Earth scientists are playing with fire

Earth scientists are playing with fire

One hundred miles beneath us lies the planet’s molten, roiling interior; one hundred miles above us, far beyond the protection of the clouds, the upper atmosphere basks in the brilliant white glow of the Sun. Everything in between, wrote the scientist and inventor James Lovelock, is Gaia: the “dynamic physiological system that has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years”. Gaia, in Lovelock’s conception, is the air we breathe, t…