Writer’s Voice Transcript: Interview with David Lipsky about The Parrot and The Igloo

The biggest problem author David Lipsky faced while writing his book about climate deniers? The lies.

One of the things that was hard about reading stories that have to do with people who lie for money is that you want to say, on Tuesday, you said that if we could prove that there was melting in the Arctic, you would then admit that global warming is true.

But here it is Friday, and instead of saying, oh, now we'll admit that global warming is true, what you're saying is, oh, how wonderful. We've searched for years for a Northwest passage, and now we have it. That's an actual thing that one of the two most famous deniers, a Forrest Gump figure named S. Fred Singer, that's something that he really did. — David Lipsky

Intro

If you think the reality of climate change is something that was only apparent in the last 30 or so years, think again. In 1956, the New York Times prophesied that once global warming really kicked in, we could see parrots in the Antarctic.

Fast forward to 2010, when Senator James Inhofe built an igloo on the Washington Mall and put a sign on top, Al Gore's new home, "HONK IF YOU LOVE CLIMATE CHANGE."

In his book, The Parrot and the Igloo, David Lipsky tells a story of how we moved from climate reality in 1956 to climate denial in 2010 (and beyond). The book traverses the course of the intervening decades with the stories of the hucksters, zealots, and crackpots who lied about climate science and misled the public in ever more outrageous ways.

One of the most interesting threads in The Parrot and the Igloo is how intertwined tobacco denialism and climate denialism have been all along, sharing PR firms, campaign talking points, and even so-called expert spokespeople to spread the corporate propaganda of their client industries.

The Parrot and the Igloo is, among other kudos, a New York Times Editor's Choice and a New Yorker Best Book of 2023.

Interview

Francesca: David Lipsky, welcome to Writer's Voice.

What a pleasure to be here, Francesca.

The subtitle to The Parrot and the Igloo is Climate and the Science of Denial. I actually had to look at that a couple of times. I had to do a double take. The “Science of Denial,” or would it be better to say the “science” of denial?

Yeah, Francesca, it's funny. I'm sure that you come across this just in talking to writers. You do want to have a subtitle. I would have preferred no subtitle.

And I also thought it would have been fun to call it “American Climate” because of the weird combination we have in America always of overstatement and marketing of things that might not be true. And that's why they require marketing.

So I would have loved if the subtitle had been “American Climate” because it would have been a story of how America dealt with climate, but also about how our particular approach to problems, our American climate, has caused trouble with climates all over the world.

But yeah, I hoped “Science of Denial” would be funny because those guys got very, very good at it. And that's part of our American climate.

You write in the epilogue that you became a very unpleasant person while writing this book. I mean, I can imagine the stress of it, but tell us why did you become so grumpy?

Because one of the things that was hard about reading stories that have to do with people who lie for money is that you want to say, on Tuesday, you said that if we could prove that there was melting in the Arctic, you would then admit that global warming is true. And here it is Friday. And instead of saying, oh, now we'll admit that global warming is true. What you're saying is, oh, how wonderful. We've searched for years for a Northwest passage, and now we have it. That's an actual thing that one of the two most famous deniers, a Forrest Gump figure named S. Fred Singer, that's something that he really did.

He was speaking with a reporter from the Washington Post. First, he was speaking to the Wall Street Journal. And then he said, there's been no appreciable warming in the Arctic for 50 years or ever by standard satellite measures.

And then he was told, no, there's been incredible melting. And now there's shipping there for 10 months out of the year.

Instead of saying, oh, I was wrong, what he said was, well, we've been looking for a Northwest passage for such a long time, and now we have it.

Similarly, presented with evidence of a sea level rise — rather, this is again S. Fred Singer and why he was delicious in a terrible way to write about, but would be painful because it would make you start doing this to your friends— presented with that evidence, rather than say sea level is rising, he said, the best evidence may be that it's a lowering of the land surface. And what I love about S. Fred Singer is that he added the “may” just to cover himself.

And actually, that's one claim that is at least partially true because where I live, the land is in fact lowering, but the sea level is also rising.

Exactly. But it's that kind of thing where you're insisting that people be true to what they said a day ago, right?

That is great when you are trying to tell a story about how people professionally lying has had a terrible worldwide effect, but it doesn't make you the most fun at a dinner party, as I was repeatedly told during the composition of this book.

Oh, you're poor listeners. But I bet they're thanking you now, as a matter of fact.

