The Parrot and the Igloo: Necessary Reading Now!
When our children and grandchildren look back on this era, one of their most confounding questions will be their bewilderment-- maybe even rage-- that we let climate change go this far downhill before doing anything about it. “What were you thinking?” will be the kindest way they will phrase it.
David Lipsky has the answer.
In his taut and elegantly written “The Parrot and the Igloo,” Lipsky performs the high-wire act of writing the complete history of, as the subtitle reads, “climate change and the science of denial,” and doing so in bingeworthy fashion. “I wanted it to be like a Netflix release, where all the episodes drop together,” he writes in the preface. Trust me, it is.
Crazy thing is, he begins in a completely counterintuitive place, way back with Samuel Morse and the invention of the telegraph, then slides into the Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla stories, and somehow it all makes perfect sense-- you will learn things you never knew, will want to learn more, and will desperately hope the book does become a Netflix series. It’s that good.
The book takes its oddly memorable title from two moments in time that bookend the story. In 1956, with the weather even then warming, oceanographer Roger Revelle had looked at the previous century’s worth of CO2 released from burning coal and oil and suggested it “may have a violent effect” on climate and warned of a runaway “greenhouse effect.” Picking up the story, The New York Times imagined a future Arctic, thawed and tropical, complete with “gaudy parrots squawking in the trees.”
This is 1956, mind you-- we knew about climate change that long ago.
Fast-forward six decades to a snowy winter in 2010, when Oklahoma senator and world-class climate curmudgeon James Inhofe’s grandchildren built an igloo on the Mall in DC, pushed a sign through its top that read “AL GORE’S *NEW* HOME,” and invited people to take climate-mocking selfies alongside it. Al Gore was then fresh off his An Inconvenient Truth and Nobel Prize turns, making him the prime target of climate deniers. (Inhofe, by the way, is famously the one who derided “manmade global warming” as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” on the Senate floor. His grandchildren might regret this in the coming years.)
Though 2010-- the year of that igloo-- ultimately tied 2005 as the hottest year on record up to then was irrelevant, as science is irrelevant. There was enough snow to build an igloo in DC: that’s all some needed to prove global warming was a hoax.
Along the way you'll meet a memorable cavalcade of colorful charlatans, cranks, and know-nothings who dedicated extraordinary amounts of time to taking down climate science, including a pantheon of people recycled from denying the mountain of evidence against Big Tobacco, Exxon leveraging the cigarette experience to stonewall climate action.
Inhofe himself criticized the leftist environmental extremists perpetrating the hoax by saying, “You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it, and that's their strategy.” Ironically, this has been exactly the denialists’ strategy-- and a sadly duplicitous media allowed the deception to continue for decades. Even now it continues.
Sadly, the upshot of the denialists’ work is the wide distrust of science in general, a distrust that ramped up even higher during COVID, where a vaccination that saved millions of lives through brilliant cutting-edge science was dismissed as, yes, a hoax.
In the end, it is an infuriating book but a necessary one, as Lipsky places his finger on the pulse of popular culture to show us how we arrived at this odd moment, where each month seemingly sets a record for the warmest month ever-- the hottest June ever, then the hottest July, etc.-- and we are still paralyzed into insane inaction.
Climate change has produced a surprisingly robust shelf of great nonfiction reads, from Bill McKibben’s elegiac “The End of Nature” in 1989 to Elizabeth Kolbert’s masterful “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” in 2020. Lipsky’s “The Parrot and the Igloo” belongs on the short list of best climate books ever.
Read it and weep.