James Lovelock Quotes (36 Quotes)

For each of our actions there are only consequences.

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

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.

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

I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm not a pessimist, even though I do think awful things are going to happen.

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

Let's make hay while it lasts.

Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

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

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.

We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences.

Science always uses metaphor.

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

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

There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.

Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.

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

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

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.

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

The beehive regulates its temperature as well as we do. The hive will regulate itself to 37 degrees no matter if it is minus 20 degrees outside.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.