Oh, they all loved reading the book. And some of them were like, yeah, I see why you were like that. But it didn't make it any more fun when I was like that.

God, S. Fred Singer.

And is this the same guy who said on the one hand that if anything, the earth is cooling, not warming, and then later on talked about how beneficial carbon dioxide was?

That is indeed that gentleman, but what was great about S. Fred Singer — there's a friend of mine, the nonfiction writer, Rich Cohen, who is a really great nonfiction writer. He said, what you really should do is make an opera out of the S. Fred Singer story, because he's such an odd character and he keeps turning up lying about important things — but what he said, if there's a real cold, climate scientists are so confused.

And this was what he was trying to tell all of us so that we wouldn't ask our elected representatives, hey, could you do something about the climate? We would like it so that there were fewer 102 degree days in the winter. We'd like it if things keep growing. We'd like it if there was still water. We don't want to have big storms.

To get you to not do that, he and his allies would try to make all climate scientists seem a little kerflooey in the head. So he said to the, I think this was to the Miami Times, he said, “you know what, they're so confused, climate scientists, that if we have a really cold winter, all those people who are actually warning about global cooling, they're all going to come back.” I'm not kidding.

And then two years later, there was a really bad winter and a scientist did come back to warn about global cooling. And it was S. Fred Singer! Who said, based on the winter we've had now, I think we should be more worried about a global cooling than a global warming. It takes a very special kind of person to do that.

Great fun to tell their story, but maddening to read about it in a research capacity.

Well, he could join, was that Jim Inhofe who brought in a snowball to Congress?

Yes, Jim Inhofe is the one who brought the snowball into the well of the Senate.

So we've gone right to the heart of it, really, because this book is essentially about the long project on the part of, shall we say, you know, some of the biggest corporations in the world to dismantle the public trust in science, a project that they have been eminently successful at. Talk about the term “junk science,” which was invented by the tobacco industry. And we'll get to that too, because there's such a tight pairing between the tobacco denialists and the climate denialists, but it was equally promoted by the climate denialists. So tell us about this project and this term junk science.

That's a great question.

When you're fighting over how people are going to vote or how people are going to talk at the water cooler or how they'll talk when they're standing at the bus stop on 79th and 75th Avenue and they're realizing the crosstown isn't coming and they're deciding to share an Uber, they're going to pass the time by talking about something.

And the fight, we've seen it over the last 15 or 20 years, really the fight for the political technicians, the mood technicians, is what phrase people will use when they're talking about a problem.

So the control of this, it goes down even to how you would talk about global warming.Sometimes people think that it's proof of something wonky in the science when they say, how come it was called global warming for so long and now it's called climate change?

But that was a purposeful decision made by the lead pollster/strategist of the Republican Party at the turn of the century. What he said was, we have to stop saying “global warming” because it suggests a catastrophic challenge.

Whereas if we say “climate change,” it seems more like a winter vacation going from Ohio to Fort Lauderdale and it seems more manageable. So I want all Republicans to switch now and never say “global warming again because that makes people feel that there needs to be action on the issue.

That's a great example of how the battlefield became how we would absorb information and then how we might express it to people who then themselves might express it to other people.

So you have a very ingenious set of technicians and working both in a medium and with materials that people didn't really work with before.

Similarly, the same kinds of technicians, as you were saying, the tobacconists faced this problem for a longer time. And by the 80s, they were in a terrible position.

Francesca, we both remember when smoking seemed okay and glamorous in movies, right?

Well, they still smoke in movies.

They do. Then you read that they were smoking clove cigarettes. Some of the younger actors will say that they smoke cloves because they didn't want to do that damage to their lungs.

But I used to take the Amtrak to school and I would go into the smoking car. I'm sure that's going to tell on my lifespan later on because there was less conversation because those people were really dedicated to smoking. So the smoking car tended to function as a quiet car.

The reason why that was legal really up through the 80s was that we had come to an accommodation with cigarettes, which is, if you want to have a Marlboro Light, that's fine. You're going to be the one who dies and not me.

But then by the early 70s, and then especially by the later 70s, the science began to point out that actually if I'm standing next to you and you're having that Marlboro Light, I'm having part of it too.

And we're a very fair people, humans and Americans. And if you want to do it to yourself, that's okay. You want to vote, well, see, I was going to say if you want to vote Republican, that's okay, except that that affects me too.So really we can't say that.

If you want to watch Friends instead of Seinfeld, that's your business, right? But if you're forcing me to watch Friends with you instead of Seinfeld, that's where we kind of step in.

