Our Biggest Experiment: A History Of The Climate Crisis
by
Alice Bell
About The Authors
Dr Alice Bell is a climate campaigner and writer based in London. She co-runs the climate change charity Possible, working on a range of projects from community tree-planting to solar-powered railways. She has a BSc in history of science from UCL and a PhD in science communication from Imperial College. She was a lecturer in science communication at Imperial for several years where she also launched a college-wide interdisciplinary course on climate change. As an academic, alice has also worked at Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit, City University Journalism School and UCL’s Technology Studies Department. She’s also written for a host of publications including the Guardian, The Times,The Observer, Mosaic and New Humanist, and was editor of the ‘magazine for the future’, How We Go to Next.
About The Book
It was Eunice Newton Foote, an American scientist and women’s rights campaigner living in Seneca Falls, New York, who first warned the world that an atmosphere heavy with carbon dioxide could send temperatures here on earth soaring. This was back in 1956. At the time, no one paid much attention.
Our Biggest Experiment tells Foote’s story, along with that of many other scientists who helped build our modern understanding of climate change. It also chronicles our energy system, from whale oil to kerosene and beyond – the first steamships, wind turbines, electric cars, oil tankers and fridges. Alice Bell takes us back to climate change science’s earliest steps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the advancing realization that global warming was a significant problem in the 1950s and right up to today, where we have seen the growth of the environmental movement, climate scepticism and political responses like the UN climate talks.
As citizens of the twenty-first century, it can feel like history has dealt us a rather bad hand with the climate crisis. In many ways, this is true. Our ancestors have left us an almighty mess. But they left us tools for survival too, and Our Biggest Experiment tells both sides of the story. The message of the book is ultimately hopeful; harnessing the ingenuity and intelligence that has long driven the history of climate change research can mean a more sustainable and bearable future for humanity.
Praise for Our Biggest Experiment
“The climate crisis is so overwhelming it can be easier not to engage with the problem. However, Alice had me every step of the way. She guides the reader on an international journey through time, focusing not on statistics but the complex human story and fascinating characters that have led us to where we are now.”
Maddie Moate, STEM communicator and TV presenter
“Our Biggest Experiment is a spectacular achievement – the definitive history of the most consequential issue of our time. Majestic in scope, it offers not one but two epic stories – how we changed the world, and how we came to realize what we’ve done – told through Alice Bell’s charming, witty and authoritative writing.”
Ed Yong, The Atlantic
“Vibrant and wonderfully detailed…Alice Bell brings to life the characters and corporations from the past whose names we all know, from Tesla and Watt to Esso and Shell. You might think it’s more important to focus on the future of our planet, but only by understanding our history can we start to shape what happens next. Read this and be energised to save the world.”
Rowan Hooper, New Scientist
“The story of the climate crisis and the making of the modern world are intertwined, and in this meticulously researched and elegantly written book, Alice Bell is the perfect guide to unpicking how humanity came to face it’s most profound threat.”
Neil Denny, host of Little Atoms podcast
Introduction: Experiments
It was Eunice Newton Foote, a scientist, inventor and women’s rights campaigner living in Seneca Falls, New York, who in 1856 first warned the world that an atmosphere heavy with carbon dioxide could send temperatures soaring. At the time, no one paid much attention.
Her experiment was reasonably simple. She placed two glass cylinders by a window and planted a thermometer in each of them. Using a pump to remove some of the air from one of the cylinders, she found it didn’t catch the heat as well as the other. From this, she figured out the density of the air had an impact on the Sun’s rays. This made sense – after all, everyone knew it was colder at the top of high mountains. After comparing a cylinder of moist air with one that had been dried, she found the Sun’s rays were more powerful in damper conditions. This wasn’t surprising either, as she commented in her notes: ‘Who has not experienced the buring heat of the Sun that precedes a summer shower?’ thirdly, and crucially for our story, she tried filling one cylinder with carbon dioxide. This had the biggest impact: the cylinder became noticeably much hotter and took a lot longer to cool down after the experiment had ended. She concluded, almost in passing: ‘An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature.’
