“Denial” is a term used in addiction and recovery: “No, I am not an addict—I can quit anytime I want.” “No, I am not wrecking my home and my family.” “No, I’m not destroying my liver.” There is no hope for recovery while the addict, or the addict and his family, are in denial. First the addict has to “bottom out.” Three new books on global warming are doing what they can to wake us up, hoping to shake us out of our denial before we bottom out. In the case of global warming, if we “bottom out,” in spite of the seeming ability of technology to find ever more clever fixes, it will likely be too late for recovery.

The message of Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth, and hence the book’s title, is that we have already passed the tipping point of global warming and now live on a different planet than the one on which civilization developed and flourished during the last 12,000 years. The issue is not about “our grandchildren,” McKibben insists, the changes are already here: “one hundred or two hundred years from now” has become yesterday. The tropics have expanded by two degrees of latitude both north and south, exceptionally hot years are occurring every one or two years instead of once every twenty-five years, Arctic ice is disappearing, droughts are increasing in both frequency and severity, whole mountain ranges are covered by dead trees, fire seasons continually set new records for both frequency and acreage, and the ocean is acidifying. Is this the Wrath of God—punishment for worshipping the idols of Mammon and money—or is it just physics? While no single incident proves that the weather is abnormal, a pattern is emerging.

McKibben states that we’ve gotten ourselves into a problem we can’t just buy our way out of. The best we can do, he says, is to “downsize gracefully.” I think McKibben is right, but I see no signs of change anywhere—carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase. We are told that if the economy doesn’t grow, it will collapse (and that that would be bad). We are told that cutting back on fossil fuels will cost money, and we are even told, mostly by those corporations with high profits at stake, that global warming is a hoax. Soon we will probably be told that God will once again part the Red Sea and that corporations will drop manna from heaven.

The first step to solve the problem, according those who deny global warming, seems to be to kill the messengers. Sen. James Inhofe, the largest recipient of oil money in the Senate, is calling for the criminal prosecution of climate scientists. Send them to jail, and don’t let them talk to the press. And the second step? There is no second step. The corporations will go down fighting for one more quarter of record profits. While growth may indeed be essential for the survival of corporations whose stock prices are ten times their earnings, growth has never been necessary for the human economy. The corporation could care less about the climate, about the environment, or about human life—yours or your children’s. But then, a corporation is not a person.

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James Hansen, author of Storms of my Grandchildren, is one of the best known climate scientists in the world. He also made news by refusing to be muzzled by Bush administration policy dictates that all press releases and requests for interviews had to be cleared first by political appointees at HQ.

The present book is an occasionally breezy, but more often sobering assessment of the current projections of global warming, Hansen’s own role in bringing it to governmental attention (he describes his meetings with Dick Cheney’s Task Force), and an overview of the technical components of climatology–the various climate “forcings” that are expressed in watts per square meter. (Climatology is a quantitative science.) Hansen apologizes to his readers for having to go into the technicalities of climatology, but there is nothing in the chapter that couldn’t be understood by an intelligent high schooler—except perhaps Hansen’s need for repeated apologies.

Hansen’s estimations are based on paleoclimate studies, not computer models. The principle source of uncertainty in calibrating the paleoclimatic record with the CO2 levels of today is the lack of data on aerosols. Astonishingly, the reflective component of aerosols has never been measured, though Hansen called for such measurement to begin twenty years ago with special satellites. Even with this handicap, Hansen shows that some prognosis is possible, and he has lowered his estimation of a “safe,” or at least a non-catastrophic level of CO2 from 450 to 350 parts per million. The current CO2 level is 387 ppm. The last really “hot” earth, when the continents were ice-free and sea levels were 250 feet higher than today, was 50 million years ago. The Paleocene-Eocene warming killed 90 percent of marine life. However, as CO2 levels are rising today about 10,000 times as quickly as they did at the end of the Paleocene, outstripping the ability of the oceans to absorb the heat, the effects could be even more catastrophic.

