In Our Biggest Experiment, Alice Bell takes us back to explore the earliest signs and causes of climate change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the advancing realisation 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.
Dr Alice Bell is a journalist and historian of science. Alice was a lecturer in science communication at Imperial College for several years, and was also a key contributor to the International Council for Science’s blog on climate policy in the run-up to the UN Paris talks. Alice has kindly agreed to answer some of our questions below.
1) ‘Our Biggest Experiment’ book reads like an epic story with so many interesting scientists and interwoven narratives. Was it always your intention to write this as an historical story, rather than a data and statistics driven text?
Totally. There are already loads of brilliant books explaining the science of climate change. I wanted to offer something a bit different.
When I started seriously reading up on climate change a little over a decade ago, I read through all the papers and briefings on the science and, crucial as all this info was, I kept finding myself asking questions about where the data came from – who commissioned it, why, when, how did they feel about that? This is partly because my undergrad degree is in history of science and I usually respond to science with questions about the people behind it, but it was also because I felt like I needed this history to really understand the climate crisis. As I read further and found answers to my questions. I learnt whole new sides to the climate crisis, deep back-stories and fascinating characters. I found it gave me a new perspective on the issue, and even lifted my spirits in places. I figured these were stories worth sharing, hence the book.
The numbers are vital to understanding climate change – indeed, chunks of my book are about how we came to start counting things like temperature and CO2 – but they’re only part of the story. If we really want to understand the climate crisis, we’re going to have to look around and behind the numbers too.
2) In the book you cover a number of different scientific disciplines and discoveries, which was your favourite area to research and why?
Science-wise, my favourite is probably the ways in which people started to unravel knowledge about past climates through cores of sea mud and ice. I loved reading the autobiography of Danish meteorologist Willi Dansgaard and his trips in the 1950s and 1960s to the Arctic, hunting bubbles of air trapped deep in ancient ice, taking them home for analysis. His study of cores from a US Army centre in the Arctic, Camp Century, took our understanding of atmospheric carbon dioxide back 100,000 years, helping scientists in the 1970s establish that the climate change we were living through was very much something they dubbed “global warming”, not cooling. I find paleoclimatology so wondrous, the ways people can piece together a history of the planet chasing markers through ice, mud, coral and tree rings.
It was also really interesting to learn more about the way scientists have contributed to the oil industry. From Yale chemist Benjamin Silliman Jr’s report on Pennsylvanian ‘rock oil’ back in 1855 (which arguably launched the American oil industry) diversifying into geology, engineering, oceanography and, when it suited them, atmospheric physics. Sometimes fossil fuel companies and their defenders get painted as “anti-science”. In truth they run on science, and always have done (they are just highly strategic about which bits of it they use).
3) I found it really interesting to learn about Eunice Foote and her role in discovering the greenhouse effect, especially since her contribution was overlooked or simply forgotten for so many years. Do you have a favourite character you discovered whilst writing this book?
It has to be Ida Tarbell, the journalist who brought down Rockafeller and the oil industry, over a hundred years ago.
Tarbell was born the same decade as the oil industry (the 1850s) in the same state (Pennsylvania). She saw the boom and bust of its early years, including the steady, steely growth of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. She started off as a teacher, but moved to Paris in her mid 30s to write a biography of a female French revolutionary she thought had been overlooked, Madame Roland. She shared an apartment there with other women writers, hanging out with Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola and an Egyptian prince. While in Paris, she started writing for McClure’s Magazine, a literary and political monthly, first in pages previously filled by children’s author Frances Hodgson Burnett and later, once she’d moved back to New York, taking up an editorial post.
Tarbell apparently convinced the magazine’s owner, Samuel Sidney McClure, to run an exposé on Rockefeller and Standard Oil during a mudbath at a spa in Italy. Her father pleaded with her to pick any other topic for a story on monopolies than Standard Oil – he’d worked in the oil industry and knew you couldn’t win against Rockefeller. At a party in DC hosted by Alexander Graham Bell, one of Rockefeller’s bankers took her aside to say similar, adding a threat to the finances of the mag for good measure. She curtly replied this made no difference to her – she was a journalist, not the owner. Via Mark Twain, Tarbell bagged an introduction to one of the Standard Oil directors, Henry H. Rogers, who remembered her father and was surprisingly candid. Tarbell sleuthed her way to more and soon had enough to go public.
It was published as a series, starting in Nov 1902 and was immediately explosive. The publicity, in turn, brought her new stories, and the series ended up running for two years, published as a book in 1904, followed the following year with a biography of Rockefeller. The reporting influenced the 1904 election, and at one point Roosevelt found himself promising to return $100k in campaign contributions from Standard Oil directors. Then, in 1906, the company was told it had three years to divide itself up into smaller entities. The largest of these new smaller entities was Standard Oil of New Jersey, which we today know as Exxon. The New York arm we now know as Mobil, the Californian one became Chevron.
4) Your background is very well rooted in science communication – do you have any key tips for communicating climate change and inspiring change?
