James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis
Posted: May 12, 2010 by Liam H, Category:Environment
Apparently VE-Gaia was named after the Greek goddess of the earth rather than James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis but I am using this tenuous link to talk about him in an IES blog anyway.
Gaia was the name that William Golding, the author, suggested for Lovelock’s hypothesis that life on earth has a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that acts to sustain life. The Gaia hypothesis was readily accepted by the environmental community but was not so readily accepted by the scientific community, including Richard Dawkins.
To my shame I only really knew of Lovelock through his Gaia hypothesis, and the fact that he upset many of his environmentalist fans on his pro nuclear power stance, but I saw an interesting programme on BBC 4 about him this week. He has had an amazing career as an independent scientist with his lab being the converted barn at his home in Cornwall. The program highlighted his work at NASA where he proposed using the atmosphere on Mars to determine whether there was life on the planet. It turned out that Mars has a relatively inert atmosphere of mostly CO2 with very little oxygen, methane, or hydrogen - very different to that of the Earth where there is life.
Lovelock’s invention of the electron capture device allowed very small levels of chemicals to be detected in the atmosphere, including CFCs. He took a trip by ship down to the Antarctic to measure CFC’s across the earth and then wrote a paper in the journal Nature that showed that CFCs were not being broken down in the atmosphere. After hearing a lecture on the subject of Lovelock’s results, Frank Rowland and Mario Molina embarked on research that resulted in the first published paper that suggested a link between stratospheric CFCs and ozone depletion in 1974, and later shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work.
Lovelock also invented the Microwave oven and has been published in the journal Nature so many times it would make any academic green with envy.
You can still find the programme information, ‘Beautiful minds’, on the BBC Website, amd a video clip can be found here.
Like Lovelock, Thomas Midgley, Jr. was another very talented scientist that was celebrated for his discoveries and patents. His legacy is somewhat different to Lovelock’s though. Midgley was the scientist that developed the ‘lead’ additive in petrol. He was also on the team that developed the use of CFCs as a refrigerant. Perhaps luckily for him he died in 1944 before anybody discovered the effect his discoveries had on the atmosphere.