Her husband Elisha was a lawyer, but also undertook science experiments at home and would collect weather data for the local area. That summer they travelled together to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of science (AAAS), held that year in Albany, New York. The astronomer Maria Mitchell had become the first female member of the AAAS a few years before, in 1850, but the titles of ‘professional’ or ‘fellow’ were still usually reserved for men. The dominant idea of what made for an authoritative ‘proper’ scientist of the time was still very male (just as it was exclusively white), and it’s striking that although Eunice’s paper, ‘Circumstances affecting the heat of the Suns rays’ was presented at the meeting, it was read for her by a man. In contrast, Elisha presented his own paper. Eunice’s paper was read by no other than Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, so it’s possible he was chosen simply to give the paper more prominence. In his introduction, Henry made what were described in the press at the time as ‘gallant remarks in regard to the ladies’, describing Eunice’s experiments as interesting and valuable. Still, if he was impressed by her work, he seems to have forgotten about it after the AAAS packed up for the year, as there’s no evidence of him celebrating it later. Henry, much like everyone else who read Eunice’s paper at the time, seems to have been interested at first before letting it drop entirely from his mind.
A few people did take note of Eunice’s paper. There’s reference to it in the Scientific American write-up of the AAAS meeting, albeit under the dismissive heading ‘Scientific ladies’; reports in the New York Daily Tribune; and mentions in Canadian, Scottish and German journals. Her paper was also published in the American Journal of Science and Arts, alongside Elisha’s far less significant work on a similar topic. Elisha’s paper was republished in the London-based Philosophical Magazine, but whoever picked it must have taken a pass on Eunice’s. A fire at the Smithsonian in 1865 destroyed much of the couple’s work and saw Eunice’s research on carbon dioxide reduced to a few scant references, largely forgotten until 2011 when retired petroleum geologist Ray Sorenson stumbled across it. A few years later, climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe dug it up after a colleague asked why there were so few women in the history of the field. This in turn saw it reported in the climate change press, where the story of a forgotten female scientist who had found a link between carbon dioxide and a warming climate back in the 1850s hit a nerve. And yet, for Eunice and her contemporaries, it was all theoretical, a contribution to our burgeoning understanding of gases and heat. It would be another century before anyone started to worry about it.
In 1956, oceanographer Roger Revelle was one of several American scientists looking at the topic of carbon dioxide relative to climate change afresh. In the intervening years, there’d been a little more scientific research on the topic. There’d also been a lot more carbon dioxide emitted: the problem was rather less abstract for Revelle than it had been for Foote. He’d been studying the ways in which oceans absorbed carbon dioxide and realized it wasn’t nearly as much as had been initially imagined. Moved by the consequences of his findings, he concluded his paper with a note that humanity was carrying out ‘a large scale geological experiment.’ At first Revelle saw this experiment with the Earth’s climate as a bit of an adventure, as just a fleeting moment in time – telling Congress in 1956 that it was ‘an experiment which could not have been made in the past because we didn’t have an industrial civilization and which will be impossible to make in the future because all the fossil fuels will be gone’. Like many other scientists of his time, Revelle believed nuclear energy would supersede fossil fuels in a few decades, solving the problem. As the 1960s and 1970s rolled on, the evidence for global warming mounted. People started to worry too. But they didn’t turn down the gas – quite the opposite.
Revelle’s ‘experiment’ line would be repeated many times, including by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in an autumn 1988 speech to the Royal Society: ‘We have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.’ By this point, Revelle and his colleagues had studied further (and checked and rechecked each other’s work) and there was a strong scientific consensus that if carbon emissions continued at their current rate, global temperatures would get very uncomfortable by the twenty-first century. Today, we’re living in that uncomfortable future that people in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s used to worry about. Although there’s been progress when it comes to clean energy technologies and mechanisms for building climate policy has been set up (the UN climate convention, for example), most people living on Earth are a long way from safe.
For anyone who needs a quick recap on the basic science, the way in which the Earth’s atmosphere traps some of the Sun’s energy is usually called the greenhouse effect. Strictly speaking, greenhouse isn’t the best metaphor and it’s more as if the planet is wrapped in an insulating blanket of gases. Still, somewhere along the way someone said ‘greenhouse’ and it stuck. The main gases in this imaginary greenhouse are water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, nitrous oxide and CFCs. In some respects, the blanket they provide us is a good thing. Or at least life as we know it has developed under a specific mix of greenhouse gases that keep the Earth at a cosy average temperature of 14 degrees C. Lose this blanket entirely and it’d be nearer -18 degrees C. Mess with the delicate chemistry of the atmosphere even a little, and the complex network of life that’s grown up inside this particular greenhouse – the complex network that we’re part of – starts to falter.
