The parrot and the igloo, p.1
The Parrot and the Igloo, page 1
THE
PARROT
AND THE
IGLOO
Climate and the Science of Denial
David Lipsky
For Lisa Gerard and Bill Clegg
Well, you know, I like a hustler.
—THOMAS EDISON
What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if in the end all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?
—DR. SHERWOOD ROWLAND
History is full of stories that aren’t actually true.
—LORD CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON
CONTENTS
Preface
PART ONE: INVENTORS
The Message
The Hustler
The Promise
The Electrician
The Jubilee
PART TWO: SCIENTISTS
The Wayward Wind
The Soda Machine
The Tire Prints and the Smoke Menace
The Geophysical Experiment
The Overwhelming Desire
The Fine Noses
The Moles
The Brakes and the Indian
The Yamal and the Fence—Come North with Me
The Global Computer Model
The Wood Chips and the Malaise
The Frog
The Unwarranted and Alarmist Report
The Undoing of Thomas Midgley
The Undoing II—Red Days
The Home of Donna Reed
The Pirate
The Pilot Lights and Somebody’s World
Mark Mills
PART THREE: DENIERS
Old Judge, or Tobacco Killed a Cat
Stockings and Chairs
Genetics
A Scientific Gymnastic Feat
Wall of Flesh
Simple Annihilation
>First Class
Philosophers and Priests
Counterblaste
A Czarina Enjoys the Corporate Christmas Party
S.
Emperor of the Universe
Who Digested the Scientists?
Millions of Guinea Pigs
Dinosaurs
Committee on the Care of Children
An Exceptional Case
“Arthur Robinson Is a Good Scientist”—Arthur Robinson
Arthur and the World
Jason Bourne’s Crestfallen Itinerary
An Unexpected Gift
Editing Turns the Mild into Weather Gods
ASS and Chair
Glengarry Glen Monckton
The Business Cards and the Straight Noodle
EPILOGUE: THE PARROT AND THE IGLOO
The Igloo
The Parrot
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Sources
PREFACE
THIS STORY IS ABOUT INGENUITY AND FOLLY.
It has three sections and an epilogue—which takes us up to the present day. I wanted it to be like a Netflix release, where all the episodes drop together.
You can read these parts in any order you’d like. If you’re eager to know the history of the hired scientists who lied us into the problem, start with section three, Deniers. (They will surprise you.)
If you want to follow the detective work that identified carbon dioxide as our culprit, that would be episode two, Scientists.
If you’d like to browse the suite of gifts—the “work of the future will be the pressing of electric buttons,” Nikola Tesla announced, when he understood how much he was about to change everybody’s life—that led to our situation, your pick is Inventors, the series premiere.
The story this book tells is about the people who made our world; then the people who realized there might be a problem; then the people who lied about that problem.
There was a lot to read. It’s a great story about the last seventy years, and I wanted it to work like a novel—like Great Expectations, if the hero were an idea: that one modest waste product of our power cords and long sweeping glides down the highway could eventually crowd our weather, which is the basis for everything. So the plan was to read all the articles, replay all the newscasts and antique NPR, and chart what a reasonably well-informed person might have been expected to know about climate during those seven decades. This is that story: the travels of one disturbing thought—in the words of one historian, “a theory more peculiar and unattractive than most”—its friends, enemies, and adventures, on the road between then and now.
I kept thinking the book was almost done. (“This story put a hole through my life,” was my first plan for this preface. “Now it’s your turn.”) I had an old dog; then a very old dog. And I wanted her to still be alive when the book was complete—to know me again without this project left to do. I’d look down from my chair, see her long black-and-white body curled against my ankles. She died two years before I finished. She’s buried now on a kind of low mountain, an ambitious hill, near West Point, New York, one more thing on the Earth.
Part I
INVENTORS
Well, you know, I like a hustler.
