The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-29)

B4 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022

But when the old friend he had handpicked as

the expedition’s botanist and medic died unex-

pectedly, Burton was forced to choose a strang-

er as his replacement — namely, Speke, a prim,

fair-haired aristocrat six years Burton’s junior

who lacked any special knowledge of either

botany or medicine. And the two men could

hardly have been more different. “Burton was a

man of eccentric genius and tastes, orientalised

in character and thoroughly Bohemian,” as one

of their colleagues later put it. “Speke, on the

other hand, was a thorough Briton, conven-

tional, solid, and, resolute.” This was not, in

other words, a combination designed for suc-

cess.

The pair’s incompatibility became immedi-

ately obvious once the expedition left Zanzibar.

A first try to reach the interior in 1855 had to be

aborted when a group of Somalis attacked the

travelers early on, leaving one Englishman

dead, Speke brutally clubbed and stabbed, and

Burton suffering with a spear thrust sideways

through his mouth. A second attempt in 1857

proved nearly as disastrous, plagued by bad

problem for the other two members of this

triumvirate — especially Burton, who has been

the subject of numerous biographies over the

years. And little wonder why: Oxford dropout,

brilliant scholar and linguist, fearless traveler,

and translator of classic books considered ob-

scene by his peers, he was the kind of man who

would disguise himself as a Muslim (to the

extent of getting circumcised) in order to be the

first undercover Englishman to enter Mecca.

For a swashbuckler like Burton, finding the

source of the Nile was an adventure too chal-

lenging to pass up. By the early 1850s, virtually

all that was known about the central African

region — to Europeans, at least — was that a

large body of water lay somewhere in the

continent’s interior, along with a group of peaks

known as the Mountains of the Moon. So when

Burton heard that the Royal Geographical Soci-

ety was planning an expedition into this entic-

ing terra incognita, his reaction was foresee-

able: “I shall strain every nerve to command it.”

Somehow, despite the fact that he had many

enemies in high places, Burton secured the job.

country’s entire infrastructure would shut

down. How did Nordhaus miscalculate so

wildly? He assumed that because most of the

U.S. economy occurs indoors, it was immune

to the impact of climate change. For that

faulty logic, he won a Nobel Prize in 2018.

During this period, uncontrolled green-

house gases mounted. Once in the atmos-

phere, carbon takes centuries to dissipate. In

many ways, Linden’s book reads as a requiem

to the power of scientific research and

pragmatic, political action.

Hindsight gives the historian 20/20 vision.

Linden acknowledges that 50 years ago,

scientists believed climates changed slowly

over long periods. They speculated that

permafrost would remain stable for hun-

dreds of years and that sea levels would rise

at a “stately pace.” Then they learned more,

grasping from Paleolithic data that past

climate shifts were violent and extremely

rapid. With floods, fires and storms multiply-

ing, Earth itself has refuted the claim of a

long, slow pace of change.

In the last decade, most of the political

players in the United States are no longer

denying the effects of carbon dioxide build-

up. That is good news. Twenty percent of U.S.

power now comes from renewables — more

than coal and nuclear. The United States is on

track to meet the Paris climate agreement

goals for 2025, thanks to the 20 percent drop

in emissions during the coronavirus pandem-

ic. The bad news is that the Paris targets will

only slow warming. Under the Paris targets,

the temperatures will increase to a disaster-

making 2.7 to 3.7 degrees Celsius.

Linden points to the business ventures

emerging to profit from disaster and the

tendency to reassign climate risks to the poor

solar panels installed on the roof of the White

House. A 1979 report commissioned by the

Carter White House and led by MIT atmos-

pheric scientist Jule Charney warned in

respect to a warming globe that a “wait-and-

see policy may mean waiting until it is too

late.” Yet that’s exactly what happened.

Linden’s narrative swerves between scien-

tists reluctant to spell out the problem in

anything but the densest prose and lobbyists

paying to make climate change science go

away. Moneyed interests, especially the Koch

brothers, derailed political leaders who

broached the subject. These leaders were

usually Democrats — from Carter to Bill

Clinton to Barack Obama.

Even Al Gore, who was a vocal advocate for

action on climate change, succumbed to the

pressure. Running for president, he did not

mention greenhouse gas emissions as he

courted the Rust Belt and union vote on the

campaign trail. Oil and coal presidents —

Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W.

Bush and Donald Trump — raised money

easily and did well at the polls. We are just

waking to the impact of climate change

denial as an invisible yet powerful undercur-

rent guiding U.S. politics.