Today, when politicians, scientists and campaigners talk about the danger climate change poses they tend to use the relatively heavy milestones of 1 degree C, 1.5 Degree centigrade or 2 degree C global warming (or, if they really want to scare you, 4 degree C, 5 degree C, or 6 degree C). One or two degrees may not seem very much, but the figure isn’t the difference between when you checked the weather forecast this morning and then later that afternoon. Rather, it’s a combination of all the temperatures across the world for the whole year. As such, it can mask many other, more extreme weather events. The comparative warmth they’re looking at isn’t just the sorts of climate fluctuation that would be happening whether humans lived on this planet or not, but has been caused by the massive influx of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
The biggest perpetrator of this industrial warming is carbon dioxide mainly from the burning of fossil fuels. Carbon emissions have also risen due to the destruction of natural ‘carbon sinks’ such as forests cleared to graze livestock which would otherwise breathe in our emissions. This part of the problem began well before the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, there’s evidence that the emergence of farming several thousand years ago saved us from another ice age. Industrial activities have released other greenhouse gases too, like methane, CFCs and nitrous oxide. The fossil fuel industry causes methane emissions, for example, along with carbon, as do livestock (cow farts often get the blame here, though it’s more the burps we should be worrying about). And in case you were wondering, yes, those silver canisters of nitrous oxide contribute to climate change too, although the nitrous emissions from agricultural fertilisers and manure are a much larger problem.
One of the many slippery things about the climate crisis is that it doesn’t hit people with a clearly identifiable thud. It creeps up gradually over time and does so mixed in with all sorts of other aspects of our world; other problems humans have made and hazards that were already waiting for us. This mixing with other problems is partly what makes the impacts of climate change so hard to predict, but it is also what makes them so toxic. Climate change takes a host of other social, economic and environmental issues, and turns up the heat. It adds new hazards to trip over, squeezes already pressurised systems and further exhausts already depleted resources. As climate scientist Myles Allen puts it: ‘People ask me whether I’m kept awake at night by the possibility of five degrees of warming. I don’t think we’ll make it to five degrees. I’m far more worried about geopolitical breakdown as the injustices of climate change emerge as we steam from two to three degrees.’
The American state of California offers a good example of how the climate crisis tightens the grip of other injustices. Teams of prison inmates – many on minor drug offences and including youth offenders – are sent to fight wildfires for a dollar a hour and the promise of credit towards early parole. This has happened since the 1940s, but as wildfires get worse, the state relies more and more on this cheap, captive workforce. It’d been estimated the program saves the state nearly a hundred million US dollars a year. And that’s just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. We can’t tell for sure if the 2014-16 Ebola break-out in West Africa was caused by climate change shifting bat populations, but it’s likely we’ll see more of these interactions in the future as the pressures surrounding rising temperatures push people and other animals close together. The same can be said about mosquito-borne diseases like Zika or malaria. There’s no evidence linking climate change to COVID-19, but it could well mean we see more pandemics, deadlier ones, spreading faster. There’s also plenty of research showing that as temperatures rise, so do instances of violence, be that rape, domestic violence or civil war. And, in case you were wondering, Harvard researchers reckon climate gentrification has been discernible for a few years already too, as the rich push the poor out to riskier land.
Greenhouse gas emissions can go down as well as up. As Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis stress in their book on the Anthropocene (the geological era characterised by the impact of humans), The Human Planet, there is a noticeable dip in atmospheric carbon around the start of the seventeenth century. Maslin and Lewis trace this back to the colonisation of the Americas a century or so before, or more precisely the death of 50 million indigenous people. The dead don’t farm and so the unmanaged land shifted back into forests, which in turn inhaled enough carbon dioxide for it to be in bubbles of air from the time preserved deep in the polar ice caps. This re-growth was short lived. European settlers in North America soon got to farming for themselves, not to mention coal mining, inventing kerosene and laying railway tracks, highways, and oil and gas pipelines. Still, this temporary drop in carbon dioxide levels might well have played a role in the so-called ‘little ice age’, a series of cold snaps between roughly, 1350 and 1850. This little ice age most likely had a mix of causes – dust from volcanoes intercepting sunlight, for example – but the re-growth caused by colonisation of the Americas might well have been one of them; human forces combining with those from other parts of nature to shift climates, just as they do today.
