Science is all about branding. The most successful theories do just what they say on the tin. When, in 1905, Einstein published his study of moving bodies in the special case of constant speeds, he quite sensibly said his theory was about “relative motion”. He didn’t try to jazz it up by giving the theory, which we now call special relativity, a catchy name like “luminomics” or “relativocity”. Einstein played safe and reaped the rewards. Likewise, “quantum mechanics” is a no-nonsense, what-you-see-is-what-you-get handle for how the most fundamental components of matter interact. It’s not trying to be trendy or amusing or, even worse, poetic. And therefore, barmy as the theory may sound, we are willing to take it seriously.

Others have not been so wise. Witness the pitifully low numbers of physics PhD students studying Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs for short. Who wants to devote years of intensive study to a theory with a comedy name? No one, that’s who. Even a genius like Murray Gell-Mann had trouble getting the notion of quarks off the ground because he gave them a weird name (from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — “three quarks for Muster Mark!”), and in my opinion string theory still struggles to convince a wider public of its trustworthiness because it sounds unbelievably low-rent.

So you have to feel a bit sorry for James Lovelock, who followed the advice of his friend William Golding and named his holistic theory of the ecology of the Earth "The Gaia Hypothesis", after the Greek goddess. Golding’s title would have been dynamite for a science-fiction novella, but it was an absolute liability for a scientific theory. It’s been an uphill battle ever since for the theory to gain acceptance. Which is a shame, because Gaia has lots of interesting stuff to say about climate change.

We humans have a tendency to see ourselves as the crowning glory of creation, the still centre around which the natural world revolves. Gaia encourages us to see ourselves as just one component of a self-sustaining system, the Earth.

Because, let’s face it, the planet is not in any danger from global warming, or global cooling, or global stay-the-same-ing for that matter. The planet is a lump of rock — 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes’ worth to be precise — which started life as a molten fireball so hot that even after hurtling through space for the past 4.5 billion years, it hasn’t properly cooled down. It has, at times, almost completely frozen over or basked in temperatures so sweltering that the polar ice melted and crocodiles swam at the North Pole. A few greenhouse gases and a rise of a couple of degrees in global temperatures isn’t even going to touch the sides.

What we really mean by “saving the planet”, of course, is “saving the humans”. I’m not sure we deserve it. For a start, we did the damage in the first place. And what’s so great about us anyway? Sure, we made it to the top of the food chain. But we did it, basically, by learning to gang up on rival species and one another. You don’t see many Neanderthals out shopping for precisely that reason. Now we have finally come up against a challenge that can only be bested by all of our tribes acting together in our common interest. I don’t want to appear cynical, but I don’t think we’ve got a hope. In short, there’s a theory for what happens next, and it’s one of those which does exactly what it says on the tin — catastrophic die-off.

You may be thinking: perhaps it’s for the best. Perhaps humanity has gone as far as it can go, and it’s time to hand the baton over to some more highly developed beings with a more self-aware intelligence that respects the environment.

Well, forget it. There’s no guarantee that the species that takes our place will be any less selfish, belligerent and short-termist than we are. Evolution (and the planet for that matter) doesn’t care. There’s only one quality our successors will almost certainly possess — a liking for a hot bath in highly carbonated water. Who knows, millions of years after we are extinct, some future species may industrialise, overpopulate and make exactly the same mistakes all over again. The ultimate irony is that we will just be lumps of fossil fuel for those numpties to burn. 

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