Thanks to Jason, I've just come back from the discussion between James Lovelock and Sir Crispin Tickell at the Southbank Centre where there were some interesting comments from the father of the Gaia Theory on Climate Change and man's relationship to it.

Lovelock opened the talk by raising the complaint that climate scientists, or indeed many scientists, get so carried away in their modelling that they forget the real world. A problem he had firsthand experience of when back in the late 60s he started measuring CFCs in the atmosphere and the affect they were having on our ozone layer.

He then went on to speak about what the role that we as people had to play in climate change and whether any difference we could make would be noticeable. Climate Change was, he said, the earth finding equilibrium by adapting to the rising pollutant levels in the atmosphere. An event which has happened many times before throughout history with the last significant change resulting in the earth’s temperature rising 5-8°C and not returning to “normal” for 200,000 years.

But if that’s not enough food for thought, according to Lovelock, Climate Change is inevitable. It is happening and is such a massive beast in motion that there is little that we as people can do to stop it. Curbing our production of Carbon Dioxide through anthropogenic actions will do little when the vast majority of CO₂ is not a result of things like the cars we drive but rather the breath we exhale.

Which begs the question then as to whether we as creatures are a kind of virus, an anomaly created on this planet, or just part of the master plan? 3.5 billion years ago there was the spread of life on this planet which exhaled a gas so poisonous and toxic that it would forever change the earth. That life still exists today in the form of plants, exhaling the same poisonous gas. But for humans that gas is life. We call it oxygen.

So change Lovelock says is inevitable. In the same way that we have the evolution of the species, so too do we have the evolution of the environment.

His last words were “Don’t be gloomy. The world is still a remarkable. So enjoy it while you can...”

So did he live up to his reputation as the pessimist he is now often seen as? Or is he a realist?