THE INDEPENDENT

Give science a chance to find a way out of climate change

Published: 17 January 2006

Sir: Before we become too gloomy over global warming, admittedly a real threat, we must be aware that there are different ways of looking at the past and the future from those proposed by James Lovelock and echoed by your paper ("Green guru says we are past the point of no return", 16 January).

While many scientists accept Gaia many others do not consider there is a strong coupling between the environment and organisms, the essence of Gaia. The alternative position is that changes in the environment lead to the adaptive evolution of organisms extremely slowly. This is weak Darwinian coupling. As an example early anaerobic organisms polluted their environment with oxygen. This produced a variety of environmental changes in sequence and each change was rapid. Organisms adapted to the whole process, but taking two billion years due to the conservative nature of genes.

Now the evolution of man has has produced a rapid change in the environment due to man's intelligent use of science. We are now examining the impact on life carefully and are considering ways of mitigating adverse situations.

There are changes even under global warming which will improve certain areas of Earth. More importantly, man's intelligence allows him to combat changes even to the degree that the organisms cultivated can be adjusted, as in the Green Revolution but also by genetic modification. The extent to which man can alter agricultural practice is unknown.

We can all see that there will be complete loss of some species and that others including man may suffer losses, but we may be able to both reduce the damage we are causing and to adapt to it very considerably. We are not able to predict scientific advances and therefore we should not be too gloomy. Give scientists a chance to provide a way out before looking into 100,000 years of misery.

PROFESSOR R J P WILLIAMS F R S

CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT, OXFORD UNIVERSITY