― Jean Genet
Jean Genet (December 19, 1910 – April 14, 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. Wikipedia
― James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. Wikipedia
–Charles Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhythm and rhyme, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and are based on observations of real life. Wikipedia
Pressed between the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — a favorite book of my childhood, which my grandmother used to read to me and which still dwells in her immense library — is a single yellow leaf, its curved fan almost glowing against a faded illustration of the White Rabbit gazing anxiously at his pocket watch.
I still remember the afternoon I picked it up from under the four majestic ginkgo trees standing sentinel at the northern entrance of Varna’s Sea Garden — the iconic park perched on the cliffs of the Black Sea in my father’s hometown, where my grandparents took me each summer; I still remember the shock of seeing something so strange and beautiful, so unlike my notion of a leaf, and then the gasp of revelation: I suddenly realized that anything — a leaf, a life — can take myriad shapes beyond the standard template, can bend and broaden the Platonic ideal.
The Triumph of Life. (Available as a print.)
The improbable presence of four ancient trees native to Asia in Communist Bulgaria is a microcosm of the story of the ginkgo itself.
Earth’s oldest surviving tree genus, ginkgos were there before the dinosaurs existed, before Africa and South America parted. But after a long epoch of triumph over droughts and floods and mass extinctions, they came teetering on the brink of extinction for reasons entombed in mystery.
Jared Farmer chronicles their evolutionary trajectory in his altogether fascinating book Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (public library):
These ginkgophytes were, in their evolutionary heyday, the foremost innovators of the plant kingdom. They could shed leaves in winter, go dormant in low-light seasons, switch between stub growth and branch growth depending on conditions, and resprout from lignotubers — energy-storing roots — after disturbances. On a prior planet with relatively few tall plants and no fast-growing angiosperms, ginkgophytes achieved dominance as generalists.
As Darwin said, “rarity precedes extinction,” but the duration of rarity varies greatly. Ginkgo is a temporal outlier. Ginkgophytes survived multiple mass extinction events and outlived their original seed dispersers, which might have been carrion-eating animals attracted by the sweet-rotten smell of the fleshy seedcoats. After a long period of glory in the Mesozoic era, ginkgophytes declined in the Cenozoic and dwindled to one species by the ice ages. Ginkgoes disappeared from North America, then Europe, and finally Japan, becoming, by the Pleistocene epoch, mountain refugees in China.
Long-eared owl in ginkgo by Japanese artist Ohara Koson, c. 1900-1930. (Available as a print and a stationery card.)
It was there that itinerant Buddhist monks discovered them. Taken both by the trees’ medicinal properties, which had become a staple of Chinese medicine, and by their uncommon beauty, the monks began landscaping Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines all over Japan with ginkgos.
In 1683, the polymathic German naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer set out for Japan under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company. He spent a decade there, then another decade writing the first Western study of Japan’s history, culture, and flora, which included the first botanical description of this singular tree he had encountered in Nagasaki. He gave it the awkward name Ginkgo, likely in error, as the original Japanese name should have been transliterated as ginkio, ginkjo, or ginkyo.
Ginkgo by Engelbert Kaempfer, 1712. (Available as a print and a stationery card.)
The printed word, like the Internet that succeeded it, is a copying machine for error. The spelling spread across botany until Linnaeus himself adopted it in his taxonomical Bible, relegating Ginkgo biloba — which he had never seen or studied himself — to the appendix of “obscure plants.”
Still, the ginkgo captivated the Western imagination with its striking geometry and its dramatic dance with chlorophyll, casting its spell on masses and monarchs alike.
Among the enchanted was the Duke of Weimer.
When Goethe — the Duke’s personal adviser — encountered the ginkgo at the royal gardens in 1815, it lit him up with a metaphor for the nature of love and the nature of the self, which he rendered in a poem penned in a letter to a friend he may or may not have been in love with, signed with a pressed ginkgo leaf.
