124 Quotes by James Lovelock

Our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.

What I tend to do is to wake about five in the morning-this happens quite often-think about the invention, and then image it in my mind in 3D, as a kind of construct. Then I do experiments with the image...sort of rotate it, and say, 'Well what'll happen if one does this?' And by the time I get up for breakfast I can usually go to the bench and make a string and sealing wax model that works straight off, because I've done most of the experiments already.

We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science

By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.

The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.

By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions.

The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.

Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.

I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.