The climate scientist’s lament: “Global warming isn’t an opinion; it’s an equation.” That’s how David Lispky, author of the bestseller The Parrot and Igloo, summed up the fracture between climate science and the misguided narrative that has hobbled our response to climate change for more than a century.
“Global warming,” Lipsky writes in the book, “is a long history spent in the hall of ironies.”
Indeed.
The Long Road to Institutionalized Climate Denial
In The Parrot and the Igloo, Lipsky expertly guides us through the ironic twists and turns of climate change, climate science, and climate denial: From Svante August Arrhenius, who, at the turn of the 20th century, first calculated (by hand) the climate impacts of burning coal, to today, more than one hundred years later, when his hard-won equations have proven hauntingly accurate, despite an entire industry built in service of denying it.
Lipsky’s novels and non-fiction works have earned him accolades from The New Times, The New Yorker, The Chicago Tribune, and Vanity Fair, among many others. He brings his prodigious research and storytelling skills to bear in The Parrot and The Igloo. In it, he paints with broad strokes the panorama of how we came to understand climate science.
How, by the 1950s, the implications of our carbon-intensive energy economy on climate were clear, well-researched, and well-publicized.
And how, in one of those ironies, Big Tobacco cleared the path to engineered misinformation and denial of inconvenient truths. Smoking isn’t harmful; climate science is junk science. Big Tobacco lost its fight, but not before it didn’t offload its playbook (and several of its crank-scientists-for-hire).
It is a fascinating, sometimes hilarious, often enraging tale of how we got here.
Join me as I discuss all these issues and more in an engaging conversation with David Lispsky, author of The Parrot and the Igloo.
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
