That the level of fire the earth is experiencing is not just a symptom to human impacts, but the earth evolving, is profound. Thanks for elucidating that!!
"Instead, the transition happens through violent, discrete events..."
----
Smooth forecast lines of trends are a major problem when dealing with public expectation, especially when the coastal town manager is trying to address, say, sea level rise without busting the budget. The result is spending a very large chunk of money on some sort of resiliency project, only to find out it was too little, too late, when the money could have been used for something else.
Meanwhile, I'm the asshole that keeps telling people it's time for triage, and people have to fight being sentimental about things and places that they are attached to. That land you bought to retire to out West? There's no more water. That house in the Florida community that looked so good in the brochure will cost ever more to insure. The once-attractive Sun Belt will be known as the Dangerous Heat Belt.
The realtors, of course, will fight you all the way, but the property values and the associated tax revenue will go into a death spiral anyway.
"I'm the asshole that keeps telling people it's time for triage, and people have to fight being sentimental about things and places that they are attached to."
LOL, a prophet without honor in his home town! My sympathy, as you're not the only one ;^). Regardless, things and places are being lost whether or not people are attached to them, but it's the ones they're attached to that get the message across! Sadly, triage may reduce to liquidating one's private resources and beating feet.
We are watching humanity destroy itself and take the rest of multicellular life with it. Resources will tank; intra- and interstate war will rise; inevitably, it’ll go nuclear. You think India and Pakistan, for example, will just nobly divvy up the mass starvation as the Himalayan glacier-river system tanks? They’ve nearly gone nuclear three times over relative bullshit, not mass starvation. Full exchange means no photosynthesis for two years. It’s been modeled. Billions starve—and other nations won’t sit by. More wars, some genocides against useful internal targets. Collapse. A US-Russia full exchange ends it all: a decade of no photosynthesis.
Pay attention to the devastation that Ukraine is inflicting on the Russian economy with relatively low-cost drones. Russian civilians who have for years ignored the government's invasion of Ukraine ("three day special military operation") are losing every mark of comfort to which they have been accustomed: Fuel shortages, loss of major e-tail, farmers unable to harvest wheat.
If anything Putin is more likely to toss a nuke (if any still work and haven't been stripped by the black market) at Ukraine.
Great wildfire commentary, Andrew Yes,the forests are on the move.. to oblivion. Carbon Brief had a great wildfire article today too. Can you and Zeke post about our heated up water cycle on 'roids?
The qusstion is, what is the trajectory of tax on fossil fule sales by Carbon content that, considering the deadweight loss of said tax, optimizes the CO concentration and hence maximizes income net of unmitigted costs and cos of adption.
We knw it's nt zero, but are the modelds good enugh to say what it shoul be?
Are you asking about the social cost of carbon (SCC)? You can ask Gemini about modelling SCC as easily as I can, of course. The LLM's answers are consistent with my organic understanding, drawing on my prolonged formal education in earth sciences, biology, and economics, and subsequent 38 years of amateur obsession with anthropogenic global warming while incidentally employed in federal science labs:
"The resulting dollar value of the SCC is notoriously sensitive to specific parameter choices within the models...
"Historically, official US federal estimates centered around $50/ton (using a 3% discount rate under earlier Interagency Working Group frameworks). Updated modeling published by the EPA and independent academic literature (such as the GIVE*/RFF framework) shifted baseline recommendations closer to $190–$200+/ton, reflecting updated damage functions and lowered near-term discount rates (often 2% or lower)."
It's all down to assumptions about the discount rate, shape of the damage function, adaptation projections, and equity weighting. In Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that use a damage function, it's defined economically (e.g. Climate Impact Lab, RFF-SCCN), but is probably the IAM component most dependent on hazard projections from the physical climate science modeled by coupled GCMs. Otherwise, you'll find little agreement, even in the EPA, whose job it is to mitigate SCC!
Are the models good enough? Yes and no ;^). Quoting Gemini again:
"If 'good enough' means finding a precise, universally agreed-upon single dollar figure: No...
"If 'good enough' means guiding policy and bounding the decision space: Yes..."
The SCC is a single number I want a tax trajectiry that achieves a given outcome at greatest net benefit. Actually, bounding th decisin space woud be useful, something for actvists to actvate for or is inupt parameters of seond best policies, like subsidies.
LOL! Gemini initially spelled GIVE 'GiveUP', and when I pointed it out, said:
"Given the sheer complexity of squeezing multi-century socio-economic trajectories, climate sensitivity, and discount rates into a single equation, naming a climate-economics model 'GiveUp' would certainly be an honest moment of dark humor, but Resources for the Future went with the slightly more optimistic acronym."
