OUR BIGGEST EXPERIMENT, an epic history of the climate crisis, is out now.
Buy it in your favourite bookshop (or UK bookshop.org, or US bookshop.org, or wherever you most love to purchase books). If you’ve read it already and enjoyed it, do let others know with a review on Amazon or Goodreads.
It was Eunice Newton Foote, an American scientist and woman’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.
Interested in how the sun’s rays worked their way through conditions here on Earth, she set up a reasonably simple experiment at home; placing two glass cylinders by the window, and sticking a thermometer in each. After comparing moist air with dry, and exploring different levels of air pressure, she tried filling one of the cylinders with carbon dioxide. Here, she found the the impact of the suns rays were especially powerful. It became noticeably much hotter than the other, and took a lot longer to cool down after the experiment had ended too. Writing up the experiment, she concluded, almost in passing: “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature”.
This was back in 1856. And at the time, no one much paid any attention.
OUR BIGGEST EXPERIMENT tells Foote’s story, along with many other scientists who came before and after her, helping build our modern understanding of climate change. It also tells the story of our modern energy use, from whale oil fulled lights and coal powered mills, to steamships, and the first electric cars. We follow it through to World War Two and beyond, tracing the development of big science and our advancing realisation that global warming was a significant global problem, along with the growth of the environmental movement, climate scepticism and political systems like the UN climate talks.
It’s a story of great minds, the pursuit of truth and courageous attempts to make the world better, but it’s also a story steeped in colonialism, full of spin, snobbery and hubris (as well as a dose of eccentricity and whimsy). It’s a story that showcases some of the best of humanity as well as the worst, and may well be the end of us.
As citizens of the twenty-first century, it can feel like history’s 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 to survive it too.