The Copenhagen Context: Gaia or Medea?

The wires are burning with news relating to the Copenhagen Climate talks--how things are moving fast towards agreements, how things are hopelessly bogged down, how it's a great step forward, how it's a predestined failure.

There are also a flood of announcements of study results timed for maximum impact, leaving no doubt how truly serious the Climate Crisis is, and an ill-timed diversionary flap over mostly misread and willfully distorted stolen emails among some climate scientists.

Rather than trying to keep up with contradictory reports even before the conference begins, there are a few interesting articles out there that perhaps help to create contexts for what's about to happen--which of course may well also mean what's about to not happen.

There's an interesting review by Tim Flannery of three important recent books bearing on the Climate Crisis context, in the November 19 issue of the New York Review of Books. The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
by James Lovelock posits an extreme outcome for the Climate Crisis, both in terms of consequences (civilization essentially eradicated) and in terms of predictions. James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin (Princeton University Press) is both a brief biography of Lovelock, including recent interviews, and a history of global warming science.

Flannery passes on some of Lovelock's biography, including his scientific discoveries in several fields (he's the guy who figured out that the common cold is spread by touch, not through the air), which apparently are due to his skepticism of both outcome and method, and his powers of imagination. "Lovelock's exceptionally effective research method derives from a strong capacity for empathy," Flannery writes. He imagines himself being the phenomenon he is studying--even if it's bacteria in a drop of water.

Lovelock's greatest--and certain largest--insight was Gaia: the planet as a self-regulating system in which, over time, life alters conditions to maximize the continued existence of life. He first proposed it as an hypothesis, which was ridiculed by, among others, the Selfish Gene guy, Richard Dawkins. However, this criticism sparked Lovelock's imagination anew, and he created a model of a planet with just one form of life, and set about testing whether it would become Gaia-like through Darwinian determinism. It did. And other models like it have as well.

So for all the New Age appropriation, Gaia is now a theory, like the theory of natural selection, not just an hypothesis. The theory explains several situation in earth's past where the survival of life defies the logic of physical conditions. Scientists from four international climate research programs endorsed a version of Gaia in 2001.

The third book Flannery reviews is The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? by Peter Ward (also Princeton.) Ward recites a record of huge catastrophes and massive extinctions which make the earth sound less like the goddess of life than a raging murderer of her own children, the mythic Medea. "This name thus seems appropriate for an interpretation of Earth life, which collectively has shown itself through many past episodes in deep time to the recent past, as well as in current behavior, to be inherently selfish and ultimately biocidal."

Flannery doesn't think much of his book, mostly because author Ward never confronts the evidence for the Gaia theory. Ward is a strict neo-Darwinist, a Selfish Gene ideologue, it seems, and that style reminds me of circular theological argument. But when it comes to humanity, he may be on to something.

Is it Gaia, guiding the scientists trying to save the planet with evidence and argument, with their latest warnings of rising temperatures, record levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, of impacts piling up faster since the Kyoto treaty, of a whole set of scary evidence? Of the Arctic sea ice all but vanished, and the East Antarctic ice, previously considered solid, is melting?

Or is it Medea, handily provided purloined e-mails to make specious headlines and further confuse a public that--at least in the U.S.--seems to want to believe that the Climate Crisis isn't happening? (Here's a taste of the email distortions, and an even more instructive and detailed account of just how several supposedly damning statements were taken out of context and willfully misunderstood, with a wealth of available evidence that the interpretation was distorted.)

Will it be Gaia, inspiring humanity to heroically save its own future, even if it means sacrifice and change, to steeply reduce greenhouse gases, quickly create a green energy economy, and respond compassionately to emergencies caused by the Climate Crisis?

Or will it be Medea, selfishly sowing the seeds of discord and doubt, fear and ignorance, in order to hold onto wealth and the order that created it, to keep on burning oil and coal, and when things get really bad, lashing out to destroy supposed enemies and temporarily grab their resources? Is this The Road to Medea as child cannibal?

As for Mr. Gaia, James Lovelock, when it comes to humanity, he's a Medea man. He doesn't believe civilization can or will avoid its collapse, based partly on what reviewer Flannery suggests is outmoded information on green energy such as wind and solar. (Lovelock doesn't think they can supply enough energy to discourage coal and oil use.)

His climate projections are themselves out of the mainstream, which does make you pay attention, because all of his discoveries were, too. He uses a particular climate model to predict, that when COs concentration gets past 400 parts per million, the planetary temperature will lurch upward suddenly by 9 degrees C, which is very hot indeed. Flannery points out that carbon concentration probably has already exceeded 400 ppm, so according to this model the lurch could begin at any time.

He adds that the model also predicts that just before the lurch happens, global temperatures cool a bit. In the six weeks since his review was published, the Climate Crisis Deniers have been crowing about evidence that warming has stalled on a global average for the past few years. The evidence is partial, but even so, it's enough to send a chill up your spine when you read Lovelock's theory, proposed months ago.

Other scientists don't buy this model, but Flannery notes that a summit of climate scientists in Copenhagen this March concluded that"the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised." Scientists also propose several "tipping point" or "time bomb" scenarios that could lead to relatively sudden and drastic Climate Crisis effects.

Anyway, Lovelock has proposed in the past that the end of industrial civilization and a steep reduction in human population could be Gaia's way of getting rid of her biggest problem, and allowing life to go on, although absent most current species of any size. I tend to believe that Gaia not only operates by Darwinian mechanisms, but by other principles we see in various forms of life, including ourselves. We all have some Gaia in us, as well as some Lovelock: skeptical, empathetic, imaginative, cooperative, compassionate, life-loving.

But we also have a lot of Medea. Which is stronger is really the fatal question, and it may be answered for this civilization relatively soon.