I then told Gemini it was waxing ironic. It replied:
"Guilty as charged!
"I suppose dryly calling a model 'GiveUp' while dissecting the sheer absurd complexity of multi-century economic forecasting does lean right into situational irony, intentional or not.
"Sometimes the accidental jokes write themselves—especially when trying to put a clean price tag on the end of the world!"
The Earth and her living organisms are a massive homeostatic system. The species causing gross imbalance are being shaken off. But not only that, the Earth is reforming and changing herself even before we are gone. We get to watch some of it. I love that; it's reassuring.
Assuming you're serious, Jo, I for one am not reassured by the Gaia hypothesis. The earth is only homeostatic within broad parameters determined solely by chance and necessity, i.e. contingency on everything that happened before and the stochasticity underlying the cosmos; small comfort for anything alive today. And AFAICT, Gaia is basically geocentric feminist theism, whereas I'm a lifelong atheist.
By the best available scientific evidence, nearly the entire surface of the planet froze at least twice before the rise of multicellular life. The biosphere has since been through at least five recognized mass extinction episodes, with a sixth underway. The biggest, 252 mya, wiped out 90% of all species at the time. The most recent previous event, 66 mya, killed off 75-80% of all plant and animal species while accidentally, i.e. non-teleologically, enabling our own species' existence. That rock could easily have been bigger purely by chance, and it wasn't 'Gaia' but 'Ouranos' who slung it at us. What species was the Earth shaking off in all those previous extinctions? How many innocent species are being shaken off to get rid of *Homo sapiens*? How come it didn't get rid of us earlier? There've been lots of opportunities to stamp us out since we first appeared 300 kya, and now look how far it's gone!
But I guess we all find assurance where we can. If you were kidding, never mind ;^).
Mal Adapted, whatever you name is, The Gaia or self-regulating and interconnecting life on Earth theory is not geocentric, feminist (though this wouldn't in any way discredit it) theism. Nor is it unscientific. Proposed in scientific journals and a book written in 1979 by Locklock and microbiologist Lyn Margulis it describes the unlikely event of life on Earth, that apparently did occur. Once it had occurred interconnecting life conspired to keep conditions in the zone in which they preferred to live.
Not being able to do much about asteroids, volcanoes, lava flows, rapid growth or trap magmatism the system is not fool proof.
The Guardian says ‘He cheerfully points out that the first great toxic pollution crisis for Gaia was the emergence of free oxygen in the atmosphere. Those microbial life forms that could not adapt thereafter survived only as anaerobic bacteria in swamps and in the intestines of animals.
He makes a case for the planet as a vast chemical apparatus. The natural oxidation of atmospheric methane produces a billion tonnes of carbon monoxide gas each year. Nature bubbles with sulphur dioxide, dimethyl mercury and a host of carcinogens, all part of Gaia's planetary management chemical kit.
On page 113 Lovelock reports, expressionlessly: "It has been predicted that the increase in carbon dioxide will act as a sort of gaseous blanket to keep the Earth warmer.’
Humans are alone in actively altering the conditions and parameters of climate beyond those our species, genus and class, and many others, can survive in.
I am reassured that something is being done about it and within a very short time frame of the last 100 years or so. Unless you think it shouldn’t be?
BTW, Jo, since you asked: my pseudonym refers to my voluntary failure to reproduce. I've been using it since 2008, and all comments on pro-climate-science fora under that name since then are mine, i.e. I own them as Mal Adapted. I comment pseudonymously so I'm not standing on my real-life credentials, which are nothing to boast of; and so nobody shows up at my door to punch me in the nose. So far so good!
Oh Jo, we agree on pretty much everything here, just not about "interconnecting life *conspired* to keep conditions in the zone in which they preferred to live", my emphasis. You have the rest of it right AFAICT, and none of my criticism is original. Neither Lovelock nor Margulis, both of whom I encountered early in my formal training in Ecology and Evolution from 50 years ago, argued there was any sort of unified global overmind that could conspire about anything! I really hope you aren't going to double down on that, because otherwise your contributions are valuable IMHO.
Verily I say unto you, we agree on the scientific stature of the Gaia hypothesis as originally proposed. I studied it in graduate school, long before LLMs appeared in the noosphere, and found it consistent with evolution as not teleologically (i.e. intelligently) determined, but contingent (i.e. path-dependent) and stochastic (i.e. partially random), indeterminate until afterward: Like Darwin, but on a planetary level, L&M merely sought to explain the pattern we observe, not predict the future, which is unknowable before it happens.