—THOMAS EDISON, 1885
THE MESSAGE
TECHNOLOGIES ARE LIKE STARS: THEY HANG AROUND the lot waiting for the right story, the proper vehicle. Electricity became a star with the telegraph. The telegraph needed a crime.
On New Year’s Day in 1845, a sixty-year-old Quaker named John Tawell caught the Paddington train for Slough. (Slough, twenty miles from London, is one of those in-between places people like to make fun of. It’s where the Ricky Gervais version of The Office is set.) John Tawell had been a chemist, a forger, a deportee to Australia; in 1841, he’d romanced and wed the dream bride of every reformed criminal: a prosperous widow. He also maintained a former mistress, Sarah Hart. They’d arrived at an informal palimony scheme. Fifty-two pounds a year, so long as Hart didn’t spill the beans and ruin everything. Tawell was now running short of cash. Sarah Hart had a solution: Tawell could murder his wife. Instead, he bought a bottle of prussic acid and boarded the train for Slough.
Tawell poured the poison into a mug of beer, watched in Hart’s kitchen as she drank it. Then he left. A neighbor—recognizing Tawell by his Quaker coat but not by name—saw a man so agitated he couldn’t unlatch the front gate. The neighbor found Hart on the kitchen floor, foam around her lips. A second neighbor trailed Tawell to Slough station. Tawell was in time to catch the seven-forty for London—where he would melt into a world of coats and commuters. The business settled, Tawell had treated himself to a first-class ticket.
Tawell’s misfortune was to have selected the one British rail line with a working telegraph. In the 1840s, the telegraph had been used as a royal novelty: to announce the birth of Queen Victoria’s son and to fetch the Duke of Wellington some clothes he’d forgotten for a party. It had not caught on—made much imaginative headway—among nonroyals. By 1843, its British introducers were broke. They’d fallen to their “lowest point of depression.”
The station manager sat down at the telegraph, wired a description to London. Tawell was shadowed from the station, then apprehended, then charged. He was tried—a tabloid bonanza, a dress rehearsal for our own podcasts and Datelines—convicted and executed. Here was a detective story with technology as the hero. Poles, wires, operators, and offices rose over the landscape. People would point and explain, “Them’s the cords that hung John Tawell.”
It took one train ride to demonstrate all the virtues scientists had been compiling for twenty-four centuries. Electricity was powerful, it was portable. It was life-altering at a dash.
From the beginning, electricity dawned as a sort of foggy new world—a coastline to be explored, mapped, then settled. As with lots of other things, the Greeks landed first. A sixth century BCE philosopher named Thales made the initial approach. The focus of his experiments was amber. Amber is fossilized tree resin, ancient sap. Thales discovered that when you rubbed a block of amber with cat fur—it’s fun to imagine early experiments: different fur, fancier grips—the amber would attract light objects like feathers and straw. They’d slither across a table and stick.
What Thales was doing, of course, was generating static electricity. William Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth’s physician—in portraits, he wears one of those Jurassic Park ruffs and a Brooklyn brunch stubble—reproduced Thales’ experiments for the English court of 1600: the same time that Shakespeare was plotting sad ends for Hamlet and Othello. Gilbert roughed out the basic principles. He also gave the property a name. He took the Greek for “amber”—elektron. That’s what electric means, basically: having the properties of amber.
Exploration stalled. Electricity became a stunt, a prank, a hobby for tinkering men of science and leisure worldwide. Hosts arranged dinner parties with sparking forks; men surprised women with electrified kisses. The 1730 exhibition The Electrified Boy required an underweight child to suit up with insulated clothes and get winched above the floor stomach-down, like a dolphin in the canvas between tanks. Static was applied to the boy’s feet: his hair would rise, his fingertips made metal shavings hover; a crowd-pleasing spark could be elicited from his nose.