Linden is also critical of insurers who

should have been keenly aware of the risks of

the properties they were covering. He finds

fault, too, with business leaders outside the

fossil fuel industry who were taken in by

economists who greatly underestimated the

costs of climate change. Yale economist

William Nordhaus calculated that with a

three-degree Celsius rise in temperatures,

America would only lose 1 percent of national

income. We now know that the damage from

such an increase would be incalculable: The

Book World

RIVER OF THE

GODS

Genius,

Courage, and

Betrayal in the

Search for the

Source of the

Nile

By Candice

Millard

Doubleday.

349 pp. $32.50

weather, disappearing supplies and porters,

infuriating insects, bizarre illnesses, and inter-

necine conflict among the expedition’s mem-

bers. The unfailingly good-natured Bombay

tried to play peacemaker, but Burton and Speke

clashed often, piling up resentments and mu-

tual antipathies that would never be fully re-

solved.

They did, however, make discoveries — if

landmarks known to Arab traders for decades

and local people for centuries can be consid-

ered “discoveries.” The big body of water at the

continent’s heart turned out to be three sepa-

rate major lakes, and the expedition got a look

at two of them. Burton and Speke together

reached the one that Europeans would call

Lake Tanganyika, but only Speke glimpsed the

other — Nyanza, a.k.a. Lake Victoria — as

Burton was incapacitated by illness and too

weak to make the side trip. Naturally, Burton

felt that the lake he saw was the likely source of

the Nile; Speke was convinced that the true

source must be the lake his rival didn’t see. And

although the younger man would ultimately

prove correct (more or less, but the question is

complex), this fundamental disagreement

would poison the remainder of each explorer’s

life.

Millard recounts all of these travails with a

fluid grace that wears its learning lightly. She

leaves some important parts of the story untold

but shows a keen sensitivity to aspects that

have at times been underplayed, such as the

role of slavery and the slave trade in the effort of

discovery. Burton and Speke, she points out,

although opposed to slavery as an institution,

did hire enslaved people as porters (for pay).

Even Bombay took along an enslaved servant —

a fellow African named Mabruki. Bombay ap-

pears to have treated him with a kindness

bordering on devotion, but we’ll probably nev-

er know how Mabruki felt about the arrange-

ment. Some perspectives on history, unfortu-

nately, can only be surmised.

T

o the Royal Geographical Society of Vic-

torian England, it was “the problem of all

ages.” Determining the source of the Nile,

traditionally regarded as the longest river in

the world, had in fact been a common fixation

since ancient times, prompting speculation

from figures as varied as Herodotus and Alex-

ander the Great (who guessed, oddly, that the

African river’s headwaters might be found

somewhere in India). By the mid-19th century,

the quest had become an obsession with the

British in particular. According to Sir Roderick

Murchison, one of the founders of the Royal

Geographical Society, the explorer who ulti-

mately pinpointed the fabled river’s origins

would be “justly considered among the greatest

benefactors of this age.”

Given the depth of this fascination, it’s not

surprising that many books have been written

about this holy grail of Victorian exploration —

notable among them “The White Nile” by Alan

Moorehead (1960) and “Explorers of the Nile”

by Tim Jeal (2011). Now enter Candice Millard,

who has made a specialty of writing about

individual episodes in the lives of colorful

historical figures such as Theodore Roosevelt

and Winston Churchill. With her new book,

“River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Be-

trayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile,”

she takes a similar slice-of-the-story approach

to the decades-long Nile drama, focusing on the

bitter rivalry between explorers Richard Bur-

ton and John Hanning Speke. And while her

book is neither as infectiously readable as

Moorehead’s (which is now outdated) nor as

comprehensive and deeply researched as Jeal’s,

she does add a new dimension to the story.

Perhaps as a corrective to the Anglocentrism of

earlier accounts, she brings a third figure into

the foreground: Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a for-

merly enslaved African who acted as guide and

interpreter for Burton, Speke and several other

explorers over the years. It’s a refreshing shift

in emphasis and certainly overdue, but since

relatively few details about Bombay survive in

the historical record, there are limits to how

much Millard can tell us.

A lack of documentation is certainly not a

They found the source of the Nile — and became lifelong enemies

HISTORY REVIEW BY GARY KRIST

KHALED ELFIQI/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Tourists explore

Egypt’s first modern

walkway

overlooking the

Nile in Cairo on

May 20.

C

limatology is a Cold War science. It

relies on expensive equipment and

researchers spanning the globe taking

measurements. In the 1950s, American and

Soviet scientists led in recording the first

signs of human-driven climate change. As a

young researcher in 1960, Charles Keeling

published data on the rise of carbon dioxide

emissions from the top of Hawaii’s Mauna

Loa volcano. In the early 1960s, Russian

climatologist Mikhail Budyko linked the rise

in carbon dioxide to humans burning fossil

fuels. The Cold War powers, major producers

of carbon dioxide, were in the position to lead

on the issue. Instead, political leaders in both

countries squandered decades of precious

time by ignoring or denying the very science

they pioneered. Science is slow, but that

slow? What went wrong?