That said, just as evolution predicts the adaptation of bacteria to antibiotics, Lovelock is right about what the gaia hypothesis predicts. The strongest CO2 greenhouse hypothesis test was in the late Permian, as atmospheric CO2 went from 400-440 ppm to 2500 ppm (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014701118), and remained over 2000 (https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/50/6/650/612995/Five-million-years-of-high-atmospheric-CO2-in-the) for several million years. Now we're seeing another rigorous test confirming it: CO2 levels are independent of any long-term intelligent design (human minds being effectively random with respect to any cosmic designer's plans), and species adapt or perish without descendents. That we haven't all died out yet, doesn't ensure we won't later. That's sound science, IMHO.
But for a second opinion, I just asked Gemini that very question: "Did Lovelock and Margulis believe in any sort of sentient, global overmind that could 'conspire' about anything?" The LLM began its reply with a charming photo of the two of then, along with:
"Short answer: no, absolutely not. Neither James Lovelock nor Lynn Margulis posited or believed that Earth possesses a conscious, intentional, or sentient mind capable of planning or 'conspiring.'
"The misconception largely stems from the metaphoric language used to popularize the Gaia hypothesis, as well as the name itself (suggested to Lovelock by author William Golding), which led critics and New Age enthusiasts alike to anthropomorphize the planet."
Of course, Gemini is quick to caution us "AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses" 8^D. If you want an argument, I'll go on and on about teleological cosmic determinacy vs. evolutionary indeterminacy, but that would be way off topic!
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables just isn't sufficient, for many reasons.
1. Evidence shows that building more renewables just leads to more energy consumption, not to transition.
2. Renewables have costs too. Solar makes shade. Hydro makes dams. Wind kills birds and at a major scale it can actually change wind patterns. And so on.
3. Renewable-energy systems are created with fossil fuels, plus lots of other extracted resources that have to be mined/processed/transported at scale.
The list goes on.
We can't just keep living the extractive/destructive lives we're living now and think that everything can be okay. We've eaten up half the habitable land on the planet, and significantly altered 75% of all the land. We've filled the oceans with plastics and emptied them of vertebrates. We've replace almost all of the mammalian and avian wildlife on the planet with ourselves and our livestock.
We need to do more than just switch this current culture to renewables. We need to heal this culture, we need to heal the people in the culture, and we need to heal the land. If I may promote our project here, this is our open/free and individually-actionable plan for healing: https://integrationcenter.org/plan/
This sounds like "climate doomism": the idea that collectively capping the trend of GMST is futile unless all 8.3 billion humans adopt a global steady-state economy without environmental impacts*. Knowingly or not, you are helping to sustain ROI for carbon producers and investors, by demanding nothing less than a zero-impact global economy. Rather than take your clickbait, I'll address your comment right here:
1(a). Claiming renewables only lead to addition, not transition, overlooks the fact that any additional demand met by renewable energy does not cause additional fossil carbon emissions. The world *will* develop economically, using the cheapest energy it can get, and that's not healable. Energy demand is growing in every developing nation, and it *will* be met by fossil fuels if not RE. Yes, humanity's overall impact on the biosphere increases with total consumption and cost socialization, but Jevons' Paradox applies to increases in the efficiency of use of a specific, finite resource: anthropogenic CO2 emissions, OTOH, are crucially tied to the technology, not the efficiency, of energy production. Every decrement in the rate of CO2 emissions below what they'd be without RE, slows the rate of global warming, benefiting everyone. Once the transition is complete, energy consumption will be effectively decoupled from climate. The rest of our 'environmental' (i.e. social) impacts will continue as before, but without open-ended global warming!
1(b). Your claim also ignores empirical data from easily discoverable open sources. In Europe, South Australia, and parts of the US, renewable generation has directly displaced fossil fuels (specifically coal and peak gas), causing absolute drops in grid emissions. You can find the same sources I did.
2. Yes, renewables have costs too. So? There are no perfect choices: "perfect" is the enemy of "better than it would be otherwise". You can look up Social Cost of Carbon yourself. In the judgement of resource and social development economists around the world (look it up too), the net social cost of relying on fossil fuels will be higher than for replacing them with RE. IOW, collective decarbonization is still cheaper than open-ended global warming. Are you claiming otherwise?
3. Look up "supply chain electrification". As more and more mining and manufacturing of solar panels and wind turbines is done with RE, the CO2 emissions rate will decline toward zero, and when it falls below the rate of natural atmospheric drawdown, atmospheric CO2 in ppm will start to decline as well, followed sooner or later by the rate of warming. Slower warming is better than faster warming, and no warming is even better.
