The Parrot and the Igloo by David Lipsky

Author:David Lipsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2023-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

S.

BY 2014—SUMMER, A BOLD CHOICE FOR LAS VEGAS travel—the denial movement had grown brawny enough to occupy a casino. An international conference: thirty-two co-sponsors, attendance at six-fifty. Funders and scientists had pulled off big things.

This was a modern conference: there were awards. Dr. Sherwood Idso, who’d made the old Greening of Planet Earth video for the coal people, received the first annual Frederick Seitz Memorial Award. Presented to him by Dr. S. Fred Singer.

And with a click—one denial grandfather named Fred celebrating the achievements of the other—climate denial closed its circle. Became one of those Möbius strip novels whose last line is really the start of its first page.

The Freds serve as main characters in Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt. With seething courtesy, Oreskes calls them her protagonists.

“Who could deny all that?” Oreskes marvels at one point. “The answer: Both Fred Seitz and Fred Singer.”

Dr. Singer didn’t leave the Strip empty-handed. He took career honors: Lifetime Achievement in Climate Science. In his testimonial, the president of the Heartland Institute (event sponsor) was not skimpy with praise. “Fred Singer is the most amazing and wonderful person participating in the global warming debate today.” He looked into his audience. “If there’s any person in the world responsible for the development of a skeptics movement on global warming, it’s Dr. S. Fred Singer. . . . Fred is a giant. He is a hero.”

He resembles a character out of Tolkien, small and twinkling. In a movie, he’d rest his chin on the grip of his cane. On TV, there are the small lively eyes, and the broad mouth—beneath a Vandyke beard—that appears constantly delighted. A figure from the old-time carnivals. It’s all hucksterism, his smile says; but that’s the marvelous and adult spice of life. If my science is flimflam, could be the other fellow’s science is also flimflam—maybe all science is flimflam. And now perhaps we can return to business? ABC News, 2008, asking Dr. Singer’s opinion of warming research. “All bunk,” he replied. But those other scientists; the learned societies; NASA. With mounting happiness: “What can I say? They’re wrong!” All of them? With his soft accent, and greater joy: “Yes!”

He was born a Jew in 1924 Vienna. And if life is joy, it’s a willed joy. Because the facts are heavy, and sometimes they’re sad. Fred Singer fled to England the day German tanks rolled across Czechoslovakia. Burned a year in damp Northumberland. He was fourteen, and worked for an optician. (Which may have been the wrong job, message-wise. Presenting life to the young S. Fred Singer as a question of lenses. What you hear in this climate versus denial remark is the bell at the optometrist’s door. “Nobody tells an untruth,” Dr. Singer told the Washington Post. “But nobody tells the whole truth either. It all depends on the ideological outlook.”) The Singer family reunited in the States. And not a Vienna substitute: Ohio. It was a life that keeps tugging you from the spot you aimed at—you have to adjust what you’ll accept—the rocket launched a few degrees off course.

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