Quotes by James Lovelock

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

“Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not...”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty. Revere and respect Gaia. Have trust in Gaia. But not faith.”

“Neither Lynn Margulis nor I have ever proposed a teleological hypothesis. Nowhere in our writing do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves planetary foresight...”

“If there were a billion people living on the planet, we could do whatever we please. But there are nearly seven billion. At this scale, life as we know it today is not sustainable.”

“Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This global dimming is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smok...”

“Challenging the conventional wisdom is the way to make waves in science.”

“The climate and the chemical properties of the Earth now and throughout its history seem always to have been optimal for life. For this to have happened by chance is as unlikely as to survive unsca...”

“In the current fashionable denigration of technology, it is easy to forget that nuclear fission is a natural process. If something as intricate as life can assemble by accident, we need not marvel ...”

“Our planet... consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb...Within our bodies, no less than three million atoms rendered unstable in that event still erupt every minute, r...”

“We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physic...”

“Life has to be a planetary phenomenon. You could no more have a partially occupied planet than you could half a cat or half a dog.”

“Life has to take charge of its environment and evolve with it.”

“If you were an artist or novelist, or a poet or somebody like that, nobody would think it odd if you worked in your own home. In science there's none of this at all. I'm almost the only independent...”

“Bacteria … have been here for three and a half billion years, and without them we have no chance whatsoever of survival. Humans are something very recent, like the froth on top of a glass of beer.”