James Lovelock, the formulator of the Gaia Hypothesis as to how the biosphere has self regulating mechanisms, wa the subject of discussion on Morning Ireland.

MI reported that Lovelock has been warning that the earth will only be able to support 1 billion people towards the end of the century causing mass migration to places such as Ireland and the UK. Lovelock and James Martin seem to be in total agreement that focussing on Wind Energy is a foolish waste of time at this stage.

Lovelock has also stated that any environmentalist who is against nuclear energy is a fool. He has also rubbished the models for gradual climate change saying the world does not work that way. The scientists commenting on MI agreed.

While some disagree with Lovelock he is still, at the age of 90, a darling of the scientific community and of the Green community.

Can anybody provide good links to Lovelock's prognostications on these points?

As Áine Lawlor says, just when you thought the news couldn't get any worse, now everyone is going to die, nearly, and it's too late to try to save the planet. The only hope we have is of trying to save the human race because the planet will heal itself.

He is being over-pessimistic according to one of the commentators when he says there will be mass migration, death and starvation in an attempt to flee from some catastrophe that might result from climate change.

So we have to try to pre-empt a theoretical disaster he says by getting involved in reducing CO2. Or else more than Áine Lawlor will be struggling with Malthus' ideas. Wind farms aren't enough he says, we need to be looking at nuclear....

If panic or at least concern over something like this caught on then it could galvanise a population to do anything through fear.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0224/morningireland_av.html?2496510,null,209

Some interesting pro-nuclear images here of comparative sizes of different quantities of energy or energy producers. I haven't got around to finding out the comparative CO2 footprints of wind and nuclear over their entire life yet though.

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

Can anybody provide good links to Lovelock's prognostications on these points?

Just to keep your question in view. I haven't googled anything yet besides the above anyway.

Thanks A#9. You mentioned his main point which was that it's too late to avoid the devastating consequences of climate change. Lovelock says we have to prepare for the inevitable.

James Martin, author of The Meaning of the 21st Century, is an old fashioned optimist who thinks technology can save everybody. He gives an example of how little energy the massive wind farm in copenhagen created relative to the latest generation nuclear power stations. It is in his audio on the IIASA podcasts page and also in his book. I can't think of it off the top of my head but it is fairly devastating, something like the order of one plant produceing a thousand times more energy per day than a large scale windfarm.

Sorry guys, but when this sort of thing starts fetching up on Morning Ireland, we'd be wanting to ask ourselves why. There is always the official narrative where RTE is concerned. Lots of lurvely lolly to be made out of going nuclear for the boys.

Meanwhile, the way Lovelock is presented as the ultimate authority on nuclear is bizarre - another one of those ideas the media obediently takes and runs with while forgetting to do its real job. (Saddam had WMD, Iran is funding terror in Israel, proeprty speculation was the saving of Ireland etc etc etc). Lovelock's ideas about nuclear are hotly contested by many more environmentalists than actually support them. The way to get them to go down with Jack and Jill public is to attach them to an end of world scenario (which though it ultimately may have some truth in it) but will in fact be infinitely worse served by the legacy of nuclear. The media doesn't get that sort of irony too often, sadly.

There is a letter in today's UK Independent:

Quote :

Sir;
The INDEPENDENT has played a key role in the greenwashing of nuclear
power over the last five years, from its trumpeting in 2004 of James
Lovelock's support for nuclear (omitting to mention that he had been a
virtually life-long nuclearphile) to its forlorn attempt now to pretend
that 'the Green movement' is backing nuclear. What evidence does the
INDY produce for that extraordinary assertion? The backing for nuclear,
allegedly, of the following four individuals:
1) Mark Lynas, who has in fact backed nuclear for some time now and is
no new convert. Lynas's most important book is 'High Tide', about the
impact of global over-heat through rising sea-levels. It would be
interesting to hear what the impact will be of rising sea levels upon
nuclear power stations - nearly all of which are built right beside the
sea...
2) Chris Smith, Labour peer. When I last looked, Labour were strongly
pro-nuclear - so no great surprise there. Smith is not a green, merely a
Labour appointee.
3) Stephen Tindale, formely of Greenpeace. Sadly, Mr. Tindale has leant
towards the Labour line politically in recent years, and (unlike some
other major figures in green pressure groups) has been notably
unsympathetic to the Green Party. His defection to the nuclear lobby is
therefore again little surprise.
4) Chris Goodall, one lone Green Party parliamentary candidate. If Chris
had actually come out strongly and unequivocally in favour of nuclear
power, that would have been a bit of a blow. But he didn't. His nuanced
words have it seems been twisted by the INDY to imply stronger support
for nuclear than he actually feels.
So: It is simply untrue that 'the Green movement' is leaning towards
nuclear power now. The INDY is guilty of hype and sensationalism: shoddy
reporting. A further key example of this is the crazy statement in Sarah
Arnott's gushing pro-nuclear 'news' article (24 Feb.) that nuclear power
has "no carbon emissions". This is a dreadful distortion: yes, nuclear
power has no carbon emissions up its chimneys - but the carbon emissions
it generates from mining, transportation, refining, processing, and
(most crucially, because open-endedly) dealing with its waste stream,
are huge.
All this is a shame, because it will seriously tarnish the credibility
of your (generally excellent) environmental-news team, and the
(richly-deserved) strong reputation of Geoffrey Lean and Michael
McCarthy.
I urge the INDY to come back to reality. Nuclear could never be a
responsible choice for anyone who takes the future seriouly, as Greens
by definition do. For gifting our descendants with vast piles of toxic
waste is nothing less than a mortal crime against our children, and
their children, and their children...

