In “The Parrot and the Igloo,” the novelist and journalist David Lipsky spins top-flight climate literature into cliffhanger entertainment.
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...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/books/review/the-parrot-and-the-igloo-david-lipsky.html?smid=em-share
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