Benjamin Franklin left one Boston performance in a state. He immediately tried to put his hands on anything electrical. A primitive electric storage system—wire in water; this was called a Leyden Jar—had been introduced. Franklin showed off Leyden jars at his printing shop: throwing sparks, drawing crowds. Franklin created a hopping metal spider, cooked turkeys (“birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tende
Which is what sent Franklin into the Philadelphia rain with a kite, a key, and silk, an insulator. As failure insurance, Franklin brought along his son: If the experiment didn’t come off, Franklin could always say the kite was the boy’s. Two practical aims: He meant to demonstrate that the electricity generated by static, and the thunderous forks that sometimes singed trees and rooftops, were cousins; that here was a potentially awesome force. As churches, the tallest buildings, were often struck by lightning, Franklin’s second aim was to popularize the lightning rod. Franklin became America’s first celebrity scientist. Yale and Harvard offered honorary degrees. A Russian named Georg Richmann tried to repeat his work. The lightning burst Richmann’s left shoe and pressed a small red circle into his forehead. Richmann became a casualty and a novelty: the first person electrocuted by love of science.
The technology proceeded by fits and starts. Also accidents and grudges, progress charted with entries in the dictionary. In 1781, an Italian professor named Luigi Galvani discovered that frogs’ legs—relieved from their donors—would still kick under application of a current. Galvani’s belief was that even the dead continued to generate some form of animal electricity. Alessandro Volta, his rival, thought this was just ridiculous. To demonstrate the ridiculousness (“What is left,” he wrote, “of the animal Electricity claimed by Galvani?”), Volta invented a surer way to generate and store electricity: The voltaic pile, the battery. But there they are, preserved together in the dictionary—the conventioneers’ hall where everyone shakes hands after death. A current that moves is “galvanic.” The current is the volt.
Michael Faraday steps into the narrative like a hero out of Dickens: rough childhood, smooth features, virtuous character, shy achievement. (In the old ABC drama Lost, which featured a scary electromagnetic island, the sole character to have any idea what was going on is named Faraday.) Faraday, a London blacksmith’s son, left school at twelve. He put in seven years as a bookbinder’s apprentice. And it’s funny that electricity, which would take a planet of readers and redirect them toward YouTube and touchscreens, was perfected by somebody from the trade. In 1812, a customer gave Faraday his tickets to a series of chemistry lectures. Faraday attended and was smitten. He composed a kind of love letter, using the tools of his shop—took perfect notes, bound them into a volume, presented the book to the lecturer, who happened to be head of the Royal Institute of Science.
Faraday became his apprentice—then began to outshine everybody. In 1822, Faraday wrote four words in his notebook: “convert magnetism into electricity.” It took nine years. His solution was to rotate a metal disk inside the arms of a horseshoe magnet. Since the process was dynamic, his machine was called a Faraday dynamo, which meant another new word.
By 1831, electricity could be stored, it could be generated. It still didn’t have a use.
SAMUEL MORSE WAS BORN—oddly—a mile from Ben Franklin’s birthplace. He arrived in 1791, one year after the big Philadelphian departed, as if the tech were passing a sort of baton. Morse liked to draw—as a kid, he scratched a portrait into a school cabinet, got yelled at. Once he was famous, that chest became a relic.
Morse attended Andover, started Yale at age fourteen. He liked physics and chemistry. He played with Volta’s battery, sat in on lectures about electricity: it was then understood as one of the world’s secretions—“electrical effluvia,” the “universal fluid.”
But Morse was mostly an artist; he helped defray tuition by selling friends portraits of themselves. Then he headed for England, to study painting, enter competitions, grouse about money, return home broke after three years. London had been a series of wardrobe and beverage disappointments. “My drink is water,” Morse complained to his parents. “I have had no new clothes for nearly a year.”