Anyone who says they know how to communicate climate change is selling magic beans. Climate is such a big, complex issue, a lot of the best advice goes out the window, or at least general sci comms advice isn’t enough. There are some basic good tips that apply to most comms work – think about the audiences you want to talk to, go to where they are already (e.g. don’t expect to talk to people who don’t like science at the Science Museum), and most of all, listen to them. But that’ll only get you so far. At Possible – the climate charity I co-run – we spend a lot of time pouring over any research we can get our hands on, so we can be as evidence-based as possible. There isn’t nearly enough research on climate comms, projects like the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations at Cardiff Uni is brilliant, but we need way more research funding on this issue. Something else we’re big on at Possible is finding ways to involve people in climate action – you can spend ages polishing your messages, but it’s all too easy for them to simply wash over people if there isn’t a way for them to get involved.
5) I felt a sense of positivity running through this book, reading about the scientific discoveries made over the years and the amazing technology mankind has developed. Do you find it easy to find courage amongst the bad news, and what makes you feel positive about the future of the climate crisis at the moment?
I’m really lucky to work at a climate action charity, it’s very different from reading data on sea ice melt day in day out. So when all the stories of climate impacts start to feel a bit much, I look to my colleagues taking positive, practical action and it helps me remember that there is still so much we can do. As the ever-articulate NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel puts it, ‘Climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off, but a slope we slide down.’ That slope is getting very steep, but we haven’t fallen off yet. There’s still so much of the world we can save.
There were times writing the book when I felt pretty down. There was a week last summer where it was just blisteringly, stiflingly, oppressively hot in London. London’s horrible when it gets too hot anyway, but that extra knowledge that climate change is contributing to the heat, and hurting people in other countries so much more, makes it all the harder. I was trying to finish the first draft of my book and re-reading all these papers from the 1960s or 1970s musing that “if” we didn’t do anything, the climate could get nasty after the year 2000. It made me so angry about all those lost years of delay and inaction. But at the same time, writing the book helped me find strength too, especially the stories of scientist’s research. Because climate change isn’t obvious. You need science to see it. We could, all too easily, be sitting around thinking ‘the weather’s a bit weird today. Again.’ We at least have this warning, and that’s something quite powerful in itself, even if we haven’t been fast enough to take that warning.
6) Do you have any further projects or books in the pipeline you can tell us about?
I have started mulling over an idea for another book, but honestly I’m not sure I have time. I’ve got too many exciting projects at Possible. My colleague Neil has some amazing work brewing on community hedge planting which has to be put on hold with the pandemic, but I’m so excited to get dug in (literally!) in the next planting season. Then another team member, Emma, has a really fun citizen science app we’re hoping to launch soon (if we can sort the bugs). Then there’s our solar railways work, projects listening to communities about what they think about projects to curb traffic in towns which sprung up during lockdown, and of course the big UN climate talks in Glasgow in November. One thing about climate campaigning is there’s always more to do! It doesn’t get boring.
Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis
By: Alice Bell
Hardback | June 2021| £16.99 £19.99
All prices correct at the time of this article’s publication.
In his latest book, 
shapes, forms and colours of the birds. They were so very different to the birds I was used to seeing in the Somerset countryside around our home. After that, every now and again I’d see footage of hummingbirds on wildlife documentaries, and began to appreciate further just how remarkable they were – what Tim Dee described as ‘strange birds: not quite birds or somehow more than birds, birds 2.0, perhaps’.
There were plenty of other moments that I’ll hold in my heart, and they don’t all involve the iconic, rare species. One such was watching Golden-tailed Sapphires, a hummingbird that looks as if it’s been dipped in rainbows, feeding in a clearing in the immediate aftermath of a heavy rain shower. As the sun broke through the dripping vegetation and steaming air we were suddenly surrounded by myriad small rainbows through which the birds were flying. That moment was ephemeral, over almost as soon as it began, but it’s etched in my memory forever. 
I found myself asking myself that very question as my journey into their world unfolded… Hummingbirds certainly seem to touch something deep inside us. They featured in the mythology of the Aztecs; inspired the most dramatic of all of the immense geoglyphs carved into the desert floor by the Nazca; appear in renowned art and literature; and, to this day, are singled out for particular love by those whose gardens they frequent, people who would not necessarily identify themselves as birders.
Inevitably there were some logistical challenges to contend with, not least having to reacquaint myself with horse-riding after a decades-long and deliberate avoidance of it! There were a couple of close encounters with large predators that were, in hindsight, more alarming than they felt at the time – as a naturalist, I was thrilled to get (very) close views of a puma… But perhaps the most challenging moment of all was landing in Bolivia at the very moment the country was taking to the streets to protest the outcome of a recent presidential election. There was an incident at a roadblock manned by armed men that was genuinely scary, with an outcome that hung in the balance for a terrifying instant, and could easily have ended badly.
