The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
By James Lovelock
Allen Lane £20, 178 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia
By John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin
Allen Lane £20, 240 pages

We are in the grip of a crisis we have barely begun to grasp. The earth is overheating under the influence of our continued efforts to burn up fossil fuels and cut down forests. It may already be too late to do much about it.

All of this will be familiar to readers of The Revenge of Gaia, the last book by prominent scientist and environmentalist, James Lovelock, which warned of the dire consequences of failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions. He concluded that, on its current course, the human race would not die out but would be reduced to “a few breeding pairs”. The Vanishing Face of Gaia, his latest book, paints an even grimmer picture, as suggested by its subtitle: A Final Warning.

This book is more detailed than its predecessor on some of the ways in which we might slow down the progress of climate change. Lovelock is a strong proponent of nuclear power, but he also explains proposed techniques such as geo-engineering – strategies for changing the way in which the world reacts to global warming. These include burying carbon in the form of charcoal and, Lovelock’s favourite, pumping up water from the bottom of the sea.

One of the starkest warnings in this book is that the world is already overpopulated, and this makes reduction of fossil fuels unlikely. Lovelock is pessimistic: “I do not see how the 60 per cent reduction [in emissions needed to stave off disaster] can be achieved without a great loss of life.” Population has long been the biggest taboo in environmental circles, but Lovelock reminds us that it must be part of any discussion of climate change.

Though the subject matter could scarcely be more discouraging, Lovelock’s fluent prose and vast range of knowledge make it a surprisingly easy read. It would be tempting to dismiss Lovelock as a crank, were it not for the fact that – as his well-referenced arguments show – he is merely elucidating what a vast body of climate scientists have already established.

The old infuriating contradictions in Lovelock’s work still crop up, however. He is vehemently opposed to putting up wind turbines, which he thinks ugly. Nuclear power, on the other hand, he presents as the only possible solution to keeping the lights on.

It is true that nuclear power is safer than its detractors claim, and that any strategy of combating climate change with a chance of success must include the construction of a new generation of reactors. But I would question Lovelock’s cheerful assumption that it is possible to massively expand nuclear power around the globe with no consequences for terrorism or security.

Lovelock has never been afraid of eccentricity, as a new and highly readable biography by science writers John and Mary Gribbin amply illustrates. He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia traces Lovelock’s life and thought from childhood and through the controversies of his middle years to his new role, at the age of nearly 90, as an elder statesman of environmental scientists. Lovelock’s refusal to conform to scientific norms is presented by the husband and wife authorial team as the wellspring of his success. And what success.

Those who know Lovelock only from the Gaia theory may be surprised to discover the breadth of his scientific achievement. From early work making crayons that could write on glass, Lovelock went on to freeze blood and organs before working for the US space programme in the 1960s, crafting the instruments used in space exploration. In the late 1960s he invented the electron capture detector, equipment that was later used to detect the presence of ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere.

Yet Lovelock threw away all the respect he garnered from his work in one grand gesture of non-conformity. The Gaia hypothesis presents the earth, its natural systems, its atmosphere, and the species that inhabit it as something that is alive. As a single enormous organism, made up of countless billions of parts. This living system exists in equilibrium, with some systems cancelling out others to keep the whole in order. If one part gets out of kilter, the system as a whole adjusts to restore the balance. In propounding Gaia as a serious hypothesis, Lovelock effectively stuck up two fingers to the scientific establishment.

Characterising a lump of rock clothed in vegetation and wrapped in mist as alive does not sit well with standard scientific methods and modes of thought. At best, the Gaia hypothesis could be regarded as romantic. At worst, as anthropomorphic slush. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Lovelock was formulating his theories, they carried the dangerous whiff of hippydom – enough to send most respectable scientists running. Lovelock, many decided, had finally gone off his rocker.

He did not care. Lovelock had become that rare thing, a freelance scientist, happily working alone in his converted barn in England’s west country.

In the intervening years, science has caught up with Lovelock. The defining insight is a complex living system now looks very similar to the worldview of students of “earth systems sciences”, a new discipline that seeks to understand how the natural processes of the earth interact with one another. Earth systems scientists are now frantically engaged in trying to understand how greenhouse gas emissions will disrupt the planet’s balance, and whether rising carbon dioxide levels will trigger certain tipping points that will engender irreversible and catastrophic changes to the climate.

As the Gribbins record, Lovelock’s maverick nature was apparent from childhood, when he refused to do his homework, and from his early forays into science. Born in 1919, he was brought up in Brixton, but his father took him out frequently to the country, imbuing him with a lifelong love of the natural world. Lovelock at first declared himself a conscientious objector in the second world war, joining the Quakers, before deciding that Hitler was so evil he must fight. Rather than be allowed to serve in the armed forces, however, he was employed in medical research and so embarked on a career that has lasted nearly 70 years.

Lovelock’s ideas on Gaia often seem inhuman – he regards people as an infection, a sort of virus afflicting the earth, which it will shrug off in time and recover from. But his writing has enormous warmth and vitality, and this biography is fascinating for what it reveals of the man himself, from his sale of his own blood (a rare type, naturally) to support his family early in his career, to his experiments in eating human blood mixed with dried egg, taken home from the laboratory during the war. Typically, Lovelock did not view this as strange – merely a rational way of getting more protein.

As this timely biography reminds us, we need scientists such as James Lovelock, in an age when the way we train and employ scientists seems designed to preclude any more mavericks of his sort. But then, that has always been the case – and it didn’t stop him.

Fiona Harvey is the FT’s environment correspondent

This week’s FT Magazine is a special issue on the environment