James Lovelock invented the electron capture detector, which was able to measure CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) to prove that there was a growing hole in the ozone layer. They were used in fridges and many aerosols. Thanks to Lovelock’s work, they were banned under the Montreal Protocol. The United Nations General Assembly designated September 16 as the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer.
He also proposed the Gaia hypothesis. This ecological theory claims that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth consciously form a complex, self-regulating entity that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth. He is in favour of geo engineering and nuclear power. During the Second World War, he worked on ways of shielding soldiers from burns. Lovelock refused to use the shaved and anaesthetised rabbits that were used as burn victims, and exposed his own skin to heat radiation instead . He was a conscientious objector at the start of the war but changed his mind later. He also experimented with the cryopreservation of rodents, determining that hamsters could be frozen with 60% of the water in the brain crystallized into ice with no adverse effects. The results were influential in the theories of cryonics. He helped develop the CLAW hypothesis.
From his 1988 book The Ages of Gaia:
I have never regarded nuclear radiation or nuclear power as anything other than a normal and inevitable part of the environment. Our prokaryotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of fallout from a star-sized nuclear explosion, a supernova that synthesised the elements that go to make our planet and ourselves.[25]
In The Revenge of Gaia[40] (2006):
A television interviewer once asked me, "But what about nuclear waste? Will it not poison the whole biosphere and persist for millions of years?" I knew this to be a nightmare fantasy wholly without substance in the real world... One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets... I find it sad, but all too human, that there are vast bureaucracies concerned about nuclear waste, huge organisations devoted to decommissioning power stations, but nothing comparable to deal with that truly malign waste, carbon dioxide.
One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.
In 2019 Lovelock said he thought difficulties in getting nuclear power going again were due to propaganda, that "the coal and oil business fight like mad to tell bad stories about nuclear", and that "the greens played along with it. There’s bound to have been some corruption there – I’m sure that various green movements were paid some sums on the side to help with propaganda".
Here he is questioning what universities are for.
“I think we both wondered then what the university training was all about.”
https://webofstories.com/play/james.lovelock/3“
“It detected all the pesticides, all the carcinogens, all of those sorts of chemicals, but nothing else. And using it, scientists in other parts of the world were able to demonstrate that the pesticides like DDT [dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane] and so on were spread throughout the whole global environment. You could find them in the fatted penguins in Antarctica or in the milk of nursing mothers in Finland. And this was the base data that gave Rachel Carson the information that enabled her to write her famous book, Silent Spring, which I think everyone agrees was the start of the green movement and the environmental awareness that we now have. It was the device, the electron capture detector, that made us realise that pollution was global, not just local in scale. But it didn't stop there, because several years later it demonstrated that the chlorofluorocarbons were present in the atmosphere, because they were yet another thing that it could detect, and were building up in concentration and this led to the recognition that the ozone layer was in danger, which about… which I think everybody knows. “ https://webofstories.com/play/james.lovelock/7