Connectivity 101

‘I am not hopeful of a positive outcome at Cop26, knowing who is participating. I was not invited to Glasgow, though that is hardly a surprise.’ Photograph: Magdalena Bujak/Alamy

Years ago, yours truly talked about Daisy World and James Lovelock and his uncompromising view on climate change and what it means for humanity. As you, my loyal readers know, the notion of everything's connected is true through the expression of quantum mechanics and the two laws of thermodynamics, something a lot of so called experts seem to not understand in any way shape or fashion. Perhaps this is why Lovelock was not invited to the UN global conference dealing with this existential issue but this artificial separation of the causes of global warming will change once we have a catastrophe as man never changes until we experience one, right?

I don’t know if it is too late for humanity to avert a climate catastrophe, but I am sure there is no chance if we continue to treat global heating and the destruction of nature as separate problems.

That is the wrongheaded approach of the United Nations, which is about to stage one big global conference for the climate in Glasgow, having just finished a different big global conference for biodiversity in Kunming.

This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics. It is impossible to understand these subjects in isolation because they are interconnected. The same is true of living organisms that greatly influence the global environment. The composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and the temperature of the surface is actively maintained and regulated by the biosphere, by life, by what the ancient Greeks used to call Gaia.

Almost 60 years ago, I suggested our planet self-regulated like a living organism. I called this the Gaia theory, and was later joined by biologist Lynn Margulis, who also espoused this idea. Both of us were roundly criticised by scientists in academia. I was an outsider, an independent scientist, and the mainstream view then was the neo-Darwinist one that life adapts to the environment, not that the relationship also works in the other direction, as we argued. In the years since, we have seen just how much life – especially human life – can affect the environment. Two genocidal acts – suffocation by greenhouse gases and the clearance of the rainforests – have caused changes on a scale not seen in millions of years.

It's all about the water ...

Winter berries

The amount of global warming depends hugely on the properties of water. When cold ice forms, much of it is white snow. This reflects the sunlight back to space and is cooling. But when it is warm, the water vapour in the air is a powerful greenhouse gas that makes it warmer still.

Much of the confusion over global heating comes about because of the huge quantities of heat needed to change the state of water. Few are aware that to melt a gram of ice takes 80 calories, enough heat to raise the temperature of 1ml of water to 80C. Try an ice cube in your boiling hot tea.

Warnings that once seemed like the doom scenarios of science fiction are now coming to pass. We are entering into a heat age in which the temperature and sea levels will be rising decade by decade until the world becomes unrecognisable. We could also be in for more surprises. Nature is non-linear and unpredictable, never more than at a time of transition.

Then imagine how much heat was needed to melt large areas of the polar ice cap during the recent summer and how much hotter the world would have been if the ice had not been there. No wonder there is confusion about whether there is global heating or not.

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