EA - James Lovelock (1919 – 2022) by Gavin

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: James Lovelock (1919 – 2022), published by Gavin on November 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The real job of science is trying to make science fiction come true.Britain's greatest mad scientist died recently at 103.We'll get to his achievements. But I can't avoid mentioning the 'Gaia hypothesis', his notorious metaphor gone wrong that the Earth is in some sense a single organism whooaa. But him being most famous for this is like thinking Einstein's violin playing was his best stuff.Lovelock was raised as a Quaker, to which he credits his independent thinking (he was a conscientious objector in WWII). Also:"His family was poor, too poor to pay for him to go to university. He later came to regard this as a blessing because it meant he wasn’t immediately locked into a silo of academia. Somehow, he created an education for himself, taking evening classes that led, when he was 21, to the University of Manchester."He quit work and left academia forever in 1964, instead running a one-man "ten foot by ten foot" lab from his garden in the West Country, living off consulting work for NASA, Shell, HP, and MI5 and royalties from 40 inventions.Chromatography, &, modern environmentalismBy far his biggest coup was building the electron capture detector in 1957 during his second PhD, the world's most sensitive gas chromatograph (way of detecting chemicals in air).When Lovelock first developed the ECD, the device was at least a thousand times more sensitive than any other detector in existence at the time. It was able to detect chemicals at concentrations as low as one part per trillion—that’s equivalent to detecting a single drop of ink diluted in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools.He became curious about what the visible air pollution he saw was due to. He picked the notorious CFCs just because they were conspicuous, becoming the first person to notice the global consequences of Thomas Midgley's almighty fuckup fifty years earlier. (CFCs later turned out to be the cause of the hole in the ozone layer, i.e. millions of skin cancer causes.) He went to Antarctica in person, "partially self-funded" to check if they were there too, because why not. He screwed up the interpretation though, writing in Nature "the presence of these compounds constitutes no conceivable hazard".The ECD revolutionised atmospheric chemistry and so the study of air pollution, still one of the more important causes of premature death.On the lawn of the house peacocks strut and mew; a pair of barn owls have built their nest above the Exponential Dilution Chamber, a sealed upper room that was built in order to calibrate the Electron Capture Device. In the garden stands an off-white baroque plaster statue: the image of Gaia.The device was so sensitive that it showed traces of pesticides in animal tissues all over the world, including DDT. Since that led to Silent Spring, he probably helped along the perverse return of organic farming and the anti-chemicals paranoia of the second half of the C20th.Not that he was ever one of those:Too many greens are not just ignorant of science, they hate science... [Environmentalism is like a] global over-anxious mother figure who is so concerned about small risks that she ignores the real dangers. I wish they would grow up [and focus on the real problem]: How can we feed, house and clothe the abundant human race without destroying the habitats of other creatures?Some time in the next century, when the adverse effects of climate change begin to bite, people will look back in anger at those who now so foolishly continue to pollute by burning fossil fuel instead of accepting the beneficence of nuclear power. Is our distrust of nuclear power and genetically modified food soundly based?Later, he was notable for sounding the retreat (humans should start leaving c...