I sometimes think there’s almost too much optimism expressed when talking about conservation challenges anywhere in the world – a narrative that suggests “if we only care enough, the [insert iconic species name here] can be saved”. And to a degree, that’s good – we’ve got to have hope, as the alternative is too dreadful to countenance – but given our impact to date, and in an uncertain future where the effects of climate change are still unfolding and will continue for many decades to come, to name just the biggest of the mounting pressures on the natural world, I’m not sure that I do feel terribly optimistic, least of all for those hummingbird species that have very localized populations, or depend upon very specific habitats. They’re undeniably vulnerable. But like Fox Mulder, 
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photographing and surveying insects. I learned about the insects, watched them and counted the sheer number of species, and realised that no one else had actually surveyed a small urban park extensively. The book came about as I wanted to show people what was living in the bushes and to put Peckham on the entomological map!
and usually open 24 hours – but there is no reason why we can’t include habitats for our wildlife. A simple solution would be to leave areas un-mowed to grow wild. In the parks of my local area in London, large swathes of grasses and flowers have been left to mature and people have been really receptive to it. I think we are finally moving away from the Victorian ideal of neat and tidy!
For nearly thirty years now I have been going to stay in a small house at the head of a bay on the west coast of Scotland. It is somewhere my wife’s family have been going for generations and now our children and grandchildren love it too. It has everything you might long for from a place like that: cliffs, woods, waterfalls, a dark beach made of basalt sands, a lighthouse, a ruined castle, stories, beauty, birds, fish; but one thing it did not have because of the geology, was a rockpool. For years I have dreamed of making one – a place of stillness set in the tide, and this book is the story of how I made three of them in different parts of the bay; one dug in with a pickaxe; one made by damming a narrow exit to the sea from a hollow so that the dam held the pool behind it; and one by making a circular wall low down in the intertidal.
And so that provided the model – see what was there and look carefully at it. Of course, books like mine are entirely parasitic on the work of many generations of biologists and that too turned out to be the pattern. Watch the sand hoppers and then read about them. Read about them and see how much of what I read I could find on the shore. With prawns, winkles, shore crabs, anemones, limpets, sea-stars, urchins and barnacles, I simply oscillated between the pools and my books: what was there? What had people discovered about them? How did they interact? What were the principles governing their presence or absence? And with all of that came the repeated and slightly sobering realisation that unless I knew to look for something it was very difficult to see it was there. Mysteriously, we are often blind to what is in front of our eyes.
stages, can recognise the movements and timings of the tides. That sea anemones can identify other sea anemones that are not their relations and effectively destroy them. That prawns have an imagination – that might sound like too much, but it has been shown that they can remember past pain and project it into present and future anxieties. Anxiety is different from fear; it is a fear of what might be there. In other words a prawn can think beyond its present reality.
garden whose walls are dissolved twice a day, an enclosure that becomes part of the general world with every high tide. That ambiguity is what entranced me, the sense of its being a micro-ocean, a micro-arcadia, a micro-laboratory in which all kinds of intimacies and precision in natural beings can be witnessed an inch beneath your nose.
slow I would be overtaken by very old people on Zimmer frames. It seemed as though I’d hit 97 five decades prematurely.
To the casual observer, global summits and the resolutions they produce can seem frustratingly ineffective – repeating cycles of targets set, missed and reset, with no obvious progress. Yet despite the apparent inertia, when used to good effect these processes can be powerful tools for positive change. 
It’s hugely important. Not only do these treaties establish some of the most important conservation objectives, but they provide a means of learning from other experience. Typically, international treaties set a broad goal – such as ‘the wise use of wetlands’ in the case of the Ramsar Convention – but are much less prescriptive as to exactly how this will be delivered nationally. Accordingly, there is much to learn from the broad diversity of other national conservation experience in implementing treaty obligations. Such comparative experiences make these treaties fascinating and their study valuable.
Following on from the previous question, this book highlights the role and importance of NGOs (and a number of the authors themselves have been or are currently involved with NGOs). Do you think NGOs should have more involvement in environmental policy, both within the UK and on a global scale? 
James Lowen is an award-winning writer whose work is regularly featured in The Telegraph, BBC Wildlife and Nature’s Home, among other publications. He is also an editor, lecturer, consultant and keen photographer.
fragile creatures flying a thousand-plus miles). There’s wackiness too: china-mark moths, whose caterpillars live underwater; Sandhill Rustic, whose adults can swim underwater; Scarce Silver-lines, which sings from oak trees; various moths that are engaged in an evolutionary arms race with bats; Indian Meal Moth and Wax Moth, whose caterpillars can digest polyethylene and polypropylene (perhaps conceivably hinting at a solution to the global plastics problem?); and even one New World moth whose cells have proved critical for producing the Novavax COVID vaccine.
sun-loving, day-flying moth. I guess the other thing to emphasise is that whereas moth-trapping in your garden makes for gloriously lazy wildlife-watching, simply flick the switch and let the insects come to you, surveying moths in remote places is contrastingly hard work. After a long drive, often on the back of little sleep, you need to lug heavy generators and a fleet of moth traps up steep slopes or across difficult terrain. And then you need to stay alert all night to make sure you don’t miss anything. I didn’t get much sleep that year… 
intrepid endeavours to safeguard 
Due in September is 