The dirtiest fuel is coal. There is, so far, no such thing as “clean coal,” other than for warm, feel-good advertisements on television and the speeches of politicians. Hansen’s conclusions are clear: the coal must be left in the ground. Otherwise, things could get bad for life on earth, perhaps very, very bad.

Alarmist? You bet, though Hansen optimistically thinks we can supply a lot of our energy needs with “fourth-generation” nuclear reactors: LMFBRs, or liquid metal fast breeder reactors. Fast neutron reactors could burn up some of the piles of depleted uranium now lying around from nuclear weapons production. Those of us who opposed the development of the LMFBR in the 1970s must consider Hansen’s assessment that plutonium is less dangerous than coal.

Hansen has a “simple’ solution to reducing hydrocarbon emissions: the fee-and-dividend plan. The fee-and dividend plan would add a gradually increasing fee on carbon fuels at the source, the fees to be collected in a special fund and distributed once a year equally to every American citizen—say, $3,000.00 per year for starters. If you conserve more than the average American, you have a net gain; if you burn more, you pay more. Simple: no special interests, no loop-holes.  “Cap-and trade,” another proposal, is by Hansen’s analysis a sham that will do little but funnel money to financial traders.

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There are two clear messages from Climate Cover-Up by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, a well-researched and carefully documented book. First, there is no debate about the reality of human-caused global warming among climate scientists. Second, the seeming debate is a public relations scam heavily funded by coal and oil companies. If you want to know who the players are, where they come from, and what be their modes of operation, all is carefully presented in this book.

Several of the leading “deniers” have also worked for tobacco companies, denying the link between smoking and cancer. Remember the ozone hole “debate” twenty-five years ago? Industry-funded representatives also demanded equal time in that debate. Well, they’re back. Equal time is fine on an opinion page, but science requires evidence, not speculation. And evidence requires careful scientific work. Among those engaged in such work, the only debate is about details and timetables. And with ever more refinements to the data, the timetable seems to be shortening.

Hoggan also runs www.DeSmogBlog.com, where they maintain a database of global warming deniers and recent press posting by same. One of the most recent is by Donald Trump, who states that record-breaking cold storms prove that Al Gore was wrong and that he should be stripped of his Nobel Prize. Most of the other posts of global warming deniers are hardly any more scientific, and some are outright lies.

Climate Cover-Up won the Green Book Festival prize for “Best Book 2010.” My own book, The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse, won “Best Science Fiction 2010.”

Until 1833, scientists were not called such: they were called “natural philosophers.”  In that year, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge objected to the term “philosopher” on philological grounds. After the august assembly disposed of the term “savans” because it was too French, William Whewell offered the term “scientist,” on the model of “artist,” “economist,” and “atheist.” Despite the grumblings of those objecting to such a barbaric neologism, the term quickly came into general use. Scientific researchers were becoming professionals, and they needed something to call themselves. The two excellent books here under review, in different ways, explore the world of the generation preceding, the golden age of gentleman amateurs. This period, the years preceding and following the French Revolution, is also the last time that poets and scientists commingled and collaborated, both in scientific experiments and in the writing of verse.

So what happened? Why did the scientists and the poets part ways? Neither of these books tell that story, both ending with the death of Sir Humphry Davy in 1831, but I’ll add my own reflections at the end of this review.

Mike Jay, in The Atmosphere of Heaven, explores this rich time period through the life of Dr. Thomas Beddoes: physician, author, translator, Oxford lecturer, republican pamphleteer, chemist, geologist, philanthropist, and the founder of the Pneumatic Institute. The Pneumatic Institute was dedicated to the alleviation of suffering, especially of the working classes, through the new possibilities of chemical medicine, and in particular, “factitious airs,” the newly isolated gases such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide. The Pneumatic Institute was also the meeting place for the rising generation of young intellectuals who would shape the decades to come, including Humphry Davy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Peter Roget. Beddoes was also closely associated with the Lunar Society of Birmingham, whose members included Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgewood, James Watt, and Matthew Boulton.