You're welcome to respond in this thread, of course. I can hardly stop you. I may or may not respond further, but I see no need to click away for you.
* All 'environmental impacts' are social costs: we wouldn't call them impacts if literally no one cared. I, for one, am saddened by the accelerating anthropocene extinction that's erasing so many wondrous creatures faster and faster before our eyes, but I'm honestly glad giant short-faced bears aren't still running around where I live. And good riddance to *Variola major*!
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, though I respectfully disagree with several points.
This is not climate doomerism, because it is not about climate at all. My point is that our drastically-negative impacts on the world go far beyond just climate change. None of the major issues I list are caused by climate change (though they negatively interact with it).
Further, I am not at all "demanding nothing less than a zero-impact global economy." I am saying that the global economy is malignant and needs to be moved away from. Simply making modifications to it cannot fix the horrendous impacts it is having.
Moving toward renewables lets us continue extracting, consuming, destroying everything around us, while thinking we have "solved" everything.
Is that making the perfect the enemy of the good? I would instead characterize it as making the necessary solution the enemy of the insufficient, diversionary non-solution.
I am advocating that people who really care about the sad state of the world do more than just argue for minor changes (that are mostly beyond their control), and rather make major changes themselves... in a productive way that spreads that change outward. (The "clickbait" I link to is a no-profit, open-source, no-tracking, no-signup, free toolkit providing one possible way people can accomplish this.)
Yes, all of the above may seem extreme. But the state of the world is extreme. We cannot address it halfheartedly.
Thank you for engaging. I stand by my previous comment (which I'm done editing, BTW). I'll expound further below, so please read the whole thing before responding. I'll adhere to this Substack's standards for respect.
'Further, I am not at all "demanding nothing less than a zero-impact global economy." I am saying that the global economy is malignant and needs to be moved away from. Simply making modifications to it cannot fix the horrendous impacts it is having.'
Huh? That *is* what you're demanding. Only a zero-impact global economy could be wholly non-malignant! And those horrendous impacts will undeniably be made worse by continuing fossil carbon emissions, the topic of this Substack. "Wholly non-horrendous" is the enemy of "better than open-ended global warming"!
'I am advocating that people who really care about the sad state of the world do more than just argue for minor changes (that are mostly beyond their control), and rather make major changes themselves... in a productive way that spreads that change outward.'
Not so much extreme as unrealistic, because while there's absolutely nothing wrong with voluntary private footprint reduction even if it's mere virtue signalling, there will never be enough people who 'really care' enough to make 'major' changes, when only disconnecting from the global marketplace entirely will reduce their private carbon debt to zero: that is the evolutionary basis of the tragedy of the climate commons. There just might be enough who do care about global warming specifically, however, to act *collectively*, by voting to decarbonize their existing national economy. But extreme too, because failure to move immediately to a steady-state global economy doesn't mean decarbonizing our existing economy is futile, if only because failing the latter makes achieving the former impossible. Wittingly or not, insisting on the former first merely puts profit in the hands of plutocrats (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1380092/full). That is the basis of my objection to your comments.
Thanks for the article, but why not advocate for innovations, like mine, which could both limit the spread of Catastrophic Forest Fires and also Capture Lots of CO 2, to mitigate the very Climate Change which is stimulating such Catastrophic Forest Fires?
Tree ring data across the US show a much greater frequency of historical fires. In many cases in the west these lands were initially overgrazed which favored certain trees over the native grasses that carried a low intensity fire and limited stand replacing fire. But some forests need stand replacing fire. Fire in the forests is as natural as rain but decades of anti fire propaganda shape public perception. Fire is terrible for houses but the land has seen it before and at a much greater frequency than today.
That the level of fire the earth is experiencing is not just a symptom to human impacts, but the earth evolving, is profound. Thanks for elucidating that!!
"Instead, the transition happens through violent, discrete events..."
----
Smooth forecast lines of trends are a major problem when dealing with public expectation, especially when the coastal town manager is trying to address, say, sea level rise without busting the budget. The result is spending a very large chunk of money on some sort of resiliency project, only to find out it was too little, too late, when the money could have been used for something else.
"Andrea Dutton PhD: Sea Level Rise - How Fast?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flHkeuOUSyc
Meanwhile, I'm the asshole that keeps telling people it's time for triage, and people have to fight being sentimental about things and places that they are attached to. That land you bought to retire to out West? There's no more water. That house in the Florida community that looked so good in the brochure will cost ever more to insure. The once-attractive Sun Belt will be known as the Dangerous Heat Belt.
