So who are all these scientists denying climate change? David Lipsky profiles them and gives them all the color they deserve in The Parrot and the Igloo. It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. But Lipsky has managed to both entertain and amuse in this gossipy but deeply researched book. It puts the players and the major events in perspective, and shows the deterioration of science in the process, thanks to a small cadre of quacks and frauds.

The overall impression I got was that they were and are people of very low quality, as well as amoral. These so-called skeptics are of the anything-for-a-buck genre. Some of them reversed course and contradicted their own clear statements to join the deniers’ gravy train. And let there be no doubt: there has been an immense and fabulous gravy train, funded by the usual suspects – Big Tobacco and the Koch Brothers.

Many of them are out and out frauds. They have no relevant education, no credentials, no career history and no accomplishments that would merit their classification as climate authorities. They all seem to seek fame and fortune from this, and they calculated that they could achieve it on the denial side, which is very lightly populated. As Steve Milloy, one of the worst (he’s still out there pushing debunked claims at his junkscience website and on Fox), said “There are only about 25 of us.” But with tobacco money and media seeking out the “other side”, they make far more noise than all the hundreds of thousands of global scientists who understand the facts. The deniers got huge salaries, offices, globetrotting appointments, first class travel, and set up their own think tanks to further their masters’ cause and rake in donations. And all they have to do is make waves.

Lipsky shows the real scientists have been right. Their predictions have proven to be conservative, if anything. And their timelines have proven to be largely correct. Their near unanimity on climate change comes from thousands of scholarly papers, peer reviewed and published so they can be replicated and verified. And so they have, untold times.

The deniers, by contrast, refuse to write scholarly papers. None of them have published results of their own studies. None have conducted studies that could be replicated by others. Literally all they do is deny, with no basis or backup.

Very early on, Big Tobacco came up with a catchy way to deny climate change. They got their talking heads to say it was “junk science”. This struck a chord with conservatives, who continue to repeat it as if it had any meaning. It doesn’t. The studies conducted by actual scientists survive rigorous rules, procedures and protocols. The results are made public so others can compare results. That is how science works. The deniers refuse to participate.

The deniers say science doesn’t work via consensus. Maybe, but as Science’s editor pointed out in 2001 “Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science.” The consensus among 25 well paid deniers is far more absurd.

Big Tobacco then came up with its counter to junk science: sound science. They even set up their own group, Advanced Sound Science – or ASS – run by the loudest of the loud. It has, needless to say, contributed nothing to science, but has convinced a lot of Republican congressmen that “sound science” is always missing in action. They long for it, if only it existed. And they will accept nothing without it. Not that anyone knows what it entails. There is no methodology for dramatic new sound science. As Stanford biologist Donald Kennedy explained it: “It doesn’t have any normative meaning whatsoever. My science is Sound Science, and the science of my enemies is Junk.”

At their most generous, the deniers claim “more research is needed”. No one can disagree with that, so it is safe to repeat after every new paper and discovery. But as the US Surgeon General of the era understood about smoking and smog: “Research without action is a dangerous sedative.” Deny and delay is proving fatal.

The final puzzle piece/cliché word in the denier arsenal is uncertainty. Washington under Reagan, Bush and Trump made it into the most common descriptor of every scientific finding. Nothing was ever clear; there was always uncertainty in science. Science is just plain unreliable in 21st century America. Then under Trump, the word climate was banned altogether. So there was no need for uncertainty any more.

But why tobacco? It seems that Big Tobacco cottoned on to climate change as the ticket out of the secondhand smoke controversy. They figured if they could malign the science behind clean air, they could dissipate the criticism of their customers killing their own children with their smoking. It’s a stretch, but Big Tobacco saw it as a lifeline as more and more customer lawsuits went against them. Worse, airlines were beginning to limit and then ban smoking onboard, followed by offices and restaurants. It had to be stopped as soon and as loudly as possible. Money was no object. So Big Tobacco went after global warming. They would take down the whole planet for cigarettes.

In Lipsky’s recap of history, he shows the greenhouse effect has been well known and well accepted for hundreds of years. Three hundred years ago, philosopher-scientists determined that the atmosphere contained CO2, and at a very important level. If CO2 were cut in half, the planet would freeze to death like Mars. If it doubled, the planet would boil to death like Venus. Those nearby planets were the laboratories, living demonstrations of the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere. Real evidence, right in front of us, all along.

In the 1950s, definitive predictions began to appear, showing irreparable damage to the climate unless reductions were made immediately. My own favorite was the Russian Roulette model: Every decade, you add another bullet to the revolver and have one of your children (or later, their children) pull the trigger with the gun at their own heads. That metaphor runs out in the 2020s, where we see record, out of control heating, fires, flooding and mass migration chaos all over the world. The deniers, meanwhile, continue to claim the world would be far better off with much more CO2. It would be warmer and much more comfortable year round and far more lush because plants (at least poison ivy, Lipsky found) would love more CO2. Still waiting on that nirvana. It’s a leg up on God.