Eugene Linden’s “Fire and Flood: A Peo-

ple’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to

the Present” and Thane Gustafson’s “Klimat:

Russia in the Age of Climate Change” explore

the political and economic perspectives on

climate change in the United States and the

Soviet Union and Russia. Placing the two

books side by side displays an arching

concordance. The rival nations evolved on

the climate front to share much in common,

as foes often do. Both governments subsidize

oil production to the tune of billions of

dollars. Both countries fall on the shabby side

in responding to climate change, all while

vying with each other for shares of the

world’s oil and gas markets. And both

countries have forceful lobbies and lawmak-

ers resistant to setting limits on emissions of

greenhouse gases. Political sentiments line

up, too. The Russian and American right

agree that climate change is the “scam of the

century,” an excuse by the left to bridle

industry. U.S. President Donald Trump’s

administration infamously erased climate

change from government websites. Vladimir

Putin celebrated a warming climate as good

for frosty Russia. Russians, he quipped, won’t

have to spend so much on fur coats.

Fur costs aside, in “Klimat,” Gustafson

points out that temperatures will increase in

Russia more than in other parts of the globe

and that 70 percent of Russian territory is

permafrost, which is thawing at accelerating

rates, leaving behind large craters of sunken

earth, cracked buildings and crumbling

bridges.

The biggest problem, however, for Russia

is economic. In the past two decades, Russia

has thrived on the export of fossil fuels. The

Russian leadership has been having trouble

recognizing that the days of pumping oil and

gas will soon end. Putin remarked in 2019 on

the coming decline of oil exports: “I simply

don’t see any threats to us, they don’t exist.”

Presently, Russia is using its gas and oil

supply to wage war. In April, it shut off gas to

Poland and Bulgaria in retaliation for aiding

Ukraine.

The U.S. economy, similarly propped up by

oil and gas revenue, is also in danger. The

European Union is threatening to impose

tariffs on countries that do not meet E.U.

carbon emission standards as a way to level

the playing field for those that are cutting

emissions. That move would cut into U.S. and

Russian business prospects, especially as

both are late in developing renewables and in

preparing for a net-zero future.

In fascinating detail, Linden’s “Fire and

Flood” tours the American scientific and

political landscape that first grasped the fact

of climate change and then forgot about it. In

the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter had

On climate change, Russia and the U.S. are uncomfortably alike

CLIMATE CHANGE REVIEW BY KATE BROWN

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

Mammoth bones,

some tens of

thousands of years

old, lie along the

Kolyma River

outside the Siberian

town of Zyryanka,

Russia, in 2019.

The melting

permafrost is

revealing

prehistoric finds

throughout Siberia.

Gary Krist’s most recent book is “The Mirage

Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of

Los Angeles.”

and vulnerable. “Our society is so good at

monetizing discontents (think MAGA hats)

and finding profit opportunities that its very

adaptability has become maladaptive. We are

so gifted at finding the profit to harvest in

every risk and at pushing off the day of

reckoning that, as a society, we have lost the

ability to recognize and adjust to true

danger.”

The Russian government published its

first climate change plan in 2020. It did so

after realizing that investment money is

flowing away from fossil fuels. Now that

missiles are darkening the sky over Ukraini-

an cities, we learn that a significant conse-

quence of Russian denial is panic. Russia has

less than a decade left to profit on the export

of its coal and oil. After that, customers will

no longer be buying. Russia relies heavily on

the export of grain, a commodity that in the

climate change future will become more

expensive as yields decline. Capturing the

Ukrainian breadbasket would help maintain

Russia’s oligarchs in yachts, art and London

townhouses. In waging war on Ukraine,

Putin miscalculated, believing that Europe’s

reliance on Russian fossil fuels was unshak-

able. But he fights on anyway, shifting the

target to Eastern Ukraine, home to wheat

fields and some of the world’s largest nitro-

gen fertilizer factories. The war in Ukraine,

arguably a large-scale climate war, points to

the immediacy of climate change and its

power to uproot, inflame, explode and vio-

lently reorganize human life on this planet.

Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished

Professor in the History of Science at MIT. Her

latest book is “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl

Guide to the Future.”

FIRE AND

FLOOD

A People’s

History of

Climate

Change, from

1979 to the

Present

By Eugene

Linden

Penguin Press.

291 pp. $28

KLIMAT

Russia in the

Age of Climate

Change

By Thane

Gustafson

Harvard.

312 pp. $39.95