The realtors, of course, will fight you all the way, but the property values and the associated tax revenue will go into a death spiral anyway.
"I'm the asshole that keeps telling people it's time for triage, and people have to fight being sentimental about things and places that they are attached to."
LOL, a prophet without honor in his home town! My sympathy, as you're not the only one ;^). Regardless, things and places are being lost whether or not people are attached to them, but it's the ones they're attached to that get the message across! Sadly, triage may reduce to liquidating one's private resources and beating feet.
Wildfires And Racism Costing American And European Lives and Billions Unnecessarilyhttps://wp.me/p1ocvx-Dw
We are watching humanity destroy itself and take the rest of multicellular life with it. Resources will tank; intra- and interstate war will rise; inevitably, it’ll go nuclear. You think India and Pakistan, for example, will just nobly divvy up the mass starvation as the Himalayan glacier-river system tanks? They’ve nearly gone nuclear three times over relative bullshit, not mass starvation. Full exchange means no photosynthesis for two years. It’s been modeled. Billions starve—and other nations won’t sit by. More wars, some genocides against useful internal targets. Collapse. A US-Russia full exchange ends it all: a decade of no photosynthesis.
Pay attention to the devastation that Ukraine is inflicting on the Russian economy with relatively low-cost drones. Russian civilians who have for years ignored the government's invasion of Ukraine ("three day special military operation") are losing every mark of comfort to which they have been accustomed: Fuel shortages, loss of major e-tail, farmers unable to harvest wheat.
If anything Putin is more likely to toss a nuke (if any still work and haven't been stripped by the black market) at Ukraine.
Wildfires And Racism Costing American And European Lives and Billions Unnecessarilyhttps://wp.me/p1ocvx-Dw
Great wildfire commentary, Andrew Yes,the forests are on the move.. to oblivion. Carbon Brief had a great wildfire article today too. Can you and Zeke post about our heated up water cycle on 'roids?
The qusstion is, what is the trajectory of tax on fossil fule sales by Carbon content that, considering the deadweight loss of said tax, optimizes the CO concentration and hence maximizes income net of unmitigted costs and cos of adption.
We knw it's nt zero, but are the modelds good enugh to say what it shoul be?
Are you asking about the social cost of carbon (SCC)? You can ask Gemini about modelling SCC as easily as I can, of course. The LLM's answers are consistent with my organic understanding, drawing on my prolonged formal education in earth sciences, biology, and economics, and subsequent 38 years of amateur obsession with anthropogenic global warming while incidentally employed in federal science labs:
"The resulting dollar value of the SCC is notoriously sensitive to specific parameter choices within the models...
"Historically, official US federal estimates centered around $50/ton (using a 3% discount rate under earlier Interagency Working Group frameworks). Updated modeling published by the EPA and independent academic literature (such as the GIVE*/RFF framework) shifted baseline recommendations closer to $190–$200+/ton, reflecting updated damage functions and lowered near-term discount rates (often 2% or lower)."
It's all down to assumptions about the discount rate, shape of the damage function, adaptation projections, and equity weighting. In Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that use a damage function, it's defined economically (e.g. Climate Impact Lab, RFF-SCCN), but is probably the IAM component most dependent on hazard projections from the physical climate science modeled by coupled GCMs. Otherwise, you'll find little agreement, even in the EPA, whose job it is to mitigate SCC!
Are the models good enough? Yes and no ;^). Quoting Gemini again:
"If 'good enough' means finding a precise, universally agreed-upon single dollar figure: No...
"If 'good enough' means guiding policy and bounding the decision space: Yes..."
I literally can't say it any better myself!
* See my follow-up comment.
The SCC is a single number I want a tax trajectiry that achieves a given outcome at greatest net benefit. Actually, bounding th decisin space woud be useful, something for actvists to actvate for or is inupt parameters of seond best policies, like subsidies.
LOL! Gemini initially spelled GIVE 'GiveUP', and when I pointed it out, said:
"Given the sheer complexity of squeezing multi-century socio-economic trajectories, climate sensitivity, and discount rates into a single equation, naming a climate-economics model 'GiveUp' would certainly be an honest moment of dark humor, but Resources for the Future went with the slightly more optimistic acronym."
I then told Gemini it was waxing ironic. It replied:
"Guilty as charged!
"I suppose dryly calling a model 'GiveUp' while dissecting the sheer absurd complexity of multi-century economic forecasting does lean right into situational irony, intentional or not.
"Sometimes the accidental jokes write themselves—especially when trying to put a clean price tag on the end of the world!"
This thing continues to amaze and amuse me!