Goethe’s manuscript
by Johann Wolfgang von GoetheIn my garden’s care and favor
From the East this tree’s leaf shows
Secret sense for us to savor
And uplifts the one who knows.Is it but one being single
Which as same itself divides?
Are there two which choose to mingle
So that each as one now hides?As the answer to such question
I have found a sense that’s true:
Is it not my songs’ suggestion
That I’m one and also two?
Goethe was by then Europe’s most eminent poet, his verses the era’s equivalent of viral. Just as he had popularized the cloud names we use today, his poem contributed to the ginkgo craze that overtook Europe, then spread to America. Soon, horticulturalists and urban planners all over the Western hemisphere were saturating botanical gardens and city parks with ginkgos. Among them was Anton Novak — the Czech visionary who spent forty-two years dreaming up Bulgaria’s Sea Garden and building it into the most admired urban wilderness of the Balkans, so that a six-year-old girl can pick up a ginkgo leaf a century later and have a revelation that lasts a lifetime.
Meanwhile, geology was in its heyday and evolutionary theory was taking root. Scientists were unearthing ginkgo fossils hundreds of millions of years old, beginning to wonder how the first land plants evolved, beginning to suspect the ancient trees might hold a key to the enigma.
In 1894, Japanese botanist Sakugorō Hirase set out to study the reproduction of ginkgos, which are not “perfect flowers” and therefore produce male and female gametes on separate trees. Under a microscope, Hirase discovered the ginkgo spermatozoid and, with surprise, watched it arrive at the ovum by swimming through the fluid — motility inherited from the marine past of plants, establishing the ginkgo as a primordial species, the missing link between ferns and conifers, and a living fossil, like the dawn redwood, reaching across deep time to bridge our stratum of being with that of the dinosaurs.
Today, ginkgos line the streets of countless cities and rustle in parks all over the world. The oldest survivors in the wild have witnessed the births of major religions and the deaths of massive civilizations. Six ginkgos were among the handful of organisms that survived the bombing of Hiroshima. Long after Hitler and Openheimer have been pressed between the pages of history, the ginkgos are still alive, rising from the ruins of our capacity for destruction by hate as an emblem of our capacity for salvation by love.
Two pigeons with falling ginkgo leaves by Japanese artist Ohara Koson, c. 1900-1930. (Available as a print and a stationery card.)
Salvation, be it of a species or of a soul, is always anchored in some act of love, and every act of love is at bottom an act of salvation. “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in balancing the equation between love and loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.” Nearly two centuries after Goethe, poet Howard Nemerov lenses this elemental unit of aliveness through the ginkgos:
by Howard NemerovLate in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?
What in those wooden motives so decided
To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,
Rebellion or surrender? and if this
Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?
What use to learn the lessons taught by time,
If a star at any time may tell us: Now.
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E. E. Cummings wrote in his timeless summons for the courage to be yourself. But what does it really mean to be oneself when the self is an ever-moving target of ever-changing sentiments and cells, a figment of fixity to dam the fluidity that carries us along the river of life, to soften the hard fact that we never fully know who we are because we are never one thing long enough. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion,” Iris Murdoch insisted in her magnificent case for unselfing, and yet we do live out our entire lives in it — the self is our sieve for reality, the sensory organ through which we experience love and politics and the color blue. How to inhabit it with authenticity but without attachment might be the great task of being alive.
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.
The great Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) takes up these immense and intimate questions in The Book of Disquiet (public library) — his posthumously published collection of reflections and revelations partway between autobiography and aphorism, profoundly personal yet shimmering with the universal.
Considering himself “the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it,” with a soul “impatient with itself,” Pessoa writes:
[…]
Perhaps it’s finally time for me to make this one effort: to take a good look at my life. I see myself in the midst of a vast desert. I tell what I literarily was yesterday, and I try to explain to myself how I got here.
[…]
I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in far-away nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, undefiled by mystery and the future.
A generation before the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh lost his self and found himself in a dazzling epiphany at the library, Pessoa recounts one such moment when the veils of the self parted long enough to glimpse the vastness of the unself:
I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought… This sudden awareness of my true being, of this being that has always sleepily wandered between what it feels and what it sees, weighs on me like an untold sentence to serve.
