Reply

I would like to thank David E. Moody for his thoughtful review and mostly generous comments about my book evaluating the Gaia hypothesis. The review seemed to suggest that my scientific evaluation of the Gaia hypothesis was compromised by my concern that belief in Gaia could potentially lead to undue complacency about global change impacts, expressed in the final chapter. I would like to point out that although I did raise that concern in the last chapter of my book, I did not write or even think about the implications of believing in Gaia until after I had completed my scientific evaluation of it. The final chapter was conceived last and written last. My objectivity was therefore not compromised (could not possibly have been compromised) throughout the writing of the book. My evaluation should therefore be judged by the quality of its scientific arguments alone – which was exactly my approach to assessing the Gaia hypothesis.