James Lovelock

The oil companies regard nuclear power as their rival, who will reduce their profits, so they put out a lot of disinformation about nuclear power.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

One pound of uranium is worth about 3 million pounds worth of coal or oil.

If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it... Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.

Life clearly does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes. Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

I'm not a pessimist, even though I do think awful things are going to happen.

All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it.

Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.

I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.

So-called 'sustainable development'... is meaningless drivel.

Civilization in its present form hasnt got long.

You never know with politicians what they are really saying. And I don't say that in a negative way-they have an appalling job.

If a power station were to be built down the road, I'd prefer a nuclear plant over an oil burner, and definitely over a coal burner. We simply have to lessen our consumption of fossil fuels.

Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.

There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.

You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.

Climate change now represents so urgent a threat to mankind that the only way to deal with it is by suspending democracy.

I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.

If it hadnt been for the Cold War neither Russie nor America would have been sending people into space.

Esso has been the main one in America spreading the disinformation that there is no global warming problem.

NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station.

China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution.

For each of our actions there are only consequences.

Climatologists are all agreed that we'd be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.

Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.

This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief.

We'd never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn't been for space exploration and NASA.

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.

Science always uses metaphor.

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

The tropical rain forests are a telling example. Once cut down, they rarely recover. Rainfall drops, deserts spread, the climate warms.

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price.

Let's make hay while it lasts.

I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn't surprise me at all.