It’s so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don’t know what human words could define it. I don’t know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I’ve stopped having the fever of sleeping through life. Yes, I repeat, I’m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time — since birth and consciousness — and suddenly I’ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now.
And yet, like Virginia Woolf’s garden epiphany about the creative spirit and Margaret Fuller’s hilltop unselfing into “the All,” such moments of revelation in which the soul contacts reality are but brief sidewise glances at some elemental truth we cannot bear to look at continuously less we dissolve into it. Pessoa reflects:
Complement with Herman Melville on the mystery of what makes us who we are and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the “same” person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, then revisit Jack Kerouac on the self illusion and the “Golden Eternity” found in its wake.
A century and a half after Novalis declared that laboratories will be temples, the poet turned marine biologist Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) consecrated science in her lyrical writings about the natural world. At the center of her creative cosmogony was a vital symbiosis between literature and science in illuminating the nature of reality — a credo she formulated directly only once, in the acceptance speech, excerpted in Figuring, for the National Book Award her 1951 book The Sea Around Us had earned her: “a work of scientific accuracy presented with poetic imagination and such clarity of style and originality of approach as to win and hold every reader’s attention,” read the award citation.
Rachel Carson
At the ceremony held on January 29, 1952, the drama critic John Mason Brown welcomed Carson to the stage with introductory remarks that captured the unexampled allure of her scientific-artistic sensibility:
Rising from the table she shared with the poet Marianne Moore, Carson took the podium, looked softly, almost shyly, at the audience with her eyes the color of sea water, and spoke with confident composure about the animating ethos of her work:
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction; it seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
19th-century Solar System quilt by Ellen Harding Baker, embroidered over the course of seven years as a teaching tool in an era when women were barred from higher education in science. (Available as a print.)
Speaking before we discovered the double helix, before we set foot on the Moon, before we heard the sound of spacetime in the collision of two black holes, Carson considers how science invites us to be wonder-smitten by reality, which is the ultimate poetry of existence:
[…]
The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
In a sentiment she would echo a decade later in her bittersweet farewell and challenge to posterity, she intimates that such a worldview can make us better stewards of this irreplaceable world — which means, invariably, better stewards of our own survival:
Complement with Carson, at her finest, on the ocean and the meaning of life, the story of how she inspired M.C. Escher, and this stunning choral tribute to her legacy, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin on the relationship between poetry and science.
Local Porch Lamp Source Of Incandescent Bliss
Published: September 29, 2025 (TheOnion.com)
MEREDITH, NH—Saying the luminous paradise had exceeded even its wildest expectations, a local moth told reporters Tuesday the inside of a light fixture was everything it had ever dreamed of and more. “Woo-hoo! They’ve got a whole second light bulb in here—this is the greatest fucking day of my life!” the moth said as it giddily careened through the enclosure, ping-ponging between each of the fixture’s 60-watt bulbs in transcendent ecstacy. “And I thought this place looked good from the outside! You spend your whole life fantasizing about the inside of one of these things, but nothing can prepare you for the reality. I’ve got these beautiful glowing orbs all to myself, and if my wings get tired, I can just sprawl out on this nice, comfy glass here and still have a front-row seat. I feel like I should tell my buddies about it, but they’d never believe a place this bright and cozy could really exist. I can’t even find the exit anymore, but who cares? I’ve got all the sweet, sweet light I’ve ever wanted right here in front of me!” At press time, sources confirmed the winged insect had suddenly noticed the desiccated corpse of another moth, heard the sound of a switch flipping, and been plunged into total darkness.
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An aging Earth, like an aging body, is increasingly vulnerable to heat’s fatal accidents.
By: James Lovelock
The following text is excerpted from James Lovelock’s 2019 book “Novacene.” Lovelock, the scientist behind the Gaia theory, died in 2022 on his 103rd birthday.