The Earth and her living organisms are a massive homeostatic system. The species causing gross imbalance are being shaken off. But not only that, the Earth is reforming and changing herself even before we are gone. We get to watch some of it. I love that; it's reassuring.
[Last edited 1800 PDT 7/29/2026: MA]
Assuming you're serious, Jo, I for one am not reassured by the Gaia hypothesis. The earth is only homeostatic within broad parameters determined solely by chance and necessity, i.e. contingency on everything that happened before and the stochasticity underlying the cosmos; small comfort for anything alive today. And AFAICT, Gaia is basically geocentric feminist theism, whereas I'm a lifelong atheist.
By the best available scientific evidence, nearly the entire surface of the planet froze at least twice before the rise of multicellular life. The biosphere has since been through at least five recognized mass extinction episodes, with a sixth underway. The biggest, 252 mya, wiped out 90% of all species at the time. The most recent previous event, 66 mya, killed off 75-80% of all plant and animal species while accidentally, i.e. non-teleologically, enabling our own species' existence. That rock could easily have been bigger purely by chance, and it wasn't 'Gaia' but 'Ouranos' who slung it at us. What species was the Earth shaking off in all those previous extinctions? How many innocent species are being shaken off to get rid of *Homo sapiens*? How come it didn't get rid of us earlier? There've been lots of opportunities to stamp us out since we first appeared 300 kya, and now look how far it's gone!
But I guess we all find assurance where we can. If you were kidding, never mind ;^).
Mal Adapted, whatever you name is, The Gaia or self-regulating and interconnecting life on Earth theory is not geocentric, feminist (though this wouldn't in any way discredit it) theism. Nor is it unscientific. Proposed in scientific journals and a book written in 1979 by Locklock and microbiologist Lyn Margulis it describes the unlikely event of life on Earth, that apparently did occur. Once it had occurred interconnecting life conspired to keep conditions in the zone in which they preferred to live.
Not being able to do much about asteroids, volcanoes, lava flows, rapid growth or trap magmatism the system is not fool proof.
The Guardian says ‘He cheerfully points out that the first great toxic pollution crisis for Gaia was the emergence of free oxygen in the atmosphere. Those microbial life forms that could not adapt thereafter survived only as anaerobic bacteria in swamps and in the intestines of animals.
He makes a case for the planet as a vast chemical apparatus. The natural oxidation of atmospheric methane produces a billion tonnes of carbon monoxide gas each year. Nature bubbles with sulphur dioxide, dimethyl mercury and a host of carcinogens, all part of Gaia's planetary management chemical kit.
On page 113 Lovelock reports, expressionlessly: "It has been predicted that the increase in carbon dioxide will act as a sort of gaseous blanket to keep the Earth warmer.’
Humans are alone in actively altering the conditions and parameters of climate beyond those our species, genus and class, and many others, can survive in.
I am reassured that something is being done about it and within a very short time frame of the last 100 years or so. Unless you think it shouldn’t be?
BTW, Jo, since you asked: my pseudonym refers to my voluntary failure to reproduce. I've been using it since 2008, and all comments on pro-climate-science fora under that name since then are mine, i.e. I own them as Mal Adapted. I comment pseudonymously so I'm not standing on my real-life credentials, which are nothing to boast of; and so nobody shows up at my door to punch me in the nose. So far so good!
Oh Jo, we agree on pretty much everything here, just not about "interconnecting life *conspired* to keep conditions in the zone in which they preferred to live", my emphasis. You have the rest of it right AFAICT, and none of my criticism is original. Neither Lovelock nor Margulis, both of whom I encountered early in my formal training in Ecology and Evolution from 50 years ago, argued there was any sort of unified global overmind that could conspire about anything! I really hope you aren't going to double down on that, because otherwise your contributions are valuable IMHO.
Verily I say unto you, we agree on the scientific stature of the Gaia hypothesis as originally proposed. I studied it in graduate school, long before LLMs appeared in the noosphere, and found it consistent with evolution as not teleologically (i.e. intelligently) determined, but contingent (i.e. path-dependent) and stochastic (i.e. partially random), indeterminate until afterward: Like Darwin, but on a planetary level, L&M merely sought to explain the pattern we observe, not predict the future, which is unknowable before it happens.
That said, just as evolution predicts the adaptation of bacteria to antibiotics, Lovelock is right about what the gaia hypothesis predicts. The strongest CO2 greenhouse hypothesis test was in the late Permian, as atmospheric CO2 went from 400-440 ppm to 2500 ppm (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014701118), and remained over 2000 (https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/50/6/650/612995/Five-million-years-of-high-atmospheric-CO2-in-the) for several million years. Now we're seeing another rigorous test confirming it: CO2 levels are independent of any long-term intelligent design (human minds being effectively random with respect to any cosmic designer's plans), and species adapt or perish without descendents. That we haven't all died out yet, doesn't ensure we won't later. That's sound science, IMHO.
