ABSTRACT
James Ephraim Lovelock was born on 26 July 1919 in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire. Later, James became a keen hill walker, and in 1999 he and his wife celebrated his eightieth birthday by walking along the Cornwall Coast Path. In the early 1960s, while living in Texas, James was a consultant at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. Carbon dioxide is a so-called 'greenhouse gas' and James concluded that a consequence of its progressive removal from the atmosphere was that the surface temperature remained fairly constant. James's first doctorate was in medicine and one of his heroes is James Hutton, one of the founders of modern geology, whose training was also in medicine. Hutton told a meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785 that the Earth was a super-organism and that its proper study should be physiology.
