Quotes by James Lovelock

• All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it.
• An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.
• China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution.
• Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.
• Climatologists are all agreed that we'd be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.
• Esso has been the main one in America spreading the disinformation that there is no global warming problem.
• Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.
• Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.
• For each of our actions there are only consequences.
• A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.
• Let's make hay while it lasts.
• I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn't surprise me at all.
• This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief.
• We'd never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn't been for space exploration and NASA.
• Science always uses metaphor.
• You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.
• Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.
• There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary 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.
• Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.
• One pound of uranium is worth about 3 million pounds worth of coal or oil.
• There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.
• 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.
• You never know with politicians what they are really saying. And I don't say that in a negative way-they have an appalling job.
• I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.
• NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station.
• I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.
• I'm not a pessimist, even though I do think awful things are going to happen.
• I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.
• If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.
• If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.
• If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.
• Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.
• Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.