And so by the mid 80s, by the late 70s, the pollsters, one of the many teams of pollsters that tobacco had hired said, “secondhand smoking is going to be the thing that kills you because it'll change the anti-smoking movement from a ripple into a tide.”

And so they were preparing for it and sure enough, by the mid 80s, the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, does all these studies and declares secondhand smoke to be a class A carcinogen, which means it has to be regulated.

That puts you in a terrible bind if you're a tobacco company. You can just say, okay, right? But that means that once you can't smoke in trains anymore, so I have no quiet car as a college student, once you can't smoke in airplanes or movie theaters or restaurants, you're losing, and especially offices, you are losing, if you're selling tobacco, you're losing 34% or half, 50% of the day's possible smoking.

That means people can only smoke a little bit in the morning and then at night, and you're going to see that on your bottom line instantly. So you have to fight that instantly.

They fought it in two ways. They had two different branches, particularly. One is one of those funny things like climate change and global warming. They changed the way secondhand smoke was phrased. They changed that pretty effectively to the phrase “environmental tobacco smoke,” which makes it sound like, oh yeah, there's a tree out there and the tree is having a Marlboro light or that brook or that hill. They're the ones who are having the menthol. It's not a person who you could talk to.

Second thing was they created a strategy, which you can draw a line from this to our neighbors who didn't want to take the vaccines during COVID. They decided that they had to undermine science.

It was really ingenious. It's the kind of thing where if you have a family member and they have a good idea about something, but you can't fight them on the idea. So instead you try to talk about bad ideas they've had in the past. Well, you were wrong about buying that catamaran that was swallowed by the hurricane last year. So certainly you're wrong about us getting booster shots.

Similarly, what especially Philip Morris, but the tobacco industry in general decided was make the EPA wrong about climate change and then people will think they're wrong about secondhand smoke and we can survive as companies.

One way they did it: when they started having meetings, “how do we do this? How do we make this big change?” And it's so it was thrilling and enraging and maybe bad company at people's homes to go over their documents, which because it turned out that they had so violated the law over such a long time, they were required by the Department of Justice to post millions of their documents online so that their crime would be evident to all.

It was fascinating to go through the minutes of their meetings and they were like, “we need a better term, need an attractive term, need catchier term than ‘bad science,’ too vague, too uncritical, need better term.”

And then they came across a book by a pro-industry scientist and the book was called Galileo's Revenge and the subtitle like subtitles like “climate and the science of denial,” the subtitle had the thing they were looking for: “junk science in the courtroom.”

It's so interesting because, not knowing this history, I have always thought of junk science as being the so-called science that the denialists purvey, which kind of blows up their idea about how successful it is to making what the associations they want you to make to it.

You know, on the surface, yes, but below it, no. Because think about it this way. You now have an idea that some science is good and some science is bad. Before, we had the term “junk science,” which is their coinage, you would just say, “this person's a scientist.” They are at Lawrence Livermore Labs or they're at Penn State, a great scientist like Mike Mann. And then these other people clearly are working for the tobacco companies or they are working for the fossil fuel companies.

So the other word we have, which is perfectly serviceable, is liar.

But if you can create the category “junk science,” it means some science is reliable, some science isn't.

That opens up a space in your mind that can be accessed by someone like, let's say, Stephen Malloy, who was a fake non-scientist who was in the employ of both the tobacco companies and the fossil fuel companies. And of course, his website is the junk science website.

So no, it is a dangerous idea, right? Because then, if you haven't got a phrase like junk science and someone doesn't want to take the COVID vaccine, if you ask them, you say, hey, there are all these studies show that the vaccine is lowering fatalities by in the 90 percentiles, right?

Then they'll say, well, I don't care what scientists say. That's not too convincing to the listener or even to them. But if you have a rhetorically firm phrase, if you have a field tested and a focus group tested phrase like “junk science,” it's going to sound dependable, right? “No, those studies are junk science.”

That's why the tobacconists were genius when they said, “need better term than bad science, need better term than global warming.” Climate change is a better term because then people can say, climate changes all the time. Why should we think that it being warm now is meaningful?

Junk science means some science is good, some science is bad.

Yes, exactly. It's real nihilism. It puts one in mind of when they talk about the weaponization of the federal government or the deep state. I mean, the CIA does not have an angel's halo around it. The CIA has been involved, let's say, in the overthrow of certain democratically elected regimes. But they have then taken that truth in a way and twisted it to allow them to violate the rule of law.

