Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  We started towards the Cape Verde Islands. That evening at dinner the mate warned us not to wander on the ship’s decks without using sun block. He said there was plenty of it in the ship’s stores. Sunburn is a serious problem in tropical waters. Typically, we took little notice of this warning and, as we sailed further south, still in the northern hemisphere, nothing in the way of sunburn seemed to happen. Then one day after rising, I noticed that the air seemed different, the parallel streets of cumulus clouds now projected, it seemed, to infinity. The air had, in spite of its warmth, a fresh cleanliness we had not previously experienced. In the night, we had crossed the intertropical convergence that separates the air of the northern hemisphere from that of the southern hemisphere. The southern air is clean and unpolluted; the northern hemisphere is always, to some extent, hazy. As if to punctuate this change, suddenly two flying fish landed on the deck behind me as I took my air sample, and I was entranced. These were living things as strange to me almost as dinosaurs. Many others came on to the ship as we sailed along and we had fresh flying fish for dinner that night.

  After breakfast, while collecting water samples, I found my skin burning—that warning sign that sunburn is happening. I went to my cabin and applied the sun block that the ship provided. It worked for me, but some of the others suffered a crop of blisters before adapting to the intense ultraviolet of the southern hemisphere. This incident and the incredible clarity of the night sky with its, unknown to me, constellations and brilliantly defined Milky Way, made real how hazy is the air in which we live in the north. My CFC readings were now down from seventy to forty parts per trillion and they confirmed it. However, the presence of forty parts per trillion of F11 in the southern hemisphere supported my speculation that these substances were distributed throughout the Earth’s atmosphere and were accumulating ineluctably.

  Near the coast of Brazil, we met our first Atlantic storm. The ship rode it well and I continued my sampling routine, just as if it were still calm. When I took my morning samples at the bow on the second day of the storm the sea was bursting over in a delicious warm shower. As I turned, after collecting my sample of air, I was surprised to find the bosun standing just behind me. I realized that he was there to catch me should a wave threaten to take me overboard. He smiled, but said nothing as we moved back to the lab. I was touched by this unsought but thoughtful gesture from the bosun and from the ship’s company, who cared enough for me to make it, and do it without ostentation.

  All too soon, the shoreline of the River Plate came in view and we docked at Montevideo in Uruguay. During the last day of the voyage, I had shown Roger Wade, one of the travelling but then not working scientists, how to use my gas Chromatograph and he promised to continue the daily sampling for the next five months in Antarctica. In fact, his measurements were so diligent that I had complete confidence when later we came to analyse the charts. Roger’s own programme was biological and part of the ship’s Antarctic research. By now I dearly wished that I could have gone on, at least to the Falklands, the next port of call, but sadly there was no way for me to return in time for my own commitments. I was due to attend a meeting in the United States the next week. I reluctantly said my goodbyes to my shipmates. Captain Shelby Smith said enigmatically to me as we parted, ‘This will be remembered as one of the key research voyages.’ He was prescient, for at the time I did not know just how important the CFC and DMS measurements were to be. We gathered so much important scientific information on the Shackleton, and at so little cost.

  I climbed down the gangway to the shore of Montevideo. As always, it was the land that seemed to be moving, so used was I to the ship’s comfortable motion. A pleasant man from the British Consulate met me and guided me through the Uruguayan Customs and Immigration. He and I stood in front of a bench, behind which stood six formidable armed men. My consular friend said, ‘Leave it entirely to me. Say nothing whatever.’ He gave them my passport for inspection and then began to pass banknotes to the leader of the immigration team until the leader raised his other hand to show that he was satisfied. We moved on to his car. Curious, I asked, ‘What would have happened had I landed here alone?’ He replied, ‘You might well have tried to bribe a junior Customs man, not the leader, and you would have landed in gaol on a corruption charge.’ We drove through Montevideo, my first sight of a Latin American town, and then on to the airport. Here, another disquieting ritual of paying the export tax took place, and I was very glad that I had the friendly aid of the man from the Consulate. I then checked in at the Scandinavian Airlines desk for my flight home.

  We stopped at Sao Paulo, which in those days was a small green airport, and then at Rio before crossing the Atlantic to Lisbon, where I caught my plane for London. The tantalizing glimpse of that southern American continent by air travel seemed so feeble after the full sensory experience and joy of three weeks on a ship. I published the Shackleton voyage results as a paper in Nature with the title, ‘Halomethanes in and over the Atlantic’ and it provided the incident that led to the Ozone War. Foolishly, I stated in the paper that the CFCs represented no conceivable hazard. This gratuitous blunder was due to my concern that politically minded Greens would seize on the paper as proof that the air we breathed was loaded with chlorine-containing chemicals produced by the multinational chemical industry, and that we would all be poisoned as a consequence. I should have said ‘no conceivable toxic hazard’, because at a few parts per trillion the CFCs were in no way poisonous to people or animals.

