The power of one

Twenty-Five years ago, James Lovelock conceived the most radical way of looking at life on Earth since Darwin, and became a hero to the emerging environmental movement. Now, because he believes nuclear power is the only answer to the growing threat of climate change, some Greens see him as the enemy.

His call this week for a huge expansion of nuclear-power programmes was immediately rejected by the leaders of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

But that will not worry 84-year-old James Lovelock, CBE, FRS, who all his life has been a maverick, Fellow of the Royal Society or not.

It was as an independent scientist, working for himself, that he invented the equipment that detected CFCs, the chemicals from spray cans that began to destroy the ozone layer. And it was as an independent thinker that he conceived of "Gaia" - his name for the mysterious system by which the Earth (he came to believe) had kept itself fit for life, over millions of years.

It was a complex series of feedbacks and interactions which regulated the temperature, the chemical composition of the atmosphere, even the salinity of the seas, so that life could thrive - and what was controlling it all, was life itself.

Living organisms were keeping the environment benign for themselves, and the Earth was in effect a single giant super-organism. You might even say - and Lovelock did - that the Earth was alive.

The scientist who once worked for Nasa devising experiments to test for life on Mars, was persuaded by his neighbour in Wiltshire, novelist William Golding, to name the system after the Greek goddess of the Earth, and Gaia was born.

To Lovelock's surprise, the hypothesis was at first ignored by the scientific community, and was taken up instead with enthusiasm by New Agers and by the Green movement.

Gradually the theory (now generally termed Earth System Science) has become more widely accepted.

It was his conception of a planetary life-support system maintained in precarious balance that made Lovelock sensitive to developments that could destabilise it, and his was one of the first voices raised to warn of the dangers of global warming.

In 1989, he was one of a group of leading scientists chosen to brief then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet on the threat from climate change.

Now he is increasingly convinced that Gaia is likely to react violently to the stress caused by the huge level of greenhouse gases we pour into the atmosphere.

In two weeks he is hosting a meeting in Devon on "Gaia and global change" at which many leading climate scientists will be present.

A short, wiry figure with a frequent mischievous grin, Lovelock lives in an old mill in west Devon with his American second wife, Sandy Orchard, and continues to argue with passion about the global warming threat.

Recent climatic events, such as the unprecedented 2003 European heatwave and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, show it is moving "much faster than anybody guesses", he says, yet there is no adequate response.

"I think we should think of ourselves as a bit like we were in 1938. There was a war looming, and everybody knew it, but nobody really knew what the hell to do about it."

The Kyoto protocol, he says, will solve nothing, as the cuts it mandates in greenhouse gases are tiny.

The only real solution to replacing the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas that is causing the greenhouse effect, he says, is a huge and immediate expansion of nuclear power. He does not dismiss providing energy from renewable sources such as tides, wind and the sun - the Green movement's solution - but believes it simply cannot be done in time. Major action on climate change cannot wait, he says.

"Unless we stop now, we will really doom the lives of our descendants. If we just go on for another 40 or 50 years faffing around, they'll have no chance at all, it'll be back to the Stone Age.

"There'll be people around still. But civilisation will go."

- INDEPENDENT