But for a second opinion, I just asked Gemini that very question: "Did Lovelock and Margulis believe in any sort of sentient, global overmind that could 'conspire' about anything?" The LLM began its reply with a charming photo of the two of then, along with:
"Short answer: no, absolutely not. Neither James Lovelock nor Lynn Margulis posited or believed that Earth possesses a conscious, intentional, or sentient mind capable of planning or 'conspiring.'
"The misconception largely stems from the metaphoric language used to popularize the Gaia hypothesis, as well as the name itself (suggested to Lovelock by author William Golding), which led critics and New Age enthusiasts alike to anthropomorphize the planet."
Of course, Gemini is quick to caution us "AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses" 8^D. If you want an argument, I'll go on and on about teleological cosmic determinacy vs. evolutionary indeterminacy, but that would be way off topic!
It's inevitable, we must adapt, evreything is changing tanks to our irresponsibility , forcing us to change also, or disapear.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables just isn't sufficient, for many reasons.
1. Evidence shows that building more renewables just leads to more energy consumption, not to transition.
2. Renewables have costs too. Solar makes shade. Hydro makes dams. Wind kills birds and at a major scale it can actually change wind patterns. And so on.
3. Renewable-energy systems are created with fossil fuels, plus lots of other extracted resources that have to be mined/processed/transported at scale.
The list goes on.
We can't just keep living the extractive/destructive lives we're living now and think that everything can be okay. We've eaten up half the habitable land on the planet, and significantly altered 75% of all the land. We've filled the oceans with plastics and emptied them of vertebrates. We've replace almost all of the mammalian and avian wildlife on the planet with ourselves and our livestock.
We need to do more than just switch this current culture to renewables. We need to heal this culture, we need to heal the people in the culture, and we need to heal the land. If I may promote our project here, this is our open/free and individually-actionable plan for healing: https://integrationcenter.org/plan/
[Last edited 2130 PDT 7/30/2026: MA]
This sounds like "climate doomism": the idea that collectively capping the trend of GMST is futile unless all 8.3 billion humans adopt a global steady-state economy without environmental impacts*. Knowingly or not, you are helping to sustain ROI for carbon producers and investors, by demanding nothing less than a zero-impact global economy. Rather than take your clickbait, I'll address your comment right here:
1(a). Claiming renewables only lead to addition, not transition, overlooks the fact that any additional demand met by renewable energy does not cause additional fossil carbon emissions. The world *will* develop economically, using the cheapest energy it can get, and that's not healable. Energy demand is growing in every developing nation, and it *will* be met by fossil fuels if not RE. Yes, humanity's overall impact on the biosphere increases with total consumption and cost socialization, but Jevons' Paradox applies to increases in the efficiency of use of a specific, finite resource: anthropogenic CO2 emissions, OTOH, are crucially tied to the technology, not the efficiency, of energy production. Every decrement in the rate of CO2 emissions below what they'd be without RE, slows the rate of global warming, benefiting everyone. Once the transition is complete, energy consumption will be effectively decoupled from climate. The rest of our 'environmental' (i.e. social) impacts will continue as before, but without open-ended global warming!
1(b). Your claim also ignores empirical data from easily discoverable open sources. In Europe, South Australia, and parts of the US, renewable generation has directly displaced fossil fuels (specifically coal and peak gas), causing absolute drops in grid emissions. You can find the same sources I did.
2. Yes, renewables have costs too. So? There are no perfect choices: "perfect" is the enemy of "better than it would be otherwise". You can look up Social Cost of Carbon yourself. In the judgement of resource and social development economists around the world (look it up too), the net social cost of relying on fossil fuels will be higher than for replacing them with RE. IOW, collective decarbonization is still cheaper than open-ended global warming. Are you claiming otherwise?
3. Look up "supply chain electrification". As more and more mining and manufacturing of solar panels and wind turbines is done with RE, the CO2 emissions rate will decline toward zero, and when it falls below the rate of natural atmospheric drawdown, atmospheric CO2 in ppm will start to decline as well, followed sooner or later by the rate of warming. Slower warming is better than faster warming, and no warming is even better.
You're welcome to respond in this thread, of course. I can hardly stop you. I may or may not respond further, but I see no need to click away for you.
