Enough, Dr. Lovelock

Dr. James Lovelock is speaking out again, and once again I find myself wondering just how long we are required to (or will) continue to listen to him because he authored the Gaia Hypothesis.

While I seldom mention Lovelock, he’s been in the news off and on in recent months, usually saying something quite extreme about how we’re likely headed for a massive die off of humanity during this century. I don’t agree with his views, to put it mildly, but I see little point in arguing the issue, so I usually ignore such items in the interest of saving your time and mine.

But Dr. Lovelock’s latest foray into the public eye is so ridiculous that I’m going to break my pattern and address it. James Lovelock attacks Ed Miliband’s preaching on wind:

The scientist and veteran environmental campaigner James Lovelock has launched a blistering riposte to the UK climate change minister’s suggestion that opposing wind farms should become as socially unacceptable as failing to wear a seatbelt.

In a piece entitled fascism in the wind, Lovelock described Ed Miliband’s pronouncement as “hectoring” and an attempt to use “the social rejection of political correctness” to remove democratic rights from those who oppose wind turbines.

…

In an online comment piece for the Guardian, Lovelock - who best known for inventing the Gaia concept of the planet as a self-sustaining system - denounced Miliband’s appeal to social conscience. “It seems that we are now subject to a campaign that uses social rejection as a force to make us accept industrial-scale wind energy stations across the UK, to call them wind farms is disingenuous,” he wrote. “As part of this campaign, the great and the good are now hectoring on the moral need to embrace wind energy.”

Lovelock said he was afraid that any move to smooth the passage of wind farms with the introduction of new planning laws would remove the right of local people to object. “The right to have public hearings over energy sources is threatened by legislation soon due. Although well-intentioned it is an erosion of our freedom and draws near to what I see as fascism,” he said.

…

“If wind energy were the one practical and affordable answer to global heating then I would grit my teeth at the loss of the countryside and accept it.”

…

A spokesperson for the British Wind Energy Association described Lovelock as a “scientific giant” but described the efficiency debate as “absolute nonsense”. He said including wind energy in a national grid does displace fossil fuel power, but the grid must be flexible to cope with changing wind speeds.

“The key challenge is decarbonising the UK’s power supplies - to burn less fossil fuels. This is where wind can do a good job,” said the spokesperson. “No one is saying here that by any stretch of the imagination that wind energy will provide 100% of the UK’s energy.”

He cited the example of gales over Spain in early March which allowed the country to produce more than 40% of its energy needs from wind. He also challenged Lovelock’s 17% figures saying that onshore wind turbines are on average 30% efficient in the UK, while offshore turbines are 42% efficient. “The fuel is free, its sustainable and it doesn’t pollute - what’s not to like?” he added.

Just to be insultingly clear, here we have a very high profile person in the energy and environmental arena who…

• thinks we’re in very deep trouble in terms of supporting the world population,
• is arguing against “social rejection” being used to get people to be more accepting of wind farms,
• would only support the intrusion of wind power into the countryside if it were a silver bullet solution to global warming, and
• seems to be cooking the facts on wind power (and I’m not just going by the content of this article), or, at a bare minimum, is being highly selective in how he quotes them, i.e. he’s cherry picking.

I’ll pause for a second and let you catch your breath, but there’s more. The New Scientist interview I linked to above contains the following exchange:

So are we doomed?

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.

Would it make enough of a difference?

Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won’t do it.

That’s right, he thinks biochar (if not by that exact name) is a silver bullet solution to climate chaos. This is a simplistic, and very likely flat-out inaccurate, view. For example, see the paper, The radiative forcing potential of different climate geoengineering options [50 page PDF], which says on page 2560 (second page of the PDF):

By 2050, only stratospheric aerosol injections or sunshades in space have the potential to cool the climate back toward its pre-industrial state, but some land carbon cycle geoengineering options are of comparable magnitude to mitigation 15 “wedges”. Strong mitigation, i.e. large reductions in CO2 emissions, combined with global-scale air capture and storage, afforestation, and bio-char production, i.e. enhanced CO2 sinks, might be able to bring CO2 back to its pre-industrial level by 2100, thus removing the need for other geoengineering.[2]

The rest of the paper shows that biochar does indeed hold some significant promise, at least in theory, but it’s just as clearly not even close to being a silver bullet. Note that neither Dr. Lovelock nor the paper I just quoted tell us how we’re supposed to organize, operate, and fund a system of biochar creation and burial on the needed scale for many decades. I realize Dr. Lovelock talks about selling the “few percent” of biofuel created in the biochar process, but unless I see a detailed, credible analysis showing that this could literally be self-funding, and on the needed scale, then it’s no better than wishful thinking. If biochar is not fully self-funding then it will be competing for money (e.g. revenues from a carbon tax and/or the auctioning of carbon permits under a cap and trade system) with every other solution we’re attempting to roll out to save ourselves from what we’ve done with and to the planet, and it will have to be evaluated in terms of how much good it does for the expense incurred relative to other options–i.e. it becomes a matter of economics.

I’m not saying that Dr. Lovelock should stop speaking out on such issues; we desperately need to have the fullest, most honest discussion of our situation and options as possible. I just hope that we all hold every contributor to the conversation to a very high standard.

[1] I urge even those who are “sure” they know what the Gaia Hypothesis is to click through to the link I provided and read the Wikipedia entry. “Gaia” has become one of those terms that means about 27 different things, depending on who’s speaking and the context of the exchange. I’ve seen it used to mean everything from “Earth is (literally) one gigantic organism”, which I consider to be nonsense, to “Earth is a really complex system”, which is so trivially obvious an observation that it doesn’t deserve a special name. (Again, see the Wikipedia article, particularly the “Range of Views” section.)

[2] Also see Tables 1 and 2 on pages 2606-7 of the paper, which summarize the geoengineering techniques examined.