Brilliantly said. Because then there's a rhetorical category. And so to me, it's heartbreaking when I see people in outlets that I trust and admire like The Atlantic using that phrase, because every time you use their phrase, you're advancing their argument.

I myself find it hard not to say climate change. And every time I do, I know that I am making a pollster named Frank Luntz, wherever he is, very happy. I'm dropping a quarter in his Frank Luntz box somehow.

And then to popularize the phrase “junk science,” they created a whole fake organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. And they poured a lot of money into it.

And then they, you know, Philip Morris wrote a script for the people who'd be answering questions at call centers. Philip Morris worked hard on the script.

And the first question on the script they wrote was, isn't the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition a front group designed by Philip Morris? Answer, “no, not at all.”

And the idea of people reading a script written by Philip Morris, being read by Philip Morris employees to say they weren't working for Philip Morris, is part of the awful beauty of climate denialism and just denialism in general.

Yeah, you know, this marriage really between the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry in promoting denialism, it's not accidental. It's extremely intimate. They even shared the same so-called scientists. Junk scientists.

There you go. They shared the same junk scientists.

How do you explain that?

Well, it's funny. I'll explain it two ways.

One is, if you were an alien and you were watching the interesting, confused, sometimes farcical comings and goings on this interesting planet through their own version of the web telescope, you'd think, “Oh, it's funny. They're being metaphorical.”

Like there was a problem with smoking, right? There were actual people who made things that you smoke and send smoke in the air. And then their strategy was inherited by the people who were making the whole planet exhale smoke into the air. So there's a certain kind of metaphorical beauty, right?

In a way, the planet has a secondhand smoke problem, which is when we burn coal to turn turbines to give us electricity, and when we burn oil to move us on wheeled conveyances from New York to Los Angeles, we send smoke into the air. And that secondhand smoke essentially has an effect that we didn't count on initially.

So metaphorically, poetically, it's very beautiful. But then the second thing is, since the early part of the century, there have been fights.

It's hard to explain, but we didn't introduce products into the environment that used the materials in new ways that didn't [sic] benefit either the creatures that live on the planet or the planet itself.

Once that started — to be clear, especially with tobacco early on, it also became clear that you would have to try to find people who would say, “oh, this isn't as bad as it seems.”

And right from the beginning, for example, when people were saying right from the beginning — tobacco in the 20s and 30s — when they were trying to say, “hey, we've heard it makes you cough, but you know what? Tobacco is healthy because if you smoke, you're going to be less likely to have candy after a meal and that's going to be better for you.”

The confection industry hired the former health commissioner of Chicago to write a pamphlet, this is I think in the late 20s, called The Importance of Candy as a Food.

So going all the way back to fights about whether products are good or bad for the environment or for people, you always had companies reaching out to scientists.

Again, that genius pollster for the Republican Party, Frank Luntz, his focus groups — he's a focus group artist — his by then 20 years of focus groups told him one thing, which he passed along to his Republican candidate clients and passed along to then President Bush: the public is willing to trust scientists.

One of the interesting things about the past 20 years is they undermined that too.I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the psychology of the junk scientists that they employed. They actually had an idea — the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry — had an idea of the kind of person they were looking for. Is that right?

That's so good. Francesca, what a great reviewer.

Yeah, they had a document, the tobacconists, and the document was, best were people without institutional affiliation at or near retirement age. Because if they're not in the community, people aren't going to look at them funny. And if they're at or near retirement age, it's not going to matter, right? Because they'll be leaving their academic communities anyway.

And they may have based that, as we all do, on their research. The first professional denier that they had and kept on retainer was a geneticist — is the kindest way to put it — named Clarence Cook Little.

A eugenicist, right?

Yeah, no, I wanted to get into that in a second. But on the face of it, he was a geneticist. But yes, a eugenicist named Clarence Cook Little.

And when he was saying his reasons for taking this money that a lot of scientists turned down because the bill smelled of tobacco and hospital rooms — this would have been in 1954 — he gave two reasons for taking this job.

The job was to be the visible face of tobacco denial in 1954, because it was becoming quite clear that something bad was being done to smokers' lungs whenever they inhaled a cigarette. He said, A) I would like to be in New York, and I need more money. (Those conditions are often encountered together.) And then the second thing is, I can say anything I want to because my sarcophagus is built. And what he meant by that was, I'm at the end of my career. I am in my middle 60s. I've already made my mark for good or ill. And so it's not going to matter. All the things I'm going to be known for, I've already done. So you can just use me as a resume now.

