Scientific papers

Ocean pipes could help the Earth to cure itself - letter to Nature from James Lovelock and Chris Rapley, 26 September 2007. "We propose a way to stimulate the Earth's capacity to cure itself, as an emergency treatment for the pathology of global warming ... The oceans, which cover more than 70% of the Earth's surface, are a promising place to seek a regulating influence. One approach would be to use free-floating or tethered vertical pipes to increase the mixing of nutrient-rich waters below the thermocline with the relatively barren waters at the ocean surface ...Such an approach may fail, perhaps on engineering or economic grounds. And the impact on ocean acidification will need to be taken into account ... But the stakes are so high that we put forward the general concept of using the Earth system's own energy for amelioration. The removal of 500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the air by human endeavour is beyond our current technological capability. If we can't 'heal the planet' directly, we may be able to help the planet heal itself."

Failure of climate regulation in a geophysiological model - by James E. Lovelock & Lee R. Kump, Nature 369, 732 - 734 (30 June 1994). "There has been much debate about how the Earth responds to changes in climate - specifically, how feedbacks involving the biota change with temperature. There is in particular an urgent need to understand the extent of coupling and feedback between plant growth, global temperature and enhanced atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Here we present a simple, but we hope qualitatively realistic, analysis of the effects of temperature change on the feedbacks induced by changes in surface distribution of marine algae and land plants."

Planetary Atmospheres: compositional and other changes associated with the presence of life - This paper by James E. Lovelock and C. E. Giffin was submitted September 1968 to the American Astronautical Society and published in Advances in the Astronautical Sciences 25, pp.179-193, 1969. It is the first scientific paper to discuss Earth System Science as it is currently understood.

A physical basis for life detection experiments - first published in Nature Vol. 207, No. 4997, pp. 568-570, August 7, 1965.