In the States, Morse began an incredibly successful career as a failure. He became a kind of restlessly unsuccessful painter, changing lures and streams each time he couldn’t catch fish, failing at a variety of locations and styles. He failed with mythological subjects in Boston. With patriotic images in Washington and mini-portraits in New Hampshire. (In 1827, he began a strange campaign in New York City against the ballet. “The plain fact of the matter is this,” Morse explained in an editorial. “The exhibition in question is to all intents and purposes the public exposure of a naked female.” This failed.) For an uncustomary, four-year respite, Morse succeeded in Charleston, South Carolina, as a society painter. Then recession crept in, and he failed there, too.
So he headed back to Europe. To Italy and France. He had an idea for a kind of commercial anti-travel. Since most Americans knew about the Louvre, but were unlikely to ever get across, he would execute a group portrait of the museum’s collection, which could then be exhibited for money throughout the United States. This failed. In 1832, Morse sailed home aboard the Sully—another Sully, Thomas Sully, was America’s foremost painter. If Morse had been a luckless actor, this would have been as gloomy as slinking home aboard a boat called the De Niro, the DiCaprio, or the Pitt. It must have put him in a rotten mood.
One night at dinner he fell into a conversation about electricity. Another Franklin experiment had demonstrated how quickly current flashed over the wire. Even across rivers and miles: It happened in no time at all. Electricity, it later turned out, moves at nearly the speed of light. (As Martin Amis would write, “It ain’t slow.”) Franklin, a showboater, used this principle to set off gunpowder from remote locations. He liked a boom.
At the table, Morse posed his question: If the wire could communicate a spark—the idea that Franklin had just now decided to set off the gunpowder—why couldn’t it also communicate information? If the information were simply on and off, couldn’t you convert this into an alphabet? (Morse code, a sort of primitive binary, was the first spoken instance of what’s now the most common language on Earth. Email, texts, Instagram; what gets exchanged more often over the course of a day than binary?)
Morse’s father had been a minister, and the evening has the sound of one of those encounters from the Bible: the men fell to talking, and did not stop till morning. Morse wandered the deck, continuing the conversation in his head, and did not even notice when it was dawn. His invention would make use of everything then understood about electricity: battery, wires, speed.
He roughed out a sample message on deck—“War. Holland. Belgium. Alliance. France. England. Against. Russia. Prussia. Austria.” Which reads like a stray bit of Nostradamus, a news broadcast from one century ahead. Debarking in New York City, Morse turned to the boat’s chief officer. “Well, Captain, should you hear of the telegraph one of these days,” he said, “remember the discovery was made on board the good ship Sully.”
Then Morse began a twelve-year career of failing at the telegraph. (It’s no accident his best biography is subtitled “The Accursed Life of Samuel Morse.”) He mocked up devices that failed. He failed to patent his work. He couch-surfed with his brothers in Manhattan. He wrote tracts denouncing Catholics and immigrants—“The insolence of foreigners,” he warned, “will no longer be endured,” and “We shall soon have more papists in the North than they have slaves in the South.” He took a position as professor of painting at New York University; unpaid. In his offices, Morse set up magnets, wires, batteries. To save money, he ate and slept by their side.
Public demonstrations of the telegraph failed. “His situation,” explains an otherwise sober nineteenth-century biography, “was forlorn in the extreme.” He ran for mayor of New York, on a strict anti-immigration, pro-nativist platform, and failed spectacularly. (Morse received just under a thousand close-the-pier votes.) Morse wrote to Washington, asking to demonstrate his apparatus. In February 1838, the inventor set up wires and receivers for senators and congressmen in the firelit chambers of the Commerce Committee. And a strange thing happened. It must have felt unnatural, like a spring breeze over snow.
Morse succeeded. The response was passionate, immediate. A kind of stunned babbling. The congressmen: “What would Jefferson think, should he rise up and witness what we have just seen?” “When will improvements and discoveries stop?” “Time and space are now annihilated.” Another said simply, “The world is coming to an end.” The committee voted funds, a $30,000 grant, for Morse to string forty miles of telegraph line connecting Washington to Baltimore.
