Exciting new discoveries bolster the Gaia hypothesis'claims that living organisms continually modify the Earth to keep it fit for life. Life does not merely exist, but modifies the Planet to suit its needs. The Earth - Gaia - is alive, despite the best efforts of humanity to ignore this fact and kill her.

FT.com - Gaia theory's new signs of life

A few weeks ago, the journal Nature carried the results of a study that pointed to a hitherto unsuspected link between the global climate and plankton. The researchers found that the tiny ocean-going organisms release vast quantities of organic material that floats up into the air and seeds the formation of clouds. This, in turn, affects the amount of sunlight bounced back into space - and the surface temperature of the Earth. How the "plankton effect" might influence the debate on global warming is unclear; the effect has yet to be included in any of the supercomputer models used to predict the Earth's climate. However, it is becoming hard to dismiss the view that life does not merely exist on the planet but actively modifies it to suit itself.