British scientist James Lovelock, known for his early warnings about the climate crisis and his “Gaia hypothesis”, which considers the Earth as a living being capable of self-regulation, has died at the age of 103, his family said on Wednesday (27). .
“James Lovelock passed away yesterday [terça-feira] at home, surrounded by his family, on his 103rd birthday,” the scientist’s relatives said in a statement.
“To the world, he was known as a pioneer, a weather prophet and the inventor of the Gaia theory,” his family said, praising “a loving husband, a fabulous father with infinite curiosity and a mischievous sense of humor.”
The family reported that his health had deteriorated after a recent fall.
Lovelock, who has presented himself throughout his career as an “independent scientist”, has created controversy with an apocalyptic view of the climate crisis.
“It’s too late, too late to save the planet as we know it,” he told AFP in 2009, a few months before the Copenhagen climate conference (COP15), which ended in failure.
“Prepare for great human losses”, he used to say, then a minority position in the scientific world.
Lovelock, born in 1919, grew up in south London in the interwar period and worked for the British Institute of Medical Research for 20 years.
In the early 1960s, he was hired by NASA and moved to California to work on the possibility of life on Mars.
He is known for having formulated the “Gaia hypothesis” in 1970, which presents the Earth as a self-regulating living being, a theory that at the time was criticized by his colleagues.
“What a life and what stories! Jim’s genius [seu apelido] made him the Forrest Gump of science, shaping the first climate sciences, the search for life on Mars, the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer, the conception of the world as a self-regulating system”, Guardian Jonathan Watts.
“Working for Shell, NASA, MI6 [inteligência externa britânica] and Hewlett Packard, he had access and knowledge. When he warned the world about the climate crisis, he spoke with immense authority,” Watts said, emphasizing the strained relationship he has had with environmental movements.
He “worked for oil groups, chemical conglomerates and the army. He was passionately pro-nuclear,” the biographer added.
His support for nuclear power and his criticism of renewables — he declared in 2009 that they “had no impact whatsoever on the fight against global warming” — shocked environmentalists.
“Arguably the most important independent scientist of the last century, Lovelock was decades ahead of his time in his thinking about the Earth and climate,” praised the Science Museum in London.
In an interview with AFP in June 2020, Lovelock relativized the coronavirus pandemic that “mainly kills those my age — the older ones — and there are already many.”
“Climate change is more dangerous to life on Earth than almost any other conceivable disease,” he said.