The Lunar Society met monthly, on the Monday nearest the full moon, and the members were happy to call themselves “the lunaticks.” They were industrialists, chemists, botanists, and doctors, primarily interested in applied science, and for the most part, progressive politically and socially. Many of them, Priestley in particular, were of Dissenting persuasion, Quakers or atheists or members of some other sect than the Church of England, and they were the prime movers of the emerging Industrial Revolution in the English midlands.

Jay begins his story on the anniversary of Bastille Day, 1791, and the destruction of the home and laboratory in Birmingham of England’s foremost chemist, Joseph Priestley, by a mob shouting “God and King.” Priestley narrowly escaped with his life by hiding first at the house of a friend, later in London, and finally by emigrating to America where he was welcomed by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Beddoes, returning from Oxford to his home in Shropshire, passed through Birmingham the weekend after the riots and witnessed the wreckage.

Having experienced the viciousness of the reactionary forces in the Priestley Riots, the Lunar Men stopped meeting, and, if of republican or Jacobin leaning, learned to keep quiet about their support of the French Revolution and other progressive causes. This was not true of Thomas Beddoes, who made no secret of his political ideas either in person or in print. While some of the wealthy men of the Lunar Society continued to support Beddoes, he was unable to garner support from Joseph Banks of the Royal Society. While Beddoes was admired as a scientist and an intellectual, his reputation as a “democrat” and a radical kept him marginalized, where “radical,” then as now, referred to any beliefs that would disturb the hereditary privileges of the propertied class in any substantial way. I’m stating the case here much more strongly than does Mr. Jay, who is scrupulous in letting the facts speak for themselves, rather than drawing more general conclusions himself. For example, he notes that Banks also had reservations about Beddoes’s methodology in testing his new gases on living patients. (Banks also refused to publish Edward Jenner’s findings on the success of his smallpox vaccinations.) The political history of the years leading up to the war between England and France unfold in The Atmosphere of Heaven almost as a subtext, but for that reason are all the more cogent. “Gagging Laws” were enacted, rationalized by the supposed necessities of patriotism and the war, and are eerily familiar.

The marginalization of Thomas Beddoes continued after his death. Readers of The Atmosphere of Heaven may feel that even Richard Holmes, in The Age of Wonder, gives him short shrift. Holmes states: “Thomas Beddoes was regarded indulgently as a sort of secular saint by the Watt family: a holy fool of science. A gifted physician and lecturer, he had been forced to resign from his Fellowship at Oxford for his staunchly (and tactlessly) held republican and atheist views.” As Jay’s research uncovers, Beddoes had already offered his resignation a year before in order to pursue his philanthropic project of founding the Pneumatic Institute. Nonetheless, Beddoes fills a full half column in Holmes’s index.

The Age of Wonder is broader in scope than The Atmosphere of Heaven. Holmes defines his “age of wonder” as the period between the first round-the-world voyage of James Cook on the Endeavor, and the voyage of the Beagle in 1831, two years after the death of Humphry Davy. The Age of Wonder begins with a chapter invitingly titled “Joseph Banks in Paradise.” Banks was the official botanist aboard Cook’s Endeavor, and the ship had anchored at Tahiti, still quite unspoiled, in order to record the transit of Venus across the disk of the sun and therefore establish solar parallax with similar observations being made in England and thus accurately determine the sun’s distance form the earth. Banks spent as much time studying the natives as he did plants, and contributed some of the first ethnographical writing in English. Holmes follows this account with a chapter on the musician and astronomer William Herschel and a chapter on the balloonists.

Holmes is at home among the romantic poets, having previously written a biography of Shelly, a book on Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage, and a two volume biography of Coleridge. Not surprisingly, his book contains a great deal of literary history and is sprinkled with literary anecdotes. Holmes is also more apt to speculate on who is in love with whom than is Jay, and has a slightly breezier style. (When Jay, in his epilogue, writes of Davy that it was not only his “experiences of the poison chalice of power that fed the bitterness of his last days,” the trope stands out.)

