Global warming is a topic that has plagued the media for about the past 10 years. So while this may give the implication that it is a new disastrous phenomena , it is not. The Greenhouse effect and global warming have been building for many years, and some have known about it for just as long. Being able to look back on what people discovered and took part in the past has given us great insight into global warming because it is intertwined with human activities. The book Greenhouse by Gale E. Christianson focuses on the human actions that helped create the greenhouse effect and speed up global warming.
The first thing the book discusses lays the path for the discussion on global warming. The first topic was the scientist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier. He wrote many papers on how heat spread in enclosed spaces and infinite spaces in the early 1800's. This lead him to come up with the bell jar hypothesis in the 1820's. This hypothesis said that the earth stayed warm due to an "invisible dome", that he compared to a bell jar, that kept the heat in. This hypothesis was discarded by most at the time because it was mostly based on guesswork. However this hypothesis gave birth to the idea of the greenhouse effect. I think that it was important for the author to begin with this hypothesis because it lets the reader know that the greenhouse effect is not a new concept, and how humans are often ignorant of things that will become important some day.
Also Christianson touches on how the geographer James Hutton came up with the idea of uniformitarianism. In other words, he thought that the environment works independently from a higher power. This was probably quite controversial at the time and I think it hints to the reader that the public perception of disaster events is altered in the face of their long-held beliefs.
Then Christianson goes on to explain that since the industrial age the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has risen dramatically, from 280 parts per million to 360 ppm in the 1990's. I believe that this statistic is important because it shows that Fourier was right, and his bell jar idea was renamed the Greenhouse effect. This goes to show that not educating the public on important matters can be harmful to the public later on.
In the second section of the book, Christianson lays out what human activities happened in the English industrial age to further global warming. The main focus of the section, however, was that society was becoming capitalistic, and this meant that the concern for the environment was decreased even further by people's need for money. An example cited from the book is that of early 1600's commoners burning bituminous coal, which was sulfurous and smokey. They burned this because it was cheap, easy to obtain, and the new King had begun burning coal. Also these people had high chimneys that kept the smoke mostly away. While this example shows that people were becoming more capitalistic and careless with the environment, it is good to point out that they had no idea what those gases were doing to the atmosphere. However, if Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier's theory had been taken seriously, some of these problems may have been avoided.
Another section that highlights this point well discusses "the tall chimneys" of the late 1800's. These chimneys were made to be as tall as possible to get the foul smoke away from the people and further up into the atmosphere. Christianson quotes the book Tall Chimney Construction by Robert M. Bancroft when it says, "Firstly, to create the necessary draught for the combustion of fuel; secondly, to convey the noxious gases to such a height that they shall be so intermingled with the atmosphere as not to be injurious to health." I found this rather funny because the people at that time realized that these gases were harmful to the health of society, but they continued to pump them into the air, not worrying about the implications that might have in the future on the environment. On the other hand some people did see foresee these chimneys becoming an environmental problem, for example in 1859 John Ruskin said during his lecture at Bradford's school of design that in fifty years the gases will have blocked out the sun's light completely.
Christianson also points out, perhaps unconsciously, good examples of other environmental hazards associated with the chimneys. He mentions that while people tried to build them on rock, sometimes these chimneys had to be built on alluvial clay near rivers. This seemed to me to be a hazard situation. Since the clay is soft and these chimneys are tall and made of bricks and cement, it seems that the risk that they might collapse into the rivers was high, making this a mass wastage hazard brought on by human development. Another good example was that of wind gusts. Since these chimneys were very tall (some over 400 feet) they were strongly susceptible to high winds, and often times they blew over. Workers would try to fix these chimneys when they saw them "bulge" and sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. The funny thing about these chimneys is that they continued to build them the same way for several years even though they were constantly in need of saving.
The book then heads away from the coal-burning and chimneys to steal production. One good example is that of the Carnegie Steel Company in the late 1890's. This company started very small and grew exponentially with its primary source of gases to add the the already damaged atmosphere was furnaces for smelting. The reason this business in particular is sited in the book is because of the large scale of the business and how horribly it contributed to pollution. The text states, "the air of the valley through which it flowed was so thick with smoke from the giant brick and concrete stacks, you could spread it on bread in the absence of butter." This just goes to show how the capitalistic views of business men at that time could not be changed by the obvious destruction their very businesses were causing.
The book then goes on to talk about the discovery of oil and how capitalist money mongers when out and made a mess of the environment through drilling and creating pipelines. This then rolled into the development of the engine and successively vehicles. This hints at the implications of what was to come as far as pollution and the atmosphere was concerned.
Quite honestly, I found this book hard to read. Not only was it boring and choppy, but the stories that the author tells sometimes don't really fit with the topic. And there was so much information that it was impossible to take it all in. Often times it told stories of people working to get by or people making it big all at the expense of the environment, which is okay but I feel that the whole "capitalism is bad" view should not have been the subject of this whole book. This may have made more sense to a scientist of some sort or have been more interesting to a historian. All it really was was a historical human-based perspective without much information on environmental hazards so I found it difficult to base my review from a hazards-based perspective.
