[Excerpt from upcoming book — It’s Getting Hot in Here: Reflections of a climate hawk grappling with the inevitable]
Back in the 1970’s the late great James Lovelock worked for NASA to figure out ways to detect the signature of life on other planets. His insight was life’s potential to interact with inorganic stuff to regulate planetary-scale phenomena like atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, water cycles, and even temperature. Life kicks chemical soups, like air, out of equilibrium into a more dynamic state — akin to Earth. Absent life, equilibrium abounds — akin to Mars. That atmospheric signature of dislocation from equilibrium could be detected from afar, as a proxy for life itself. We may not be able to see tiny Martian cellular communities, but their effects on their home planet’s atmosphere may be visible. Lovelock, one of the greatest tinkerers as well as scientists, built devices designed to see those signatures[1].
Most controversial about Lovelock’s proposal was the idea those interactions could be beneficial to life itself. Life regulates the environment in which it evolves, hence pulls the planet into its evolutionary orbit. When he first proposed the earth as self-regulating entity — dubbed the Gaia hypothesis — akin to an organism capable of modifying its surroundings, the reaction of the scientific community was a polite tittering. This sounded all a bit hippie. The earth has a higher purpose? Too teleological. What was the mechanism by which it evolved? How could cellular creatures co-operate? Too unscientific. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould led the charge. At best Gaia was a poetic metaphor. At worst a weak, hand-waving pseudo-science.
Co-developer Lynn Margulis engaged the broader scientific community by shifting language to that of modern systems theory: from ‘organism’ to an ‘emergent phenomena’. It hardly seems controversial to see Earth as a kind of super-ecosystem made up of smaller interacting ecosystems. Put this way, the Gaia hypothesis raises a productive (and testable) set of questions around the mechanisms by which sub-systems (life, the atmosphere) interact and the scope of those interactions: What’s the role of life in regulating oxygen levels? How might it absorb excess carbon dioxide? Is there an effect on cloud cover? How does life benefit from these conditions? What happens if something changes macro conditions a little? A lot? Controversies[2] aside, there’s little doubt Gaia’s central insights transformed our view of life on earth (or anywhere!).
The simplest way to understand the insight behind Gaia is via Lovelock’s original thought experiment Daisyworld, a mathematical model validated on ancient 1980’s computers. Imagine a world made of black and white daisies. Black daisies absorb light (and raise temperature), white ones reflect it (and lower temperature). Daisies compete based on heat: light daisies do better in hot climates, black the opposite. As simulations raise or lower the sun’s output, Daisyworld’s temperature regulates back to some optimal temperature as the ratio of black-white daisies changes. Outside some range the system breaks down. This disarmingly simple simulation shows how life, without intent or explicit co-ordination, might work together to alter a global phenomenon to their collective benefit. Daisyworld was a pre-cursor to modern analyses of part/whole relationships, like Wolfram’s work on cellular automata. Obviously, the earth is more complex. But the lesson holds: life can evolve to regulate its own living conditions.
Lovelock and his critics continued to refine the Gaia hypothesis until his death in 2022. Variants propose different degrees of interaction: a weak Gaia maintains stability, the pre-existing conditions for life; a strong Gaia creates conditions conducive to life; variants sit somewhere between the two. The claim that even cellular life could alter or regulate planetary conditions as it interacts with non-organic material is foundational to a modern complex systems view of Earth. Lovelock was careful to steer clear of claims that any this was conscious — that life intended to shape the conditions of its existence. Such claims are indeed far removed from science, and sit within a Pagan/religious-like view of existence.
Metaphors bring into sharp relief that which science can’t. The Gaia hypothesis cuts two ways on climate disruption. A benign Gaia regulates against changes to living conditions, perhaps hiding our initial ghg perturbations as ecosystems push back to stabilize conditions. But there are limits to resilience. Even Daisyworld showed that. An angry Gaia unleashes disaster if we sever the feedback loops that provide resilience — rainforest and biodiversity destruction, for example. After a benign Gaia hides risk that continues to build, an angry Gaia is revealed as the earth system shifts quickly into some new state[3].
Lovelock himself vacillated between the two. In 2012 MSNBC interview he refers to (what I’m calling) a benign Gaia “The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.” Earlier, in discussion with the Guardian newspaper, he implies an angry Gaia “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war.” In a way, both are correct. Each reflects corresponding sides of a bound to resilience. Gaia regulates up to a point, keeping earth systems stable. And then it stops, releasing that system to find a new state. The crazy weather of 2023 may be the start of Gaia’s move to a new state.
Having entered the Anthropocene, it’s no longer mindless cellular life conditioning the atmosphere over millions of years. It’s us, changing planetary conditions within decades. We’re the brains and nerve center of Gaia now. Given we’ve already shaped our own living conditions on a planetary scale, albeit badly, why not act with purpose to re-stabilize temperatures? If we can wreck our home, can’t we renovate it? Geo-engineering — the purposeful curation of atmospheric conditions — is a continuation of what life has always done, but with intent.
Two kinds of geo-engineering beckon: we can directly modify global temperatures or reduce atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. The former is a kind of techno-madness, but may give us time for the latter: correcting our mistake. That’s next.
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[1] One of his many inventions was the electron capture detector, which first detected chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in our upper atmosphere.
[2] Any high-level discipline generates controversies around causation and explanatory reduction. These controversies can be philosophically interesting, and quite nuanced. I spent years studying controversies on mind and brain, for example: is mental activity ‘stuff’? How does it emerge from neurons? Is it merely an ‘epi-phenomenon’ like a wave on water, or does it have real causal powers? If so, what does it add to the underlying physics? How? What are its relationships to neurons? Language? And on and on. That controversies exist in trying to link high-level phenomena — mental states or atmospheric disequilibrium — to underlying mechanisms — neurons or cellular genetics — is no indication the basic lessons are not useful. We have mental states, and they cause behaviour. There are atmospheric conditions, and they interact with the organisms embedded within them.
[3] This is the language of complex systems: local areas of stability (a minima) hold until some threshold is reached, at which point we tumble rapidly into some new (and very different) local minima.
