It is hard for me not to like James Lovelock. South London grammar-school boy, walker, mountain climber, scientist and admirer of Margaret Thatcher: what is not to like? But as the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, he is arguably one of the most influential and provocative radical thinkers of the last 50 years.
Forty years ago he thought up the Gaia concept, and was attacked for what people misguidedly saw as a mystical idea, when it was a very scientific concept. He was described as a maverick, which he probably took as a compliment.
He is doing it again, with his new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia (Allen Lane, £20). In it he predicts that it is too late to reverse climate change. Worse, it is approaching a tipping-point, and will soon accelerate with cataclysmic consequences.
But he is no easy ally to the Greens. When I bumped into him this Monday in the Today studio, he had been on air charming the nation about this new book, with the delicately detached air of an absent-minded scientist. In person this delightful grey-haired 90-year-old made me think of Q in the Bond films. Appropriate, really, since he once made gadgets for MI6. But out of the studio he was all business. ‘Do you think you could introduce me to your spokesman?’ he said. ‘Which one?’ said I, wondering if I could remember which member of the Tory front bench covered the area he was interested in.
‘Don’t know his name,’ he said, ‘Useless with names. He wrote in the Times about a week ago. Terrible. Made me really angry. Completely Old Green.’
‘Ah, that would be Greg Barker,’ I said. ‘OK.’
I had never heard the term ‘Old Green’ before, but reading his book I see what he meant.
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