattB
AGW is not a scientific field – its a political movement misusing science, hence my rejection of it. It can be dismissed on first principles without the statistical jiggery pokery charlatans need to demonstrate their idea of scientific truth.
As for evolution – it isn’t supported in fact but in rhetoric. You need to understand how it came into use – and to do that you need to be familiar with the politics of England at the time of The Great Reform Act of 1832.
Charles Lyell effectively shifted Creation from its Ussherian date of 4004 BC to one far removed to the past. Darwin’s theory then supplied the means by which this new date of creation could account for the presently observed biodiverisity by a mechanical process. Darwin’s theory has quite a few holes in it, causing Stephen Jay Gould to come up with his improvement as punctuated equilibria.
Lyell moved a fiction from one point in time to another. Darwin, starting from that removed fiction, then supplied a mechanism to explain “evolution”. Note that the human being remains as the ultimate product of this process, therefore not contradicting Lyell’s beliefs as a devout Methodist, in which man is made in God’s image. (Do not underestimate the power of a scientists cultural background in biassing his science).
And please let’s not get into THAT area of disputation.
Objectively you will find that life seems to appear as lifeforms which are suited to a particular environment, so what our forbears might have interpreted as evolution to maintain fidelity with their religious beliefs, may rather be lfie forms that can be associated with a particular physical environment.
Lyall Watson writing in his various books, (Supernature etc) has pointed to quite problematical facts concerning evolution. Science journalist Richard Milton caused an even greater hysterial outburst with his controversial books questioning evolution.
But I am not going to got into detail at this point because I have other priorities.
Bear in mind that the so-called fringe scientists are the ones whose theories and observations displace the fossilised corpus of institutionalised science that is intrinsically a political phenomenon dominated by group think and group mentality dominated by the intellectually normal, in a purely statistical sense I hasten to add. The history of science is one of the more fascinating areas of study, I find.
I will post up some evolutionary red herrings on my blog later this week and link to here – but as I said above, I, lilke many professional exploration geologists find ourselves suddenely unemployed due to the commodities collapse and following the, now more reasonable posted, pitter-patter of the comments here is just not possible in the short term.
Bear also in mind that there is also a paradigm shift happening in geology in which Plate Tectonics has been consigned to the has beens in theories, and the development of this can be glimpsed by reading the various papers at the New Concepts of Global Tectonics Newsletter site – http://www.ncgt.org. I post pertinent bits of the quarantined issues on my blog http://geoplasma.spaces.live.com/ .
I’m on the fringe area of science because I can afford to be since my work does not depend on my academic “position” in terms of dogma. I also do a tremendous amount of geological field work as a diamond exploration geologist, covering both hard and soft rock areas of geology, such being the nature of the rare rocks we look for, kimberlite. As I started studying geology when I was 13 years old at high School, so it’s a vocation, not a job.
And because I get my hand dirty doing the hard yakka, like Warren Carey and other geologial mavericks, we tend to find that the perfect theories beloved of academia are not, because we, for commerical reasons, need our science to be based on facts, not airy-fairy theories.
Erratum: I should have added that by moving a fiction from one point to another point in time does not change its fictionality, nor any theory deduced from it.
Please explain how “change” invalidates either the Gaia or Medea hypothesis.
“Comment from: MattB January 13th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
A Global Cooling alarmist? Graeme you are 35 years too late!!!”
Same moron. Two different threads. You idiot Matt!!!!!! How can a debate of 35 years ago affect PHYSICAL SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. You are clearly a dim bulb fella. Matt you are just a dummy. You are acting as if the physical world gives a tinkers cuss about petty science/media debates.
Follow the evidence you blockhead. This is just depressing. That we are surrounded by people so given over to the stupid demon.