In spite of all our achievements and Gaia’s benign systems of control, we are still threatened by heat. You will assume I mean global warming and, in part, I do. At first I thought global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions would soon be catastrophic for humans and that Gaia would simply flick us aside as an annoying and destructive species. Later I thought we could manage the heat increases in the near future and should no longer regard warming as an immediate existential threat. Now, however, I believe we should do what we can to cool the planet. I cannot say too strongly that the greatest threat to life on Earth is overheating.
My point is that global warming is certainly real, but the outcomes currently being predicted by scientists, politicians and Greens are not necessarily the ones we should most fear. Global warming is a slow process and its worst effects will be heralded by extremely uncomfortable events. The extreme weather we have experienced recently is only a mild sign of what might be on the way. But I think we have time, time we should spend cooling the planet to make it more robust.
I say this because Earth is, like me, very old. Great age may or may not bring wisdom but it certainly brings frailty. I am 99 as I write this. Hamlet bemoaned “the ills that flesh is heir to,” but he was a young man who died of excessive introspection; had he lived, he would have discovered that the ills of young flesh are as nothing compared to those that elderly flesh endures.
Planets, like humans, grow fragile with age. If all goes well, Gaia and I can expect a productive and pleasant period of decline — but people can have fatal accidents and so can planets. Our personal resilience depends on our state of health. When young, we can often withstand influenza or a car accident, but not when we are close to 100 years old. Similarly, when young, Earth and Gaia could withstand shocks like super-volcanic eruptions or asteroid strikes; when old, any one of these could sterilize the entire planet. A warm Earth would be a more vulnerable Earth.
We know that the Earth withstood near-fatal catastrophes in its long past. There is a great deal of evidence gathered about the impact of an approximately 1-kilometre-diameter rock in the South Pacific about 2 million years ago. The consequences appear to have been devastating, but, interestingly, there is almost no indication of long-term damage to the biosphere. Recent research, however, suggests the risk may be increasing. Scientists studying impact craters on the moon found that there had been a steep rise in the number of asteroid strikes in the last 290 million years. Astonishingly, we are now three times more likely to suffer an impact than the dinosaurs; they were just very unlucky.
Keeping Earth cool is a necessary safety measure for an elderly planet orbiting a middle-aged star.
Gaia, in the past, could take these things in her stride, but can she now? She already struggles to maintain homeostasis — a stable dynamic condition — in the calm between impacts. Now, an asteroid impact or a volcano could destroy much of the organic life the Earth carries. The remnant survivors might be unable to restore Gaia; our planet would quickly become too hot for life.
So, as well as the climatic effects of warming, there are other problems that are more serious than we can imagine — accidents we don’t or can’t prepare for. Keeping Earth cool is a necessary safety measure for an elderly planet orbiting a middle-aged star.
Heat is why we have to keep a close eye on our planet and not think so much about Mars. As NASA’s wonderful rovers continue to gather evidence from Mars, our relative ignorance of our own oceans increases. Not for a moment would I suggest that NASA’s exploration was not worthwhile, but why have we done so little to gather information about our own planet? Our lives may depend on understanding it properly.
We were stunned when the astronauts revealed in 1969 the beauty of our planet seen from space. It took Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer and inventor, to observe how wrong it was to call this planet Earth when, clearly, it is Ocean. Despite being 50 years ago, this discovery that we live on an ocean planet is only just beginning to penetrate the dusty science of geology. It is shameful that we know far more about the surface of Mars and its atmosphere than we know about parts of our oceans.
It is also risky. After the Sun, the sea is the primary driver of our climate. It is vital for our survival that the sea is kept cool. It is easy to understand this just by going on a typical holiday. There we find a hot, sandy beach lapped by clear water. This water is seductive, but it is a dead zone. Whenever the surface temperature of the ocean rises above 15°C, the ocean becomes a desert far more bereft of life than the Sahara. This is because at temperatures above about 15°C the nutrients in the ocean surface are rapidly eaten and the dead bodies and detritus sink to the regions below. There is plenty of food in the lower waters, but it cannot rise to the surface because the cooler lower ocean water is denser than water at the surface. This lack of life in warmer waters explains why so often they are clear and blue.