  On my return from the Atlantic, scientists working for the chemical industry inadvertently drew me onto their side of the forces gathering for the Ozone War. A year later, in November 1972, Ray McCarthy and Frank Bower of Dupont held a meeting at a school in Andover in New Hampshire. There were industry scientists and academics at the conference and it was organized like a Gordon Conference (see Chapter 9 for a full description of these unusual conferences), but as far as I know, none of those present at the Andover meeting had any idea of the conflict soon to start. The meeting was a quiet but interesting account of the real and potential toxic hazards of the CFCs. We only touched briefly on the large-scale effects consequent upon their atmospheric abundance. The meeting was billed as the ecology of the CFCs. Much of it was devoted to the tendency of the CFCs, at high concentration, to cause ventricular fibrillation, a fatal chaotic confusion of the beat of the heart. Children, in their search for thrills, would fill plastic bags with CFC gas from an aerosol can and then breathe it in. Sometimes they died. Pathologists presented evidence to show that the deaths were specific poisoning by some of the CFCs and not caused by simple asphyxiation. Curiously, it seemed that fear or excitement enhanced the toxicity. We all agreed that, apart from this extreme effect at very high concentrations, these materials were free of human toxicity and safe in their normal domestic use. In my talk, mainly about the prevalence of the CFCs in the air, I did raise the possibility of large-scale atmospheric effects. I commented that when these gases accumulated above the parts-per-billion levels they might act as potent greenhouse gases and add their effect to that of carbon dioxide. This we all saw was a danger to keep in mind but of no concern now that these gases were present at levels ten times lower than those likely to cause perceptible global warming. In no way were the scientists gathered at this meeting in Andover trying to cover up known dangers or deny the public knowledge of potential hazards. Quite the reverse: they were openly concerned to consider the possibilities of danger.

  I do not know if stratospheric chemists were invited to the meeting, and it was not until 1974 that the Molina–Rowland paper appeared. This well-written and finely argued text raised for the first time the possibility that the continued emission of CFCs was a danger to stratospheric ozone. It provided the environmental cause of the rest of the century. Its scientific importance was rightly recognized by the award of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Molina, Rowland, and Crutzen in 1996.

  The Molina–Rowland theory predicted that the CFCs would dec
ompose in the stratosphere and there release their burden of chlorine, and that this would deplete stratospheric ozone. The ‘sink’, as the chemists called the depletion process, was oddly above our heads and had been postulated earlier by Ralph Cicerone and Richard Stolarski. The bond-breaking short-wave UV from the sun split the molecules of the CFCs in the upper reaches of the air. I do believe that I had advance notice of the contents of this historic paper and, in early 1974, because no one had confirmed this hypothesis by direct measurement, I thought that it would be useful to make a trip into the stratosphere and find out if the CFCs declined in abundance there as the theory predicted. I tried asking Adrian Tuck, a friendly scientist at the Meteorological Office, if there was a chance for me to take air samples during one of their stratospheric flights. He liked my idea and made enquiries about its feasibility. He soon found that it would take two years at least for me to have permission for such a flight. Any modifications to the aircraft, such as the insertion of a sampling port, would require careful safety surveys and this took time. I then asked friends working for the Ministry of Defence if they knew of any RAF flight that I could use to sample the stratospheric air. They were much more helpful and soon I was at Lyneham airfield talking to the pilot and flight engineer of a Hercules (C130) aircraft. Lyneham is in Wiltshire and was then only about forty miles north of my home in Bowerchalke. The pilot said that he was due to fly the aircraft on a test flight in a week’s time. I would be welcome to make my measurements as they went to the aircraft’s ceiling at about 45,000 feet altitude. At that time of year the tropopause, the height at which the cloudy, well-mixed lower atmosphere separates from the clear, dry, upper air, was at 30,000 feet. This gave nearly three miles up into the stratosphere for me to take my samples. I arranged with the flight engineer my modest needs and started preparing for the flight the following week.

  It was all amazingly easy. There was no charge for the flight and no papers to be completed. They warned me that officially I was not on the aircraft, and that if we were unfortunate enough to crash there could be no compensation. We took off early one afternoon and made towards Northern Ireland, climbing as we went. I sat on the flight deck with the flight engineer and took my air samples in stainless steel cylinders. I compressed the samples of thin outside air to about two atmospheres to make it easier for me to analyse them on returning home. After we reached the ceiling of 45,000 feet, the pilot turned the plane back towards Lyneham but, during the return flight, he made some interesting manoeuvres to test the aircraft and the crew. One of these was to make a recovery from a stall and I asked what would happen if the plane went into a spin. The confident reply was, ‘No worry at all. This aircraft would make no more than half a turn before the wings came off.’ And after that, I kept quiet. We also went through the motions of landing on small grass fields without actually touching down. All too soon, we were back at the airfield and I made my farewells to the crew. I analysed the samples immediately I reached home. They showed a steady level of CFCs and carbon tetrachloride in the troposphere and a decline, as theory required, in the stratosphere. I published these findings in Nature in 1974.