Cllr. Rupert Read, Green Party Prospective MEP for Eastern Region
Norwich

Quote :

If we assume those wind turbines equal 2 MW each, then the array of wind turbines above would produce less electricity in a year than the average proposed new nuclear plant in the US.

For comparison, here's NEI's picture of what one nuclear plant looks like compared to the Pentagon and World Trade Center:

http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2008/12/nuclear-wind-coal-gas-and-oil.html

Yeah - if you click on the link you'll see someone has created scales for windfarms and stuff as against things like skyscrapers etc. - more compelling stuff.

Wind energy is intermediate technology but has a place too. I'm not convinced nuclear doesn't have an enormous carbon footprint over its life as the material needs to be mined, purified, transported and so on. It's very centralised as well which makes me suspicious. Below are the stages involved in nuclear energy production - if you want to reduce carbon dioxide then you have to assess all the carbon used on the way.


Nice little study by the UK Parliament on it below:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmtrdind/1122/112208.htm

Figure 3: Carbon emissions across the lifetime of a nuclear power station



Figure 4: Comparison of high and low lifetime carbon emissions for low carbon technologies (grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour, g/kWh)




It looks like some of the renewables are favourable in terms of CO2 (?) but we don't know if all the effects are factored in. Like, how many employees or civilians suffer from pollution effects of nuclear or renewables ? What about the political effects ? Renewables are often distributed and I believe this gives a sense of pride to local communities. By and large, the argument that wind turbines are ugly is cak itself - this is highly subjective and plenty of people are very proud of their little local green power plants revolving in the wind. Politically I think this is a good thing, some people might not.

There's something contradictory in what Lovelock says - as a species we should be scaling consumption down big style not providing technologies that keeps the current level of consumption up there don't you think?

As I noted on ibis Race Condition thread - if the recession is good for anything it's that it has cut CO2 emissions to shreds.

I don't understand what those comparisons mean. A nuclear power station and a bungalow? what is being compared?

cactus flower wrote:

I don't understand what those comparisons mean. A nuclear power station and a bungalow? what is being compared?

Overall expenditure of CO2 I suppose. It's a visual impression and a neat trick - the windfarm being of such and such a scale beside the Empire State etc.

It's a rough idea of quantity of CO2 visually expressed. Visual polemic ?

Nuclear shmuclear. How are we going to stop ourselves being overrun by millions of migrants arriving at our coasts? We have no army, no arms to speak of, little enough technology to detect incoming vessels, no defence fortifications and no plans to get any of these things. If push comes to shove will we just be overrun and then take the principled stand of starving to death with the rest of humanity?

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

Nuclear shmuclear. How are we going to stop ourselves being overrun by millions of migrants arriving at our coasts? We have no army, no arms to speak of, little enough technology to detect incoming vessels, no defence fortifications and no plans to get any of these things. If push comes to shove will we just be overrun and then take the principled stand of starving to death with the rest of humanity?

Sounds like the Vikings. The upside is a lovely couple of museums around the country a couple of hundred years later, radical changes to the language we speak and our culture in general and maybe a welcome dilution of our gene pool.


Doesn't Lovelock say this will happen in the next century? Maybe you'll have been reincarnated as a Spanish or African raider bent on getting to the green and fertile promised land with the temperate climate and the generous civil service remuneration.