The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (Vol. II)

The chapter opens with a scene that captures the spirit of the whole book: in August 1856 the Irish scientist John Tyndall sets out alone from the Swiss village of Interlaken, climbs onto a glacier and, amid the silence, hears the roar of an avalanche. The son of a policeman, trained in Germany under Bunsen, the man who explained why the sky is blue, Tyndall becomes bound to glaciers by a 'sense of wonder bordering on terror' — once a storm turns him back just 100 metres short of the Matterhorn's summit. Yergin is a true master at bringing the history of science to life with such human detail.

Tyndall's question was simple: if glaciers move and there was once an ice age, what changes the climate? Yergin takes the question's roots back to the 18th century: in the 1770s the Geneva professor Saussure builds a 'hot box' lined with dark cork — a miniature greenhouse — and suggests that the atmosphere might hold heat like glass; in the 1820s the French mathematician Fourier tries and fails to work out the mathematics; and in 1837 the Swiss Agassiz claims that Europe was once buried under giant ice sheets, only to be mocked by his colleagues.

The chapter's climax is Tyndall's basement laboratory at the Royal Institution in London. Disappointed to find nitrogen and oxygen transparent, he tries the coal gas piped into his lab, then water vapour and carbon dioxide, and discovers that they trap infrared radiation. On 18 May 1859 he writes in his diary that he has 'the subject completely in my hands', and soon afterwards, with Prince Albert presiding, gives the first public experimental demonstration of the greenhouse effect. His analogy — the atmosphere holding back heat like a dam built across a river — remains one of the clearest explanations to this day.

The story then moves to the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius. In 1894, in the melancholy that followed his divorce and the loss of custody of his son, he spends months doing calculations by hand, sometimes 14 hours a day, and concludes that a doubling of carbon dioxide would bring 5–6 degrees of warming — astonishingly close to modern models. The most fascinating detail is that Arrhenius was not afraid: for a chemist who knew long, dark Swedish winters, warming was 'good news' promising milder climates and richer harvests for the northern lands.

At the end of the chapter Yergin shows how the idea of climate change was forgotten: the American Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s was blamed on 'weather', not 'climate'. In 1938 the amateur meteorologist and steam engineer Guy Callendar presented data showing rising carbon dioxide to the Royal Meteorological Society, but the professionals did not take him seriously. The idea, later known as the 'Callendar Effect', was forgotten again; in 1951 a climatologist wrote that the theory had been 'abandoned'. It is perfect preparation for the political drama of the chapters to come.

The chapter also works as a standalone essay, squeezing roughly two centuries of climate science into 14 pages. The only criticism: Yergin devotes so much attention to the personal dramas of figures like Tyndall and Arrhenius that the explanation of the scientific mechanisms sometimes comes up short — the physics of the greenhouse effect, for instance, gets only a paragraph or two at the start.

• Each scientific discovery is built on a specific person's life story
• Extensive quotations from diaries, letters and interviews
• Chapter endings that build a bridge to the next stage
• Detailed notes and source references