In 1970, everyone got it. Even President Richard Nixon joined in, proclaiming a new federal agency, the EPA. He said 1970 must be the year “when America pays it debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters and our living environment. It is literally now or never. “ Richard Nixon said that. Really. And on a CBS-TV news series called Can the Planet Be Saved, Walter Cronkite said “We found not one who disagreed that some disaster portends.”

The USA was frightened and onboard until the Carter years, when fuel shortages, and Carter’s love of domestic fossil fuel firms began to turn the tide of opinion (In terms of actual oil imports though, the USA went from $3.7 billion in 1971 to $427 billion in 2013, despite all the self-sufficiency maneuvering). This followed a period of killer smogs in LA, New York and London, diverting attention to visible, smellable, choking pollution. It was literally an in-your-face issue. Much more immediately critical than long-term warming. Add Big Tobacco agendas, and conservative lawmakers could soon be counted on to actually laugh at climate change. It eventually became a hoax to them (by whom or for what gain was never clear).

Eventually, the fossil fuel folks read the Big Tobacco playbook and piled on, pumping more millions into denial, while real scientists had their already inadequate funding cut back. Big coal, for example, only decided in 1991 to band together and reposition global warming as a theory, not a fact in the mind of the public. It worked.

This at any rate is the way Lipsky presents it, except it is delightfully character-driven, which is unusual in my experience. He has been following it in great depth for decades. He has met the key players, attended the hearings, read the transcripts, and even read the awful publications of the deniers. He says writing this book has made him angry, and subject to outbursts that cost him friendships. He cannot believe how such selfish and ignorant men (all but one are men) can get away with so much fraud every day, for decades. It is costing us the planet, for their fame and comfort while they live. On behalf of cigarettes.

Lipsky’s quirky style makes it easier to digest, in some ways. His descriptions of the players is consistently colorful. Here’s how he describes Charles Keeling, who was obsessed with measuring CO2 all over the world: “He had oversize ears, a crewcut, friendly eyes—in a suit, he looked like he’d been sent to body jail (…) He measured with a Zen frenzy.”

It is Keeling’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii that is the global gold standard for CO2 measurement. Since he set it up, CO2 has gone from 313 ppm to 413ppm, passing well into the way-too-much atmospheric CO2 zone. (Before the industrial revolution, it was in the 200s.) When Keeling died in 2005, his son “Ralph—good, no-fuss name” picked up the baton.

Jim Hansen, the most famous whistleblower of climate change, was a NASA engineer who testified to this problem starting in the 1950s. There is no question of his qualifications. He became the most positive and public face of climate science for decades. He has often been called the Paul Revere of global warming. Lipsky says of him: “He has the catcher’s mitt face of a farmer, someone you might see giving reluctant directions to a sportscar at the side of a long, flat highway.” I confess I don’t know what that means.

Here’s another: Prominent climate scientist Wallace Broecker “looked, in the kindest way possible, like a highly evolved frog. Flat cheeks, wide mouth, bulge forehead. Which makes a type of sense: his specialty was water.” This is not your average climate change analysis.

Another highly qualified scientist, F. Sherwood Rowland “had the look of a local TV weatherman—owl glasses, weedy brows, friendly and concerned; a man who would use complicated phrases, then take the trouble to explain.” Does that help?

It was Rowland who said: “What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if in the end all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?” Just for saying that, he deserves a better description.

Speaking of complicated phrases, Lipsky is a specialist in them. His paragraphs are filled with partial sentences, stray adjectives, and obscure references. He has successfully out-obscured me, as there are three or four I could not make head nor tails of. I can only assume they come from some dark corner of pop culture I have not dwelled in. My hat comes off to Lipsky, but it doesn’t help the read.

He describes LA’s first smog tests as “It was junior prom: first corsage, first limo, first dance.” You don’t necessarily know what he’s talking about, even though it is clear and in plain English.

“(Global warming) had resumed its usual awful timing. A kind of historical reboot.” No idea.

“The self-defense of last resort is the gavel.” It is? Do you hit people with it, or is an auction the last resort? Maybe Congressional hearings? It turns out to refer to suing someone, in this case suing Arthur Robinson, the man whose non-existent think tank made up the signed statement that claimed 31,000 signatures of scientists, all non-believers in warming. For two decades, this fraudulent claim circulated as the real thing, cited by Fox News repeatedly as if it were new each time Robinson added more signatures, and of course was the very foundation stone of denial. It turns out it was made up, with ridiculous cutesy names and a lot of “scientists” with degrees in computer science, if any. Actual climate scientists, though, were much less in evidence.

The very title of the book is about as obscure as can be. Pretty much only David Lipsky would get it. And he takes several pages to explain it. So the book has issues. Nonetheless, it is a fast-paced and highly descriptive overview of how the USA abandoned scientific discovery for a hoax. It profiles all the key players, and not always in a flattering light. And it acknowledges that too late was in the 1970s, not 2050. So the ride will only get bumpier as we add bullets to the overloaded revolver.

David Wineberg ( )