One of the leading experts on planet Earth, James Lovelock,  believes that there is very little we can do to stave off global warming catastrophes. Lovelock is the man who created the Gaia theory – that the earth is essentially a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.

Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis as an outgrowth of his work for NASA on methods of detecting life on Mars, which he popularized with his 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. He named this self-regulating living system after the Greek goddess Gaia, using a suggestion from the novelist William Golding, who was living in the same English village as Lovelock. The theory drew withering criticism from many in the scientific establishment, drawing the comparison with the resistance to the introduction of the idea of plate tectonics within geology, which took about 30 years before it became universally accepted as true.

It was Lovelock and his colleague Lynn Margulis who, in the early 1970s, developed a testable scientific hypothesis aimed at investigating Earth’s lifelike properties. Known as the Gaia hypothesis, it states that life on Earth works to keep conditions at the planet’s surface favorable to life itself. In 2006, Lovelock joined Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin in receiving geology’s most prestigious prize—the Geological Society’s Wollaston Medal.

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