The little ice age wasn’t cold enough to be a true ice age, but it was cold. The carnivalesque end of this involved frost fairs, puppet shows, ox roasts and children playing football on the thickly frozen ice. There are stories of frozen birds falling from the sky, Henry VIII sleighing between palaces, New Yorkers walking from Manhattan to Staten Island and even an elephant being led across the Thames. It’s one reason Stradivarius violins are so prized; trees during this period took longer to mature in the cold, making denser wood and thus a very particular quality of sound. The darker side of this mini ice age was people shivering to death. Whole villages in Switzerland were destroyed by growing glaciers. Prolonged cold, dry periods had an impact on crops and livestock. People starved. Some environmental historians spin this as a warning from history, tracing the changes in weather to a rise in anti-Semitism and the witch-hunts as well as several wars. There were winners – there are always people who can make an opportunity out of crisis – but only off the back of a lot more suffering elsewhere. People in themed-seventeenth century believed they living in truly awful times. And, unlike pretty much every other generation that’s made that complaint, they had a point. Still, that’s nothing compared with what could be in store for people born in the twenty-first century.
This book tells the story of how we found ourselves in the middle of Revelle’s big, geophysical experiment; how we built systems, technologies and deeply embedded cultures for the burning of coal, gas and oil at scale. Our narrative starts in 1851, the start of this ‘pre-industrial baseline’ on which those 1.5 degree C and two degree C warming warnings are based. We kick off things at the Great Exhibition, a big show put on by the British government to celebrate it’s newly minted industrial power. From there we travel back in time to those cold years of the seventeenth century to understand the roots of the steam age, before moving on through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing the growth of the oil industry first in the US and then Russia. We’ll see the first wells drilled in Borneo, Iraq and the Niger Delta, and oil cartels move from inter-war chats over pheasant shooting in the Scottish Highlands to more complex geopolitical deals leading to a crisis at American gas stations in the 1970s.
We’ll see the monster of big oil slain by a plucky investigative journalist back in the 1910s, only to re-emerge more powerful. We’ll follow the growth of electricity networks, how the sparks saw off oil and gas in the lighting industry, before going on to market a plethora of electrical devices to further wire up our homes and offices. We’ll also see electricity lose out to oil in the battle for transport, at least for the twentieth century. We’ll see excitement over solar and wind power start in the 1870s, only to be forgotten about but then rediscovered in the 1970s and finally come of age at the start of the twenty-first century. Throughout, we’ll watch an environment movement grow to fight the dangers of this industrialisation. As we’ll see, this movement would be a mixed bunch, folding a variety of ideological takes into environmental concerns, from anti-capitalist revolution to white supremacy (as well as a desire to simply breathe more easily).
At the same time, we’ll trace the intersecting story of how we discovered the climate crisis was happening n the first place. In some respects, this is the more hopeful end of the story, reflecting humanity’s ability to understand itself and the world around it. This strand starts around the same time, rooted in the mid-nineteenth century, with the odd look back to see how we got there. As we’ll see, the discovery of anthropogenic global warming didn’t arrive in a single ‘eureka’ moment (or even a single exclamation of ‘oh, shiiiiit) any more than the fossil fuel age started with a single bang. No one woke up one day, looked out of the window, slapped their forehead and exclaimed that fossil fuels make the weather dangerous. As with most science, understanding of the climate crisis unfolded reasonably slowly, with each generation adding their own take.
It took time for people to process what they’d found – emotionally as much as anything else – to appreciate its impacts and causes, to question it, interrogate the gaps in their knowledge, check it was true and to link it up with other bits of research that might tell us more. It also took time for this new science to be understood and absorbed by the rest of society, making its way, like any other bit of knowledge, from one laboratory to the other, to newspapers, political speeches, chatter over dinner, protests, poems, playgrounds and, eventually, people’s everyday way of seeing the world. Some of the slow pace of this gradual unfolding is understandable – annoying, frustrating, losing us valuable time, but also the way science, technology and political systems were set up to run – but some of it was deliberately, maliciously kept slow too. The oil industry didn’t start deliberately doubt about climate change until the late 1980s, but it did spread doubt. We can’t lay the blame at its feet for at least a chunk of lost time.
