The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial
By David Lipsky
WW Norton 2023

There’s an obvious, sickly timeliness attending the publication of David Lipsky’s new book, The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science and Denial, since the book appears on the doorstep of a summer that has looked like dystopian science fiction for three-quarters of the surface of the planet. Several billion people have been trapped under heat domes of unprecedented severity and durability, and it’s all lasted for so long and been so close to universal that the summer prompted long-overdue widespread public discussions springing from two simple observations: this isn’t normal, and it isn’t sustainable.

The science of drastic climate change is fairly old and very settled; the sticking point in those public conversations tends to be not the clear, measurable reality of a rapidly-destabilizing climate but rather the drivers of that destabilization. Lawmakers in the employ of the fossil fuel industry abetted those industries in downplaying, distracting, and, the key word here, denying any link between human activity and the rising carbon dioxide levels that are quickly cooking the planet. 

The history of that kind of coordinated, systematic denialism, that program of disinformation and deceit, is Lipsky’s subject here, and given the Big Lebowski soft-core adulation of an overrated author in his earlier 2010 book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, readers might worry about how seriously he’d take this most serious of subjects. And that worry might be increased by his opening comparison of his book to a Netflix series, with chapters you can either catch separately or binge in the order they dropped. This doesn’t exactly bode well for a deep and detailed weigh-in on the topic.

Regardless of whether you read The Parrot and the Igloo like a Netflix series or a boring old book, you’ll encounter here a deep and detailed weigh-in on the topic — not of catastrophic climate change, but of the hitherto successful campaign to convince the public that catastrophic climate change isn’t actually any big deal.

Lipsky’s account looks at a long sweep of what we might call public science stretching back to Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison, but there’s a more modern key example that almost exactly parallels industry-subsidized climate denialism: the decades-long work of the tobacco industry to deceive the public about the dangers not only of smoking but also of ETS: Environmental Tobacco Smoke (“just the hills and valleys enjoying a puff,” Lipsky jokes). Long before the EPA branded secondhand smoke a Group A carcinogen in 1993, Big Tobacco was working hard through bought scientists, bought celebrities, and bought lawmakers to help the general public deny how dangerous the product was. “One path — the monster path — looked secure,” Lipsky writes:

One path – the monster path – looked secure. If a single study couldn’t be discounted, go big: discredit all science. “We need to challenge the popular notion that science is objective, value-free, and without error,” [wrote the 1989 Science Action Plan of Philip Morris]. “We are raising the scientific credibility issue each time ETS is mentioned.” 

The comparison with our present historical moment practically draws itself, and Lipsky’s energetic, often irreverent narrative makes it all intensely readable, although infuriating. After all, the longer the truth takes even to be acknowledged, the more delayed is any even partial attempt at a solution. That momentum-lag is crucial for the long-term business-model of the predatory businesses at the heart of the problem, and it’s also maddening, since, as Lipsky points out, the truth of catastrophic climate change is well known:

In a way, that’s the end of the story. The scientists with verve, intelligence, creativity, expertise, vigor, integrity, dedication, and courage. (I know; I have a thesaurus, too.) Voyaged to the world’s forbidding top and bottom, gloved and parka-ed, to drill and examine. They studied, published, challenged, and corrected one another, perfecting a theory that turned out to be true. 

The Parrot and the Igloo arrives in a world on fire and perhaps, just perhaps, finally waking up to its peril. In many important ways, this is the villains’ story. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.