Waters of the World

"It’s inspired. Sarah Dry is a science historian specialising in climate. And it is history, she shows, that helps to ground our understanding of the nature and findings of baggy multidisciplinary fields like climate science. So at a time when millions of people worldwide are demonstrating over the climate crisis — basically fighting for a future — Dry looks to the past: to the very roots of the science of planetary change, told through the stories of six dedicated researchers. She follows the water. Over her 150-year chronicle, “water traces not the flow of energy but the flow of human activity and thought”, from Victorians such as the physicist John Tyndall and astronomer Charles Piazzi Smith to the 20th-century meteorologist Joanne Simpson. This band of originals become names to conjure with. Proto-climatologist Alexander von Humboldt may have speculated about industry’s impact on climate, but it was these subsequent generations of scientists who finally parsed the “wild confusions of the earth’s environment”. Ultimately, their scattered scientific endeavours were synthesised. Tyndall was deeply interested in glacial movement; Piazzi Smyth, in high-altitude sky-scanning and the behaviour of water vapour. The two became explorers by default: Tyndall in the Alps, Piazzi Smyth among the peaks of Tenerife. I was gripped by Dry’s descriptions of Tyndall, who alternated between manic mountaineering, dogged experimentation and public lectures. Tyndall’s labwork confirmed the heat-trapping properties of water vapour and carbon dioxide (and he is credited for it, although amateur American scientist Eunice Foote had beaten him to it by three years, Dry tells us). In a po-faced moment, James Clerk Maxwell objected to Tyndall’s ‘theatricality’ in communicating science, but Tyndall emerges as a scientific visionary in awe of the continuity of nature, the flow between energy and matter. “At a time when millions of people worldwide are demonstrating over the climate crisis…Dry looks to the past” The 20th century saw more doggedness and brilliance, from physical oceanographer Henry Stommel’s theories on complex ocean currents to palaeoclimatologist Willi Dansgaard’s early work on Greenland ice cores. Joanne Simpson was a revelation. The first women in the United States to earn a doctorate in meteorology, in 1949, she flew research aircraft into tropical cloud masses over Bermuda and seeded clouds (and hurricanes) experimentally. Her work helped to reveal how cloud dynamics drive large-scale circulation in the atmosphere and seas. I’m old enough to recall the debut of the Whole Earth Catalog , part-inspired by images of Earth from space. Seeing the planet entire felt transformative. But in Waters of the World , we’re shown that we were primed to see that, by research evolving long before Apollo. As Dry puts it, the “self-evidence of that wholeness is a very hardwon result”. She has wonderfully conveyed how scientific diversity worked to reveal scientific unities — how the insights of generations of astrophysicists, geologists, oceanographers, glaciologists and meteorologists converged and pieced Earth systems together. That collaboration through time and space has fostered resilience in practice and robustness in discovery. In denialism-drenched times, that is a vital insight."