And I think maybe seeing the benefit they got from Clarence Cook Little, the eugenicist, made them realize they should look for more people like him. And so one of the funny things is that almost all of the major deniers were, of course, mid-60s and above.

And also not particularly distinguished in their former careers either.

Yes. And in that case, in every case, first off, they all wanted the money. But it was like they all had...I'm laughing because I'm going extra literary now.

Edmund Wilson, a friend of F. Goss Fitzgerald at Princeton, he had a theory that I think became pretty accepted. It's sort of like a superhero theory of writers, that they all have to have a wound, and that's what makes them effective. He promulgated this theory. It's easier to remember the title: It's called the wound in the bow.

So for example, Marcel Proust's wound would be that he's not physically robust. And so that means he has to focus so hard, right?

James Joyce's wound is that he couldn't be accepted in Ireland. And so he had to be an exile, and that made him listen extremely keenly.

Similarly, Peter Parker, he does have the proportionate power of a spider from that radioactive spider bite. But on the other hand, compensatorily, he is not very popular in his high school or college classes.

With the deniers, it was the same pattern kept repeating.

Like Clarence Cook Little, we were smiling in that bitter way about him being a eugenicist. He was having a pretty strong career as a young scientist. And then in the early 20s and 30s, along with some other, let's be frank, terrible people, he got attracted by the idea of eugenics, which is that some races are better than others.

And not just that awfulness, but we should then try to stop the less good races from passing on their genes to the next generation. And that was a popular idea in the 30s.

And Clarence Cook Little was giving speeches when he became the head of what became Planned Parenthood later on, once it shook off all this awfulness. He said, I want to give thanks to the gentlemen who govern Germany, Italy, and Japan for popularizing this new science of eugenics.

During the war, for obvious reasons, World War II — the war against the gentlemen who govern Germany, Italy, and Japan — eugenics became less popular and it made him less popular.

And so in a way, taking an unpopular position is a way of taking revenge on all the people who've managed to stay within the acceptable bounds of normal — I'm going to smile by saying “decent” — society. But it's a way of taking revenge on the people who've done the right thing and who are looking at you with a proper level of judgment.

A kind of Trumpian delight in doing the wrong thing.

God, what a beautiful way to say that.

So S. Fred Singer, who we were talking about before, he could have had a wonderful scientific career, but at a crucial moment when he was young, he'd been working very hard for eight or nine years on the ionosphere with a famous planetary scientist named James Van Allen, who was working in Iowa.

And at a crucial moment, Van Allen invited S. Fred Singer, “come out and work with me in Iowa, we'll continue and complete this research together.” And Singer's bad luck at the exact same moment, the Navy offered him the role of press liaison in London.

And he said, “I weighed the idea of living in Iowa City or of traveling in Europe. And I chose Europe.”

And James Van Allen, a year or two later, proved the existence of what's now called the Van Allen Belt and went on to have an extremely, extraordinarily distinguished career in science. And Singer got what Edmund Wilson would call his wound. And he began to move farther and farther from the center of science.

And in a way, it's very much what tobacco is doing by attacking the EPA. If the EPA is saying we are responsible for secondhand smoke, and then we can say the EPA is wrong about global warming, they're saying global warming is bad in the same urgent tone of voice. If we can say they're wrong about global warming, maybe they're wrong about us.

For a scientist like S. Fred Singer, if he can say the mainstream is wrong about global warming, maybe they've also been wrong in the poor value they've attached to S. Fred Singer. It doesn't do him any good if he says they're right.

In spite of the huge amount of money funneled to guys like that —

Yes, in spite of all the extraordinary amount of money being funneled to — and by the way, it only took 25 of those scientists. They asked that gentleman, Stephen Malloy, how many of you are there? And he smiled and said, there's just 25 of us. That's all you need. But anyway, yes, the money being funneled to those 25 people…

ClimateGate

Well, so in spite of that, reality has a way of biting. And by 2009, there was a kind of critical year for the denial industry because people were beginning to wake up to the reality of climate chaos. That's what I tend to call it. And climate denialism was on the ropes, And then ClimateGate happened.

Yeah. It was so painful. It was painful to live through.

And then it was a great story for a lot of readers when I've gone around and said, God, it was so wild to get to the ClimateGate section.

In 2007, we had one of those great moments where something is proved. It's like the end of It's a Wonderful Life or a movie like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where the right thing happens after the wrong thing happening for so long.