* All 'environmental impacts' are social costs: we wouldn't call them impacts if literally no one cared. I, for one, am saddened by the accelerating anthropocene extinction that's erasing so many wondrous creatures faster and faster before our eyes, but I'm honestly glad giant short-faced bears aren't still running around where I live. And good riddance to *Variola major*!
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, though I respectfully disagree with several points.
This is not climate doomerism, because it is not about climate at all. My point is that our drastically-negative impacts on the world go far beyond just climate change. None of the major issues I list are caused by climate change (though they negatively interact with it).
Further, I am not at all "demanding nothing less than a zero-impact global economy." I am saying that the global economy is malignant and needs to be moved away from. Simply making modifications to it cannot fix the horrendous impacts it is having.
Moving toward renewables lets us continue extracting, consuming, destroying everything around us, while thinking we have "solved" everything.
Is that making the perfect the enemy of the good? I would instead characterize it as making the necessary solution the enemy of the insufficient, diversionary non-solution.
I am advocating that people who really care about the sad state of the world do more than just argue for minor changes (that are mostly beyond their control), and rather make major changes themselves... in a productive way that spreads that change outward. (The "clickbait" I link to is a no-profit, open-source, no-tracking, no-signup, free toolkit providing one possible way people can accomplish this.)
Yes, all of the above may seem extreme. But the state of the world is extreme. We cannot address it halfheartedly.
[Last edited 1030 PDT 7/31/2026: MA]
Thank you for engaging. I stand by my previous comment (which I'm done editing, BTW). I'll expound further below, so please read the whole thing before responding. I'll adhere to this Substack's standards for respect.
'Further, I am not at all "demanding nothing less than a zero-impact global economy." I am saying that the global economy is malignant and needs to be moved away from. Simply making modifications to it cannot fix the horrendous impacts it is having.'
Huh? That *is* what you're demanding. Only a zero-impact global economy could be wholly non-malignant! And those horrendous impacts will undeniably be made worse by continuing fossil carbon emissions, the topic of this Substack. "Wholly non-horrendous" is the enemy of "better than open-ended global warming"!
'I am advocating that people who really care about the sad state of the world do more than just argue for minor changes (that are mostly beyond their control), and rather make major changes themselves... in a productive way that spreads that change outward.'
Not so much extreme as unrealistic, because while there's absolutely nothing wrong with voluntary private footprint reduction even if it's mere virtue signalling, there will never be enough people who 'really care' enough to make 'major' changes, when only disconnecting from the global marketplace entirely will reduce their private carbon debt to zero: that is the evolutionary basis of the tragedy of the climate commons. There just might be enough who do care about global warming specifically, however, to act *collectively*, by voting to decarbonize their existing national economy. But extreme too, because failure to move immediately to a steady-state global economy doesn't mean decarbonizing our existing economy is futile, if only because failing the latter makes achieving the former impossible. Wittingly or not, insisting on the former first merely puts profit in the hands of plutocrats (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1380092/full). That is the basis of my objection to your comments.
Lo unico bueno es...que todos habremos fallecido y la tierra seguirá su camino...
Por eso, cuando tenemos tiempo sigo gritando, " Vamos a la playa!".
Yo también lo digo,pero antes coge el flotador de unicorniooooo!!
Estoy buscandolo..
Hay mucho fumo.. no puedo ver..Ay! La tierra esta quemando.
Es ud,de New Jersey?
Thanks for the article, but why not advocate for innovations, like mine, which could both limit the spread of Catastrophic Forest Fires and also Capture Lots of CO 2, to mitigate the very Climate Change which is stimulating such Catastrophic Forest Fires?
Looks like you're quite capable of self advocacy, Mr. James.
Hi Mal, my comments are also good at attracting advisors and collaborators!!!
Wildfires And Racism Costing American And European Lives and Billions Unnecessarilyhttps://wp.me/p1ocvx-Dw
Tree ring data across the US show a much greater frequency of historical fires. In many cases in the west these lands were initially overgrazed which favored certain trees over the native grasses that carried a low intensity fire and limited stand replacing fire. But some forests need stand replacing fire. Fire in the forests is as natural as rain but decades of anti fire propaganda shape public perception. Fire is terrible for houses but the land has seen it before and at a much greater frequency than today.
A am looking at the data. It looks like the area burned by wildfires in the US is actually declining
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/19832.jpeg
The same can be observed globally
https://climate.esa.int/media/images/essd-17-3599-2025-f05-high-res.width-600.png
It doesn't look like warming leads to more wildfires.
This sounds very consistent with the recent Levermann commentary in Nature about increasingly chaotic weather.