This is important because, as the photographs from space show so dramatically, Earth is a water planet with nearly three-quarters of its surface covered by oceans. Life on land depends on the supply of certain essential elements such as sulphur, selenium, iodine and others. Just now these are supplied by ocean surface life as gases like dimethyl sulphide and methyl iodide. The loss of this surface life due to the heating of these waters would be catastrophic. Cold water (below 15°C) is denser than water warmer than 15°C. Because of this, nutrients in cold water can no longer reach the surface.
A more serious threat to life would arise if ever the ocean surface temperature rose into the 40°C region, at which point runaway greenhouse heating caused by water vapor would occur. Like CO2, water vapor in the atmosphere absorbs outgoing infrared radiation and so prevents the Earth from cooling by radiating heat away. High levels of water vapor in the atmosphere cause warming and this creates a feedback loop, increasing the water content of the atmosphere by evaporating water from the sea.
In discussions of global warming the role of water vapor is seldom mentioned. When we put carbon dioxide in the air by burning fossil fuel, it stays there until removed by, for example, the leaves of a tree. Burning fossil fuel also puts water vapor in the air, which, unlike carbon dioxide, stays there only if the air is warm enough. On a cold winter day, even your breath condenses as a cloud of mist. The abundance of water vapor in the air simply follows the temperature. When water condenses as mist or as cloud droplets, it can no longer exert its greenhouse effect. In some circumstances, such as cloud layers near the sea surface, their presence has a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight back to space. But cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere have a warming effect. The presence of water vapor in the air makes climate forecasting a complex job and it is easy to see why the forecasters sometimes make mistakes.
We can help natural processes that keep the water vapor content of the air low by avoiding the burning of carbon fuel of any kind. In general, I feel strongly that our need for energy should be treated as a practical problem of engineering and economics, not politics. I feel equally strongly that the best candidate to supply these needs is nuclear fission, or, if it becomes available cheaply and practically, nuclear fusion, the process that sustains the heat of the Sun. There is a further temperature limit we should watch closely. You may have noticed this fatal figure appearing on world weather charts during the freakishly hot summer of 2018. It was 47°C. This is a just about liveable temperature for humans — ask the people of Baghdad — but it is close to our limit. In the Australian summer in January 2019 there were five days in which the average temperature was above 40°C — Port Augusta reached 49.5°C.
In the 1940s, as part of our wartime work, my colleague Owen Lidwell and I measured experimentally the temperature at which the cells of skin were irreparably damaged by heat. This would mean burning the skin of anaesthetized rabbits. I found this request repellent and we decided to burn ourselves instead. This we did using a large, flat flame of burning benzene vapor. As you might expect, it was exceedingly painful. Contact with a 1-centimeter-diameter copper rod kept at 50°C would cause a first-degree burn in one minute. Higher temperatures caused burning more rapidly; at 60°C it took only one second. At temperatures below 50°C there was no burning in five minutes. Human skin cells are typical of mainstream life in their reaction to high temperatures. It is true that some highly specialized forms of life called extremophiles can live at temperatures up to about 120°C, but their capacities and rate of growth are minimal compared with mainstream life.
(Incidentally, as we burnt ourselves, we were watched and looked after by the Institute’s physician, Dr. Hawking. He grew quite intrigued by our capacity to endure pain and invited me to dinner with him and his family at their home in Hampstead. In the course of the evening his wife, also a scientist at the Institute, asked me if I would hold their newly born baby while she performed an intricate preparation for dinner. Having by then two children of my own, I felt quite ready to do so and for a brief period held Stephen Hawking in my arms.)
It is shameful that we know far more about the surface of Mars and its atmosphere than we know about parts of our oceans.