There was a group that you'll see in the newspaper, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It formed up in 1988, welcomed by the first President Bush, and it was designed to just continue to assess all the research about global warming and say, are humans causing it? Are they not? That's its raison d'etre.

And there's a funny thing. A lot of the people who have followed this issue for many decades, there's a little smirk or a hard smile in their writing about this.

They would say conservative politicians might have been expected to oppose the formation of an international group of distinguished scientists to give a final yes or no, but a multi-year process would serve their interests too, because a final answer would be decades away. And you could always say, we're waiting for all the facts to come in.

And 20 years, 19 years after the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, in February of 2007, they came back with their answer: Yes, human beings are causing this. And wonderfully, that was the same year that former Vice President Gore won the Academy Award for Inconvenient Truth.

And then at the end of that year, the IPCC and Vice President Gore split the Nobel Prize for helping us to understand this terrible threat. And there was this wonderful feeling of victory.

Another great climate scientist named Dr. Richard Alley, also from Penn State then, he appeared at the press conference in Paris releasing the results.

And he said, “This is real. You've done good science, and we have a high level of confidence in the science. This is real. This is real. This is real. Now act. The ball's back in your court.”

That was the message that he gave to readers of The New York Times through a press conference.

And so we were moving towards action.

And then in 2009, the digital world, the social media world runs into climate change. And some hackers steal a tranche of emails from a university server in England, and they re-edit some of the emails. And in November of 2009, they made it seem as if the whole thing had been a hoax all along.

And all of the credit that the climate scientists had been building over a 50-year period is gone in a matter of months.

Right. Michael Mann, was he also targeted?

What a memory you have, Francesca. Yeah. I mean, remember, I've lived with these heroes and villains. Michael Mann's a great hero. But I've lived with these heroes and villains for years. And I can't tell you what a pleasant surprise it was to hear you say Michael Mann again.

Yeah, Michael Mann was the person targeted. And the reason they picked him, it's like, did you play that game Red Rover as a kid where schoolchildren will hold their arms in a line, and then you'll try to pick the weakest link to run through? And if you can break through, then you win, basically.

Michael Mann was the youngest. He was the most promising of the climate scientists, and he was also the youngest. And so they went after him for a chart he had made.

It's a famous chart called the hockey stick chart, which showed what the science and the math showed, which is that you had had temperatures moving almost like the long blade of a hockey stick, just the straight part, for about 1,000 years.

And then in our century, you had this very sharp uptick. And it looks kind of like a hockey stick. And so that was known as the hockey stick graph.

And deniers started attacking that because he was only 33 years old. And you could say, he's very young. Where is this coming from? And they took an email about his work, and they directed the whole thing at him.

But even before that, even before ClimateGate, in the years leading up to it, what some scientists were saying was, “the deniers have this weird idea, which is if you can bring down Michael Mann, you can bring down the IPCC.”

Wow. Well, I'm glad to say that they did not ultimately succeed. In fact, we interviewed him about his book, The New Climate War, which is all about the delay, deny, discredit tactics of the fossil fuel industry. But it set up something that was pernicious and which does remain.

And those are, on the one hand, there's the Shelby Amendment, but I'd actually like you to talk more about the Data Quality Act. So tell us about the Shelby Amendment and how that began, but then move pretty quickly to the Data Quality Act.

Francesca, you're the only person to ask about that. And it's a treat to be asked about it. Yeah, the Shelby Act and the Data Access Act and the Data Quality Act, they are also long range. They're sort of unforeseen or foreseeable consequences of things tobacco did. And they are wild in the final effect that they had on climate.

In the 90s, the Harvard School of Public Health published one of the most influential studies in history. It's called the Six City Study.

They were asked to do this by the EPA. They were wondering why would people, let's say, in a town like Portage, Wisconsin, why would they live longer and healthier lives than, let's say, people living in Watertown, Massachusetts?

And what they came up with is something that you'll see now in the news all the time, which is that what are called small particles, which are particles under 2.5 microns, that our lungs evolved — So let's say there's a forest fire, right? Those are pretty big particles coming off that. We can deal with that.

But when you have the kinds of small particles that kind of dandruff their way out of a smokestack that's burning coal, let's say, we're not designed to filter that out. And the big particles, we just cough them up. But the smaller ones can settle down deeper into the lung where they are more likely to become cancerous. And also for children, they can cause long-term debilitating asthmas.

