The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

Front Cover
Basic Books, Aug 2, 2007 - Science - 208 pages
In The Revenge of Gaia , bestselling author James Lovelock- father of climate studies and originator of the influential Gaia theory which views the entire earth as a living meta-organism-provides a definitive look at our imminent global crisis. In this disturbing new book, Lovelock guides us toward a hard reality: soon, we may not be able to alter the oncoming climate crisis. Lovelock's influential Gaia theory, one of the building blocks of modern climate science, conceives of the Earth, including the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere and upper layers of rock, as a single living super-organism, regulating its internal environment much as an animal regulates its body temperature and chemical balance. But now, says Lovelock, that organism is sick. It is running a fever born of the combination of a sun whose intensity is slowly growing over millions of years, and an atmosphere whose greenhouse gases have recently spiked due to human activity. Earth will adjust to these stresses, but on time scales measured in the hundreds of millennia. It is already too late, Lovelock says, to prevent the global climate from "flipping" into an entirely new equilibrium state that will leave the tropics uninhabitable, and force migration to the poles. The Revenge of Gaia explains the stress the planetary system is under and how humans are contributing to it, what the consequences will be, and what humanity must do to rescue itself.
 

Contents

The State of the Earth
1
What is Gaia?
15
The Life History of Gaia
39
Forecasts for the Twentyfirst Century
48
Sources of Energy
66
Chemicals Food and Raw Materials
106
Technology for a Sustainable Retreat
128
A Personal View of Environmentalism
135
Beyond the Terminus
146
Glossary
160
Further Reading
166
xi xiii xv 15 39 48
171
66
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About the author (2007)

James Lovelock is the author of more than two hundred scientific papers and the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory). In September 2005, Prospect magazine named him as one of the world's top 100 global public intellectuals. He lives in Louceston, England.

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