At https://phys.org/print456059321.html … Professor Timothy Lenton from Exeter university in association with French professor, Bruno Lantour, argue that humans have the potential to upgrade the planet – a Gaia version 2. The idea is that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings evolved together as a single self regulating system that has kept the planet habitable for life on earth – in spite of variations in solar energy, meteor strikes, and tectonic and volcanic activity. In version 2 of Gaia the evolution ot humans and their technology could add a new level of self awareness to earth's self regulation. Of course, this is only if humans become aware of the global consequences of their activities (burning fossil fuels we may assume) and take appropriate action. In other words, a deliberate self regulation – but a conscience choice. Such aelf awareness relies on our ability to continually monitor and model the state of the planet.
In the original Gaia theory of James Lovelock organic and irnorganic components of earth evolved together as one single self regulatiing systme which can control global temperatures and atmospheric to maintain global habitability. In other words the earth was able to remove excess heat and maintain a reasonable temperature. Are they now saying that Gaia has ceased to function and earth is unable to deal with the situation envisaged in climate models? Has earth failed to maintain a habitable temperature as after all there are more humans alive today than ever before? Or are they simply reiterating the article of climate change faith that says the earth is on target to become uninhabitable. If the latter they are admitting Gaia is unable to cope with co2 – which has been around for billions of years. How can you have a new version of Gaia if the old version works no more? This is of course double speak as what they are saying is that if we are nice and Green and get rid of fossil fuels Gaia 2 will swing into action and even humans will at last be in tune with the earth – or something like that. One problem here is that if earth has evolved to shed excess heat and maintain a reasonable life saving temperature, why cannot earth do the same with rising co2.