The Revenge of Gaia (Penguin Celebrations) (Paperback)

This book lays out how we have pushed the Earth so far and that it may well be too late to save our civilisation, not just in the West but world wide. It summarises the present understanding of Global Warming, previous climate change and where the world is heading now. The Author also delves into the potential solutions and gives some bad news to the proponents of renewable energy. It looks like they just won't be up to the job.

Anyway I highly recomend this book but be aware that it is light in detail.

This is a very good book and well worth reading. Lovelock exposes the full scale of the climate change situation we are facing and tries to bring the many disparate voices of the green movement into one clear direction that at least has a chance of preventing irreversible climate change.

Lovelock doesn't tries to bring in all the different ways in which we damage the planet and unlike many in the green movement doesn't take it as read that traditionally "green" ways of living are necessarility good for the planet. Specifically the misleading scientific results that present traditional "non-green" activities is a poor light.

One of the most interesting points for me was that the human obsession with reducing certain risks (from radiation, chemicals in food etc) to the bare minimum could well be the things that avoid us from saving the climate in which we live.

As Lovelock pointed out on the radio, if not in this book, the opportunities to avert irreversible climate change are rapidly running out and the risks from a nuclear power station are as nothing to the risks from permanent climate change.

Other reviwers have suggested that Lovelock might be looking at this from a UK perspective. I disagree. He's clearly looking from a world view and references he makes to the Devon countryside where he lives are not central to his argument. The people to suffer most from global warming will be some of the poorest in the world. His suggestion about nuclear power is only fair. We use the energy so we should bear the negative consequences of it's generation. He makes an eloquant case for why nuclear power is not the demon it made out to be. Incidently the BBC recently interviewed many locals around a Nuclear Power station and the locals were very supportive of it.

His case against renewables is equally compelling. Most of them just will not produce anything like the power that is required for modern living - even less so after the energy costs of building them is taken into account. Even bio fuels, he argues, would take around 5 times as much land area as the land currently used for crops. Ands he argues that the land used for crops is even too much - hence the need to be more efficient in our farming methods.

His case against organic farming is well argued in the light of the number of people that the planet can support. It's difficult to hear that organic farming methods might not be sustainable in the long term as they feel right. But if everyone lives off organic food and slowly killing the planet is it still a good thing?

Lovelock's critique of windmills is not based on them being German (as one reviwer suggested) but on the Danish experience of windmill technology, on the lack of reliability of wind now and on the quite possible scenario that our weather patterns change significantly with global warming thus making the windmills even less use than they are now.

For me the definition of a good book is to fundmentally change the way we look at the world and to open our eyes to a different approach which might hold more merit.

It opened my eyes to the way that climate change will effect every aspect of our way of life; the economy, the landscape, quality of life and even our democratic systems of government. I'm left wondering why the subjects raised in this book are not the main issue being discussed in the media.