And so after 20 years of this research, what the Harvard School of Public Health came up with is that removing small particles would add 1.8 years to the average American lifespan. And what one of the leaders of the study said was that if you took away all the cancers, every cancer in America, it would only add two years to the national lifespan. So it was a huge finding.

In the mid-90s, the EPA, acting on our behalf, moved to regulate small particles at 2.5 microns. So if you pull out a human hair, it's about 40 to 70 microns wide. You can kind of see it and you kind of can't.

Mites, those awful things that live in our pillowcases and on our eyebrows, and eat human skin flakes, they poop out the skin flakes and that poop circulating in our homes' airways, that's the cause of most household allergies.

So if you're sneezing a lot, especially during the winter months when windows are closed, generally what's causing that is the mite poop that is floating around. It's only 10 microns and you can't see it.

These particles that the EPA wanted to regulate as of the middle of the 1990s, they're at about 2.5 microns. And there was a giant reaction. That was one of the largest fights, industry fights in the 90s. Some of the estimates are hundreds of millions of dollars were fought trying to stop this law from getting on the books.

And in fact, David Wallace-Wells, who wrote The Uninhabitable Earth, has been writing about the grave threat that air pollution [poses]. In fact, he said we should talk more about air pollution and this small particulate pollution than climate chaos because people relate to the word “pollution more” and actually it's really part and parcel of very much the same thing.

Yeah, I'm laughing because, of course, knowing that the word “pollution” works as a trigger for voters and readers, that is another finding from Frank Luntz. Now, at that point he was working, he was so embarrassed — He did come over to the side of right like a penitent, which, you know, you could easily argue he should have been.

But he came and he started working for the environmental companies as well. And one of the things he said is, you should just talk about it in terms of pollution. Stop using words like “set-asides”, you know, or “carbon fairness.” Those words are ear-closing. When you say “polluters should pay,” that actually has an impact.

Wallace Wells is a brilliant writer and him knowing that pollution has an impact with the voters that other phrases don't is some of the fruit of the poison tree that is Frank Luntz.

So absolutely, I'm thrilled that Wells is writing about it because it is a great way to connect this to people who can then keep tugging on the sleeves of local legislatures and then in presidential elections, which is, yeah, this is all about pollution. And we know that pollution was so bad.

We had done such a bad job with allowing massive kinds of smoke from — it seemed like anywhere you had more than four houses, there would be some real big dark smoke belching thing that global warming actually, when they have looked at charts of how warming worked over the century, there was a pause between about 1941 and then the later 70s because it had become so polluted on the planet that the sun couldn't come down basically to send the ultraviolet light out that could be captured by water vapor and carbon dioxide.

And so one of the funny ironies to write about, I'd stop myself from saying amusing irony because then you sound like a Bond villain or a Marvel Comics villain in general. But one of the comic ironies is that it was so bad that all across the West, all across the Northern Hemisphere, you had Clean Air Acts and the lean air acts got the smoke out, big and small particles, both cleared it out enough so that the global warming could resume.

That is awesome.

Yeah, exactly. So he's right to say that we should focus on that because we've all seen what pollution looks like. And when people who are older remember just how dirty and muddy a city like LA was…

But if you want to know how fast that could happen, A, there are historians who say the day when smog rolled into Los Angeles, I believe it's July 8th, 1943. And that's because you had a sudden scale up in industrial production to meet the needs of our armed forces in World War II. \

Similarly, you didn't need to have a word like smog. You simply didn't need it until 1905. You can chart indeed “smog” was a word that was invented by activists basically in London trying to say, hey, we would rather not joke. It's great to have industry. It's great to have a nascent electrical system, but we'd also rather not have a difficult time breathing.

In a 1928 story about Hollywood that F. Scott Fitzgerald published in the Saturday Evening Post, it's about people in the movie industry and it ends with someone finishing a conversation in a hard way, then getting in their car, slamming the door and driving off into the “everlasting haze-less sunlight of Los Angeles.”

And that's just before you had freeways too. That now reads as like a joke, “everlasting haze-less sunlight of Los Angeles.” But we've been moving kind of more towards that by controlling pollution.

So in the later part of the 90s, people who maybe had more warm feelings for industry than our good old Democratic Party, they snuck legislation into the Budget Reconciliation Act. Whenever there's a budget coming up, everyone just panics, everyone's working late and you get these giant bills.

And the bills, when they're published, they will be like many pounds and they'll be like multi-thousand page documents.