I’m not going to offer you villains and heroes. This is not a simple story with evil exploitative fossil-fuel baddies on one side and the goodies of renewable energy, environmentalism and climate science on the other. It’s more complex than that. What’s more, although individual characters played roles that we might, more or less, count as either villainous or heroic, none of them worked alone. The climate crisis is a social project – one that’s always been more about the impact of groups of people than individuals.
Spencer Weart puts it well in his 2003 book The Discovery of Global Warming, noting that a statement as simple as ‘last year was the warmest year on record’ is the work of a massive, multigenerational, international effort. Weart means in terms of the many people in spotting that shift in global temperature, in building the science that lets us see that far, but we should be aware of the massive effort behind the cause of that warming too. People have only managed to heat the planet to the point they have because they work together. You can play with the idea of a personal carbon footprint if you want, but nothing especially ‘high carbon’ is done alone. You can drive an SUV on your own, for example, but you still need to buy it from a company and buy petrol from another. Moreover, it was built by multiple hands, using materials mined by others, drawing on the knowledge of generations of engineers, and that’s without tracing through networks of advertising, design or the road infrastructure.
In all this, it’s vital to remember some people had more of a role in creating the climate crisis than others, and some are more able to insulate themselves from the dangers too. As Tim Gore, Oxfam’s former policy lead on climate change, points out, the poorest half of the global population are responsible for only around 10 per cent of global emissions and yet live overwhelmingly in countries most vulnerable to climate change. So, I invite you to explore ‘our’ biggest experiment, but to do so critically. We should be aware of our shared humanity and shared planet, as well as the ways many people have worked together over time to create this problem ( and how many people will have to work together to undo it). But we must also be mindful of how weighted our social systems are and the inequalities at play; how many people have been excluded, not just in the past but in the present and future too.
It’s also worth giving the health warning that this is a story about a lot of white men, many of them rich, and that much of the activity of the book happens in the US and UK. The climate crisis has been and remains a problem of the elite’s making, and so it’s the powerful we follow to understand how it happened. As the story develops we’ll see everything become more globalised. We’ll see bigger and more complex trading routes emerge, all chugging out new reasons to burn through fossil fuels in the process. With increasing globalisation, we’ll also see an emergence of thinking about the world as a whole, rather than just small bits of it. But that doesn’t mean the whole world is working together as equals. Today the idea of thinking about the planet as one is often associated with the sort of hippie ideals of world peace, love and understanding. There’s a big difference between a whole-planet approach based on people working together through cooperation and harmony with nature – the happy, utopian one used by fizzy drinks’ ads – and one rooted in more militaristic traditions of control. Both shape our modern conception of the climate crisis and both are likely to continue to be part of how we weave through our warmed future, so it’s worth being attuned to them.
Writing this book has, at times, been painful. I would come home from my day job working for a climate charity, supporting my colleagues fighting for a liveable future, and then bury myself in stories of people in the 1770s thinking burning more coal was simply a great way to make more money; others expanding oil drilling in the 1890s; or scientists in the 1970s dismissing the year 2000 as far enough in the future that we didn’t need to worry about carbon emissions yet. Sometimes it was hard not to simply shout “WELL, FUCK YOU VERY MUCH’ at whatever source I was taking notes from. Still, it’s also been a n uplifting experience on occasion too, not least the parts about the history of climate science. And it’s certainly helped me understand the climate crisis more fully.
The story of the climate crisis is, undoubtedly, the great tragedy of our time, but it’s a story of a lot more than that too. It’s the making of our modern world, for good as well as bad. For those of us who live in rich countries, it’s easy to take the flicking of a light switch for granted, but we have access to illumination (along with heat, food and transport) that our ancestors could only dream of, access that everyone should be able to enjoy. It’s a story of great minds, the pursuit of truth and courageous attempts to make the world better (as well as a dose of eccentricity and whimsy). It’s also a story steeped in colonialism, full of inequality, spin, snobbery and hubris. It showcases some of the best of humanity as well as the worst, and may well be the end of us. I’ve found researching this book a rip-roaring ride and hope you enjoy reading it, even if you find living through the climate crisis a less pleasurable experience.
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