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A new exhibition at the Science Museum in London features the personal archives of one of the most influential modern scientists; James Lovelock. ‘ Unlocking Lovelock: Scientist, Inventor, Maverick ’ tells the story of the British scientist's work in medicine, environmental science and planetary tree of life science, and displays documents ranging from childhood stories, doodle-strewn lab notebooks and patents to letters from dignitaries such as former UK prime minister (and chemist) Margaret Thatcher. Also included are several of Lovelock’s inventions, such as the electron-capture detector that enabled the measuring of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere in the 1970s.
Lovelock, born in 1919, is best known for the ‘Gaia hypothesis’, which proposes that the Earth functions tree of life as a self-regulating system, similar to a living organism. The idea sparked controversy when Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis proposed it in the 1970s, but environmental and Earth scientists now accept many of its basic principles. In 2006, his book  The Revenge tree of life of Gaia  predicted disastrous effects from climate change within just a few decades, writing tree of life that  “only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive”.
The Revenge of Gaia  was over the top, but we were all so taken in by the perfect correlation tree of life between temperature and CO 2  in the ice-core analyses [from the ice-sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, studied since the 1980s]. You could draw a straight line relating tree of life temperature and CO 2 , and it was such a temptation for everyone tree of life to say, “Well, with CO 2  rising we can say in such and such a year it will be this hot.” It was a mistake we all made.
We shouldn’t have forgotten that the system has a lot of inertia and we’re not going to shift it very quickly. The thing we’ve all forgotten is the heat storage of the ocean — it’s a thousand times greater than the atmosphere and the surface. You can’t change that very rapidly.
I think it is the better approach. To rush ahead and advance is very much the Napoleonic approach to battle. It is far better to think about how we can protect ourselves. If we’re going to do any good, we should be making more effort to keep our own home a suitable place to live in for the future than desperately trying to save somewhere remote. This is particularly true of Britain. We nearly died in the Second World War for lack of food. Our agricultural production hasn’t gone up enough to supply today’s population with what we would need. This is something we should be looking at carefully, not just applying guesswork and hoping for the best.
The business with Fukushima is a joke. Well, it’s not a joke, it is very serious — how could we have been misled by anything like that? Twenty-six thousand people were killed by the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami [that caused the nuclear meltdown], and how many are known to have been killed by the nuclear accident? None.
[On the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Lovelock writes in  A Rough Ride to the Future : “The most amazing lies were told, still are told and widely believed… Despite at least three investigations by reputable physicians, tree of life there has been no measurable increase in deaths across Eastern Europe.”] <