It is the second half of both books that considerably overlap, centering on the life and career of Humphry Davy and his experiments with nitrous oxide at the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol. Beddoes hired Davy as his assistant physician and researcher at the Institute in 1798. Thus Beddoes becomes the crucial link in a chain that runs, we might say, Priestley -> Beddoes -> Davy -> Faraday -> Maxwell -> Einstein.

Nitrous oxide quickly became the darling gas of the Institute. Davy named the gas, refined and scaled up the technique of producing it from ammonium nitrate, and was both the chief administrator of the gas and the chief inhaler. James Watt, Lunar Man and developer of the steam engine, designed the breathing apparatus.  Davy also had Watt design a complete airtight chamber with a window into which the gas could be pumped to study the effects of extended inhalation. As he did with all of the gases at the Institute, Davy first tried this apparatus on himself. After one particularly deep session, Davy reported “nothing exists but thoughts,” an insight that, as refined by yogic philosophers, is not solipsistic and, east of the Indus, changed the course of history. But nitrous insights, even of great profundity, often seemed to lack such lasting transformative power.

Therapeutically, after some initial successes, especially in treating palsy, the medical value of nitrous oxide seemed disappointing, at least to Thomas Beddoes, who was looking for a cure for consumption. But the effect of the gas on the poets, such as Coleridge and Southey, and their host of luminous friends was spectacular. Davy kept careful notes, and required his subjects to submit reports. His findings resulted in his first book, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its respiration, published in 1800 by Joseph Cottle (a copy of which was recently listed by a UK bookseller for ₤5,000). Cottle was Beddoes’s publisher, both of his scientific books and his political pamphlets. He also published Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and, most significantly, Lyrical Ballads, which first appeared anonymously. Cottle was one of the few of the circle who resisted trying nitrous oxide.

Davy and Beddoes had both noted the pain-relieving qualities of nitrous oxide. Davy even used the gas to relieve the pain of a toothache, but wrote that the pain returned after he stopped using the gas. A half century passed before the gas’s usefulness as an anesthetic was employed for tooth extractions and for surgery—and that in the United States. It was also in the United States that the next chapters exploring the revelatory and spiritual qualities of the nitrous oxide inebriation were written. The researchers were Benjamin Blood and William James.

As for the poets, where did they go? There is certainly nothing in Tennyson, Browning, or Longfellow that responds to Coleridge’s challenge when he wrote:

If the labours of men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed . . .
–Coleridge/Wordsworth/ Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802

None of the succeeding generation of poets followed Coleridge’s dictum to embrace science, and none of them learned mathematics. Physicist James Clerk Maxwell did write poetry, but he was not a part of the poetic community as was Davy, whose poems were published by Robert Southey in his Annual Anthology. The truth is that Maxwell’s best poems were his equations, but at least a modest familiarity with vector calculus was required to read them.

Perhaps more importantly, however, the scientific metaphors were proving more revolutionary than those of the poets. Coleridge understood this, but still felt that the more godless (we might say “philistine”) implications of mechanistic materialism were secondary and peripheral to science itself, and that the denigration of Imagination to “mere” was not justified by experiment. On the Continent, Goethe tried to create a parallel science, dubbed “phenomenological” by Rudolf Steiner, which still struggles feebly on the margins of scientific research, called today either “holistic” or “pseudo,” depending on one’s temperament.

Neither Tennyson nor Longfellow challenged the underlying world view, and the mantle of the salvation and hope passed to Progress, wholly the province of science, or to revolutionary philosophers such as Karl Marx, whose philosophy, we might say, was a subset of the scientific paradigm. The scientists went their own way, and poetry seemed more and more at odds to their endeavor, or simply irrelevant.

And finally, as for the wondrous wisdom of the gas, I went in and checked. I found that my previous conclusions in Pharmako/Poeia were still valid, by at least a full order of difference. And two degrees of difference are enough for me.
This review was originally published in Erowid Review:

http://www.erowid.org/library/review/review.php?p=294