On September 23, the United Nations opened its Climate Action Summit here in New York, three days after the Global Climate Strike, led by Greta Thun

'Any further intervention is likely to be disastrous,' says James Lovelock.

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2021-05-20 14:44:01

On September 23, the United Nations opened its Climate Action Summit here in New York, three days after the Global Climate Strike, led by Greta Thunberg, swept through thousands of cities worldwide — more than 4 million protesters around the world, marching out of anger that so little has been done. To mark the occasion, Intelligencer is publishing “State of the World,” a series of in-depth interviews with climate leaders from Bill Gates to Naomi Klein and Rhiana Gunn-Wright to William Nordhaus interrogating just how they see the precarious climate future of the planet — and just how hopeful they think we should all be about avoiding catastrophic warming. (Unfortunately, very few are hopeful.)

James Lovelock turned 100 this year and celebrated by publishing a new book — on artificial intelligence. But he is known as much more of an old-fashioned scientist and compares himself to Darwin and Faraday in that he also likes to work alone, outside of institutions. Nevertheless, though you may not know his name, he is among the most influential scientists of the 20th century, having developed — and then, over the course of decades of writing, refined and refashioned — what is called the “Gaia theory,” or the principle that Earth’s ecosystem is a single, living, self-regulating entity. In early September, just a few months after his birthday, I met Lovelock one morning at his home on Chesil Beach in southern England, where we talked about nuclear power, his hope that AI might save the planet from catastrophic warming, and just how to integrate the disruptions and disturbances of climate change into a Gaia worldview.

At 100 years old, you’ve been alive for something like 90 percent or more of all the carbon emissions that have ever been produced from the burning of fossil fuels. Exactly. Well, I hope you don’t blame me for that.

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