Excerpts: “People began to notice warming in the twenties; they just didn’t have a name for it. (Decades later, the NASA scientist Jim Hansen—whose midnight nickname was the ‘the Paul Revere of Global warming’—would fix the heating’s start at 1880. He received an immediate reward: the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan cut his funding)” (p.63).
“Where climatologists saw science—calculations aimed to match the swirl of the natural world—skeptics recognized politics, the never-ending campaign, your story versus ours” (p. 102).
“It was like inheriting a ball club. You got experience, organization—an offense plus athletes who knew how to execute. As the Union of Concerned Scientists reported, Exxon took ‘strategy [and] tactics’ from the tobacco playbook.’ And even ‘the very same TASSC personnel.’ Exxon paid for groups supporting Frederick Seitz, S. Fred Singer, Patrick Michaels. And a former colleague of Jim Tozzi’s, Steve Milloy, who had become director of ASS activities. All brought to the field the wiliness of the veteran” (p. 349).
“And this gave oil ‘a calculated and familiar disinformation campaign,’ the Union reported, ’to mislead the public and forestall government action on global warming” (p. 349).
“It enlarges the heart—shows the impact one individual can make. That so few people could frustrate the will of science and world for so long. (It makes you wonder if they weren’t the secret heroes of this story all along: a magnet for condemnation, so the rest of us could get on with our smoky lives unrestricted)” (p. 410).
“The climate fight is a story of descent. From the science journals to the opinion pages, then the talk shows, then the petitions. And with each defeat, denial regrouped on a new and lower floor. Now climate had become a matter for the blogs: What the Guardian called ‘an unanticipated outpost of the rise of ‘grey power’. Climate’s new adversaries were retirees ‘with time on their hands’” (p. 425).
“Passionate admiration for another’s work does not make you into that person. This is among the modern disappointments. Recognize it, and you walk away clean; miss it, stay in, and you fester” (p. 431).
“’The heat accumulating throughout the Earth because of human emissions,’ the Times explained, ‘is roughly equal to the energy that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding on the planet every day’” (p. 467).
“This was the outcome of what Roger Revelle once described as an unintentional, species-wide science project. ‘Human beings are now carrying out a large sale geophysical experiment,’ Revelle had written in 1957, ‘of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future,’ We’d spent thirty years putting together an unimaginably thorough answer to the discouraged question once posed by Dr. Sherwood Rowland. ‘What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions,’ he’d asked, ‘if in the end all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?’ (p. 467).
“In June 2017—his fifth month in office—President Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. And every seedling of progress was mowed under. It might as well have been 2001 again, when George W. Bush pulled us from the Kyoto treaty. Or the 1950s again, when the facts about global warming were fresh and mysterious and awaiting proof” (p. 469).
Lipsky, David. (2023). The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.