Claims Don't Cut It: Weak Logical Support In Lovelock's Article

(But alliteration allures. And, uh, assonance as well.)

Blake wrote the first post analyzing this article on global warming and nuclear power, and others in his group followed with their own analyses, but I feel like Lovelock's logical fallacies have not been properly addressed

Although I agree with Lovelock's proposal that we should not be fearful about nuclear power, I am incredulous with the premises he puts behind it. Lovelock makes several claims about the effects of global warming and the feasibility of nuclear power, but he only cites a source for one of them when he says "the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2001 that global temperature would rise between two and six degrees Celsius by 2100." In all other instances, he offers no logical support for his sometimes emotionally charged statements. I will quote and discount a few claims of his.

"The complete dissolution of Greenland's icy mountains will take time, but by then the sea will have risen seven metres, enough to make uninhabitable all of the low lying coastal cities of the world, including London, Venice, Calcutta, New York and Tokyo." Lovelock allows emotion into his factual claim by saying that these well-known cities could be submerged, but he does not refer us to any data about the rate of Greenland's ice melting or a probable timeframe for its "complete dissolution." So we do not know how long it would take for the sea to rise seven meters, or even if it ever would do so*.

"Climatologists warn a four-degree rise in temperature is enough to eliminate the vast Amazon forests in a catastrophe for their people, their biodiversity, and for the world, which would lose one of its great natural air conditioners." This statement begs the question 'Which climatologists said this and how do we know?' Also, how does the rainforest act as an air conditioner? Lovelock does not back up this claim, but instead focuses on the emotions of the loss of the Amazon rainforest.

"According to Swiss meteorologists, the Europe-wide hot spell that killed over 20,000 was wholly different from any previous heat wave. The odds against it being a mere deviation from the norm were 300,000 to one." We do not know where Lovelock procured these statistics, because he does not identify these Swiss meteorologists or link to their data. Furthermore, the statistics themselves are uninformative. How many people usually die from heat waves, and what's the difference from 20,000? Are winters getting warmer, and does this cause fewer cold-related deaths? What data are they using to find those odds? If the heat wave is a deviation from the norm, how much of a problem does this say climate change is?

"Agriculture already uses too much of the land needed by the Earth to regulate its climate and chemistry. A car consumes 10 to 30 times as much carbon as its driver; imagine the extra farmland required to feed the appetite of cars." There are several assumptions in this quote that Lovelock makes no attempt to justify. Does the Earth "regulate its climate and chemistry?" Does agriculture put a damper on this process? Do we need extra farmland to fuel our cars? The links in his chain of logic could easily be contested. Also, to be scientifically precise and not increase the skepticism of his readers who know a bit about chemistry, Lovelock should have said that cars and humans produce, not consume, carbon dioxide.

I could cite more of Lovelock's failures to site his sources, but there are other problems I want to mention. His word choice colors his essay apocalyptically, as Blake might say, when he speaks of how "global warming is a more serious threat than terrorism," the "grim forecast" of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the "extra farmland required to feed the appetite of cars," and my favorite, how "the Earth is already so disabled by the insidious poison of greenhouse gases." Yet, looking at his failure to source his claims, he does not provide adequate support for these doom-sayings.

Lovelock creates a false analogy when he says, "It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm, and failed to notice, as we piled on fuel, that the fire was out of control and the furniture had ignited. When that happens, little time is left to put out the fire before it consumes the house. Global warming, like a fire, is accelerating and almost no time is left to act." We have only his word that global warming is this serious and urgent, and the statistic he cited that the "global temperature would rise between two and six degrees Celsius by 2100" implies that we are very unable to be exact about global weather conditions.

When Lovelock says that "Most of us are aware of some degree of warming; winters are warmer and spring comes earlier," and how a "grim forecast was made perceptible by last summer's excessive heat," it's a non sequitur. We cannot assume that the temperature variation of individual years proves or disproves his claims--a much wider data sample is necessary. Statistically speaking, anecdotal evidence can only be used to disprove 100% trends. NASA documents how annual temperature summations are taken here, and a graph of their data here suggests that the global mean temperature has risen by a little more than .5 degrees Celsius in the past century, but there is still a large year-to-year variance.

Lovelock casts opponents to nuclear energy as straw people when he says, "Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified..." The only concern that he addresses is worries about but I fear that he uses false premises, namely, that "nearly one third of us will die of cancer" and that oxygen is a carcinogen. And even if both of these premises were true, he still wouldn't have proven anything about how dangerous or safe nuclear power plants are.

Ultimately, I regret spending so much time analyzing this article when there was not much useful to be gained from reading it, but I was drawn in by the sheer audacity and volume of Lovelock's unsourced claims.

*Given a surface area of 3.61*10^14 meters squared of water on the Earth, it would take around 3.61*10^14 cubic meters or 87,000 cubic miles of water to raise the sea level by even one meter, assuming that the sea level rises uniformly everywhere. It would probably require more water, because the surface area of the water would increase as the sea level rose.