THE PARROT AND THE IGLOO: Climate and the Science of Denial, by David Lipsky
In the preface to “The Parrot and the Igloo,” the journalist David Lipsky’s new book on global warming, he admits he thought about opening it with a threatening line: “This story put a hole through my life. Now it’s your turn.” You can see why. Reading it is like watching a car crash in slow motion. You know where this is headed.
Lipsky’s book is a project of maximum ambition. He retells the entire climate story, from the dawn of electricity to the dire straits of our present day. It’s well-trod ground, but Lipsky, a newcomer to the climate field (he is best known for “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” a memoir set on a road trip with David Foster Wallace), makes it page turning and appropriately infuriating. He says it up front: He wants this to be like a Netflix series, bingeable.
We usually think of global warming as a modern malady, Lipsky writes, one that began in our lifetimes. Even as a climate reporter, I admit some part of me thought that too. Yet he reminds us that a Swedish chemist first realized that burning coal would warm the planet in the 1890s, and it’s chilling to learn that people were reading headlines about unprecedented heat in American newspapers as early as the 1930s. Of course, all the modern climate graphs show that the red line had crept up by then. For them it was unprecedented. Imagine if they could see a summer now.
The book takes its title from two moments in time. In 1956, The New York Times published a story imagining the Arctic of the future, thawed and tropical, complete with “gaudy parrots squawking in the trees.” Earlier that year, the oceanographer Roger Revelle had looked at the previous century’s worth of CO2 released from burning fossil fuels and suggested, according to Time magazine, that it “may have a violent effect” on the earth’s climate. We could be headed to a runaway “greenhouse” effect.
Fast-forward 54 years. In 2010, the Republican senator James Inhofe’s grandchildren built an igloo on the Capitol Mall, and stuck a sign on the roof: “AL GORE’S *NEW* HOME.” (Inhofe is also the guy who brought a snowball to the Senate floor in 2015.) It didn’t matter that 2010 would come to tie 2005 as the hottest year on record up to that point. There was snow enough to build an igloo. Global warming is a hoax.
The distance between the parrot and the igloo is Lipsky’s main subject. How did we slide so far from that early grasp of reality? The answer, of course, is good marketing. Around 2002, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz encouraged candidates to use the term “climate change” to play down the catastrophic tone of “global warming,” the phrase that the scientists were using. He wanted it to sound more like a neutral shift, the climatic equivalent of taking a Pittsburgh-to-Fort-Lauderdale road trip, and less like a broiling existential threat. Luntz came to regret it, but the term stuck.
Lipsky acknowledges that “The Parrot and the Igloo” draws heavily from a handful of landmark climate books, including Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s “Merchants of Doubt” and Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Field Notes From a Catastrophe.” Readers of those texts will find some of the material here quite familiar, but Lipsky repackages it well; “The Parrot” is a thriller of deceptions, side deals and close calls.
Otherwise dry proceedings of back-room history are given a juicy injection of drama and humor. We get tales of vanity, fame and money — and at least one God complex. In 1982, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the Unification Church and a self-described messiah, founded The Washington Times, a newspaper that soon became a vehicle for right-wing talking points and climate denialism. (“Climate Claims Wither Under the Luminous Lights of Science,” one headline blared.) The Washington Times was Ronald Reagan’s favorite morning read. “Without knowing it,” Moon reportedly said, “even President Reagan is being guided by Father.”
Every new face (and there are many!) is important. The climate denialists come back again and again, at each fresh wave of global warming awareness, like “fire-jumpers,” Lipsky writes, landing in interview seats on news shows to snuff out concern before it can gain much momentum.
Eventually, Lipsky’s narrative, leaning on Oreskes and Conway and others, detours to Big Tobacco and its quest to suppress evidence that cigarettes cause cancer. The reader is left to wonder why, until the same characters paid by Philip Morris to scuttle bans on cigarettes become the ones shilling for Big Oil. By the time we hear about a scheme in the 1980s to deny the connection between aspirin and a scourge of sudden child deaths from Reye’s syndrome, we know where this is going. Denial is a cottage industry of the few but talented.
The yearning question for climate journalists now: What are the magic words? We have the facts and the wildfires to prove them. But climate communication — how to make those facts penetrate hearts and minds — seems always a losing battle. The denialists have always had sexier language, and they pay handsomely for it. Lipsky, with his cinematic account, has a good chance to grab back some of that ground.
Zoë Schlanger is an environmental journalist. Her book about plant intelligence, “The Light Eaters,” will be published next year.
THE PARROT AND THE IGLOO: Climate and the Science of Denial | By David Lipsky | 480 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company | $32.50