High temperatures make us vulnerable. We are currently in a warm period of the glacial cycle and if we now suffered a catastrophe — an asteroid strike or super-volcano eruption — that led to a failure to pump down carbon dioxide, we could be in mortal danger. The Earth’s average temperature could rise to 47°C and, comparatively quickly, we would enter an irreversible phase leading to a Venus-like state. As the climatologist James Hansen vividly puts it, if we don’t take care, we will find ourselves aboard the Venus Express.
On the way to this sterile state the Earth would probably pass through a period when the atmosphere at the surface was supercritical steam. The supercritical state is curious: it is neither gas nor liquid. It shares with liquids the capacity to dissolve solids, but like a gas it has no boundary. Even rock dissolves in supercritical steam and, from the solution, quartz and even gemstones such as sapphire crystallize as they cool.
If the Earth became hot enough for the ocean to reach the supercritical state, rocks such as basalt would dissolve and release the hydrogen of water as a gas. Long before this, the oxygen of the air would have vanished and in this oxygen-free atmosphere hydrogen would escape to space because the Earth’s gravity is insufficient to hold hydrogen atoms. Indeed, hydrogen would be escaping now but for the presence of oxygen, the atoms of which act like security guards and capture hydrogen atoms when they try to escape the Earth.
So 47°C sets the limit for any kind of life on an ocean planet like the Earth. Once this temperature is passed, even silicon-based intelligence would face an impossible environment. It is even possible that the floor of the ocean would enter the supercritical state and in places where the magma emerged there would be no separation between rocks and supercritical-state steam.
We should be amazed by and grateful for the remarkable achievement of the Gaia system in pumping down carbon dioxide to levels as low as 180 parts per million, the level it reached 18,000 years ago. It is now 400 parts per million and rising, with the burning of fossil fuel responsible for about half of this rise.
Don’t forget that, without life, carbon dioxide would have been much more abundant than now. If you want to know where life put the carbon dioxide, visit a typical chalk cliff, such as the ones at Beachy Head in Sussex. If you look at the chalk through a microscope, you will find it is made of tight-pressed calcium carbonate shells. These are the skeletons of coccolithophores that once lived near the surface of the sea. And in greater quantities are the beds of limestone that are everywhere on the Earth’s surface. If these reservoirs of biogenic carbon dioxide had been returned to the atmosphere as gas in geologically relatively recent times, we would be just like Venus — a hot, dead planet.
Even so, it is very unlikely that, in the imaginable future, the entire surface of the Earth will reach anything like 47°C. The current average temperature is about 15°C. But it is conceivable that, with feedback loops, especially the melting of the polar ice caps and methane released from permafrost, a global temperature of, say, 30°C may be a tipping point that could accelerate heating further. As with much of climate science, we just do not know.
What is clear is that we should not simply assume, as most people do most of the time, that the Earth is a stable and permanent place with temperatures always in a range in which we can safely survive. Some 55 million years ago, for example, an event known as the Palaeocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum took place. This was a period of warming when temperatures rose about 5 degrees above their present level. Animals such as crocodiles lived in what are now the polar oceans, and all the Earth was a tropical place. For a while I thought that if such a rise in temperature could be withstood, then why bother too much about the mere 2 degrees rise of temperature climate scientists say we should avoid at all costs? Not only this, but in places like Singapore people enjoy life where the temperature, year-round, is more than 12 degrees above the average. But I was wrong.
It was thinking about the consequences of asteroid impacts and other accidents that made me see why the Earth needs to stay cool. Yes, a rise in temperature of 5 or even 10 degrees could probably be withstood, but not if the system is disabled, as it would be if there were an asteroid impact of the severity now thought responsible for the Permian extinction. It might also happen through one of the devastating volcanic outbursts that have occurred in the past. So I now think our present efforts to combat mere global warming are vital. We need to keep the Earth as cool as possible to ensure it is less vulnerable to accidents that might disable Gaia’s cooling mechanisms.
James Lovelock (1919–2022) was the originator of the Gaia hypothesis (now Gaia theory) and author of more than 200 scientific papers. His books on the subject include “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth,” “The Revenge of Gaia,” and “Novacene,” from which this article is excerpted.
POSTED ON SEP 8