And in the Reconciliation Act, I think for ‘97, ‘98, Senator Richard Shelby snuck on a thing called the Shelby Act, which is anybody could ask for the raw data in any scientific project that involves the public interest.

The reason that he did that was that the Harvard School of Public Health, the way they had done the six-city study is they had put air sampling devices in people's homes in the six cities. And they had promised them confidentiality because nobody ever wants to have corporations or outside bodies going through their medical records.

So when industry was trying to fight them, they said, we want the raw data. And they said, we legally can't give it to you. And so industry understood that they had a rhetorical coup.

They could then claim it's secret data and they could hire actors to march up and down wearing lab coats so they would look like scientists holding signs saying, “Harvard, release the data.”

Harvard did finally release the data to a third party that wouldn't make the medical records public. And in fact, it showed that their research, if anything, had underplayed just how dangerous small particles were. So it was a big win for science.

However, in the interim of that, Senator Shelby of Alabama, I believe, was able to sneak this law onto the books. And as the Washington Post later reported, nobody was aware of it really except for Senator Shelby and the corporate wizard, a man named Jim Tazi, who had helped him shape the law.

And that allowing people to request raw data is essentially what leads to a grieve party stealing the data from a web server. And that's what leads to Climategate.

That is, that's the law of unintended consequences and how it led to really 15 years of no action on climate and 15 years that we will have to scrub.

Basically, we have to undo not the damage that we had before, but then also the additional 14 years of damage caused by the political radioactivity of the climate issue after Climategate.

Yeah, exactly. And that's just all the more part of this long project to dismantle the public trust in science. So I want to just ask you a last question, David Lipsky. You were a grump, as we talked to before, while you were writing this book. How do you feel now?

Great question. A, I still do that thing socially. So it's a problem at family gatherings. And it's a problem. I don't do it when I'm teaching, but it's a slight problem with my friends and I've learned to control it where I don't say, “hey, you just said that you hated the Barbie movie yesterday. And now that you're talking to people who liked it, you're saying there were good parts. But I remember what you said two days ago.” I find that I can stop myself from doing that.

On the issue, there was a thing, there's a great quote from a scientist who won a Nobel Prize for climate science, but it was on the narrowly averted tragedy with the ozone layer in the eighties, which is that for the benefit of shaving cream and hairspray, we almost burned away what essentially acts as the earth's SPF, what acts as our suntan lotion.

The chemical that was in the propellants would eat up the ozone that protects us from a very life hostile, mammal-hostile band of UV light.

The scientist, a man named Sherwood Rowland, who later won the Nobel for his work, what he said at the time when he couldn't get any government to act on what were his clearly accurate findings, he asked this great question, 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 those predictions to become true?

So a lot of the scientists who were concerned with global warming, they kept waiting for a moment like the ozone hole, where there would be some really public version of the change, which would then require action.

In the case of the ozone hole, a hole in the ozone layer opened up to everyone's surprise in the eighties, and what seemed like an intractable problem was solved with about 18 months of international negotiations and a set of control rules called the Montreal Protocols.

All of the global warming scientists have lamented. They would say, “why can't we have a thing? When will we get our ozone hole sort of moment?”

And the summers of the last two years, and particularly this year, have been that basically. So on the issue, I feel it's awful to see our weather changing in just the way the scientists predicted, but it feels like we've had the moment where people can say, “Ah, this is true and now we have to act.”

So I still have the instincts, but the grumpiness about the lack of a solution or the lack of resolve towards the problem, that's gone. And being able to do that, that's kind of what made this such a great story to tell, is how we found the science.

We had the people who fought against the science, and then we finally had the outcome.

Well, that is a wonderfully hopeful note to end on. The book is The Parrot and the Igloo, and I will leave it up to readers of the book to find out why you called it The Parrot and the Igloo, Climate and the Science of Denial. It's just been terrific to talk with you, David Lipsky, about this wonderful book.

It couldn't have been a better conversation, Francesca. Thanks for inviting me.

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.

His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, and many other venues.

In addition to The Parrot and the Igloo, he's the author of the novel The Art Fair, a collection $3,000, and the bestselling nonfiction book, Absolutely American.

We have a link to an excerpt from The Parrot and the Igloo at the Writer's Voice website.

Next week on Writers Voice, we talk with Kerri Mayer about her novel, All You Have to Do is Call. It's about the legendary abortion service, Jane, in Chicago in the early 1970s. Also Tan-Tuan Eng tells us about his novel, The House of Doors.