  I had always suspected that there were natural halocarbons in the air. I had found traces of methyl iodide and it seemed likely that there would also be methyl bromide and methyl chloride from natural sources. When I suggested this at scientific meetings on CFCs, I found the idea unpopular with scientists. Many seemed to have accepted uncritically the ‘Green’ notion that organisms rejected chlorine from their metabolism, and they saw chlorine compounds as the toxic products of industry. To me this was fanaticism, not science, and I prepared a Chromatograph specifically for methyl chloride analysis. During September 1976, I made a series of measurements at Bowerchalke and found methyl chloride present at a level close to one part per billion. This was nearly ten times more than the abundance of fluorocarbon 11 at that time. It is true that FC11 carries three times as much chlorine per molecule and releases it specifically in the stratosphere. Even so, the natural chlorine from methyl chloride was comparable as a source of chlorine with the CFCs. Industry scientists told me that there was no significant industrial leakage of methyl chloride and that the abundance together with its short half-life in the air suggested a large natural source. Later, scientists found that methyl chloride came from forest fires, from the ocean, and from fungi living on rotting wood. Nature, it seemed, was also in the business of ozone depletion. I published these findings in a Nature Letter in 1977.

  Apart from personal enquiries from Peter Liss, Adrian Tuck, and Bob Murgatroyd, other UK scientists expressed little or no interest in the atmospheric abundance of halomethanes. With the exception of the Meteorological Office, the establishment, led by the Royal Society, was clearly interested in the Molina–Rowland theory but disdained my somewhat downmarket researches in rural Wiltshire. The financial support for my work in Wiltshire and for the running of the Adrigole station came solely from the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA). This is a trade association of the world’s chemical manufacturers and it has a research funding committee staffed by academics and industry scientists. Greens and the Left tend to assume that this was tainted money and the beneficiaries of it were corrupted scientists. In fact, most of the funds from the CMA grants went to supporters of the Molina–Rowland theory. The only contact I had had with the stratospheric chemists on the other side, so to speak, was a letter from Ralph Cicerone sent on 7 October 1974. He invited me to a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on 12 December; here there would be a chance to meet Rowland and the stratospheric chemists. I should have gone, but I was weary from too much long-distance travel and it was not until 1980, when I received an invitation from Tony Broderick of the Federal Aviation Administration to attend their Stratospheric Advisory Committee that I began to meet and hear the scientific arguments of the other side. The FAA committee was not like any other that I had known—it provided a meeting place for the best of stratospheric scientists.

  Looking back, I wish that there had been more free and open discussion of the science of the Ozone War. As it was, industrial and environmental scientists fought like opposing lawyers in a never-ending courtroom drama. After ten years surviving as an independent, I was becoming a fair judge of character. As I grew to know the principal scientists on both sides, I felt I could trust them, and time has proven this judgement true. Unfortunately, my first encounter with Sherry Rowland was in a courtroom, at a congressional hearing of the US government. Dupont had called me as a witness to a hearing on the future of the chlorofluorocarbons. This was in 1974, when environmentalists were crusading for an immediate ban on the use of the CFCs. The early models of stratospheric ozone destruction suggested a dangerously large depletion if CFCs continued to be released to the air. Sherry Rowland was the environmentalists’ champion, and I was in the odd position of being the principal witness for the industry’s defence. They chose me because, at the time, I knew more about the abundance of chlorine and fluorine compounds in the atmosphere than did anyone else. Had the stratospheric scientists approached me first, I would probably have appeared on Sherry Rowland’s side. More important, he and I would have had a chance to discuss the science before appearing in court. I did not ask for a fee for appearing as a witness, nor did Dupont offer one. Someone paid my travel and hotel expenses for the hearing; I do not know who.

  It was not long after this hearing that environmental scientists, according to the journalist Nigel Hawkes, now science editor for the London Times, were calling me someone ‘in the pockets of the aerosol industry’. Reading University wrote asking if they should sue the newspaper because the article suggesting that I was a corrupted scientist was libellous. Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina, I think, suffered from similar character denigration by journalists who listened uncritically to the less reputable spokesmen of the chlorofluorocarbon industry. Happily, none of us felt that lawsuits would solve anything, but there is a need for a proper ethical structure in env
ironmental affairs. It is wrong to accuse scientists of corruption when they appear as witnesses on behalf of industry. If I had solid evidence to show that a man on trial for a crime was innocent, should I stand aside and let him be punished merely because I knew him to be a criminal? We are civilized enough to have laws that are clear about one’s duty in such an event. Environmental affairs are in danger of acquiring the cruel hysteria more characteristic of lynch law. We forget too easily that we as individuals are the principal agents of pollution. It is our home heating and our car that adds to the greenhouse burden of carbon dioxide, not the oil or coal industries alone.