James Lovelock Quotes
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China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution.
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There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.
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Let's make hay while it lasts.
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We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.
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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.
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Esso has been the main one in America spreading the disinformation that there is no global warming problem.
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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.
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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.
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I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn't surprise me at all.
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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.
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Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.
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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.
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Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.
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If you were an artist or novelist, or a poet or somebody like that, nobody would think it odd if you worked in your own home. In science there's none of this at all. I'm almost the only independent scientist in Britain. Everybody else works in large institutions, universities, or industrial labs. Why should one expect scientists to work that way?
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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.
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If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.
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Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.
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Neither Lynn Margulis nor I have ever proposed a teleological hypothesis. Nowhere in our writing do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves planetary foresight or planning by the biota. ...Yet we met persistent, almost dogmatic, criticism that our hypothesis is teleological.
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One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don't know it.
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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.
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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.
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An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.
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Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.
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Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.