James Lovelock é um daqueles cientistas malucos, muito adorado nos meios ambientalistas. É muito conhecido por ter formulado a hipótese de Gaia, hipótese que serviu de base ao recente filme de James Cameron, Avatar.É, por isso, com consternação, que todos aqueles que o defenderam no passado, bem como as suas ideias, assistem à entrevista ao alarmista Guardian. Repare-se nalgumas pérolas:
| I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn't want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They're not like that nowadays. They don't give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: "Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work." That's no way to do science. |
Depois desta bela introdução, vejam o que Lovelock tem a dizer sobre a camada de ozono. Ele até tem algo a dizer sobre o assunto, porque foi o primeiro a descobrir a presença global de CFCs na atmosfera:
| I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done. |
E também tem uma dedicatória para todos aqueles que andam a "embelezar" os dados:
| Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards. |
Sobre os modelos de computador, Lovelock também tem uma ideia formada:
| I remember when the Americans sent up a satellite to measure ozone and it started saying that a hole was developing over the South Pole. But the damn fool scientists were so mad on the models that they said the satellite must have a fault. We tend to now get carried away by our giant computer models. But they're not complete models. (...) If you make a model, after a while you get suckered into it. You begin to forget that it's a model and think of it as the real world. You really start to believe it. |
Vale a pena ler a entrevista no seu todo. Ele até deixa palavras de simpatia para os cépticos, sendo significativo o seguinte texto:
| We do need scepticism about the predictions about what will happen to the climate in 50 years, or whatever. It's almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it's wrong to do it. |
Quem diria!?
