Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

The text introduces the beginnings of climate science, which was born in 1771 through the work of English scholar and polymath Joseph Priestley. Although Priestley did not fully understand the nature of oxygen, he pinpointed the relationship between fire and air, as well as between air and life. Using bell jars, he conducted experiments on live mice to see how long they could last in a sealed environment. He noted that they soon died. However, when he placed a mint plant in a bell jar directly after a mouse died in it, expecting it to also die, he found that the plant lived for weeks. He then put a mouse in the jar with the mint plant and saw that the mouse lived longer than the mice in empty jars did. He noted that plants reversed the effects of animals’ breathing and vice versa, laying the groundwork for the idea of a self-sustaining closed system, the simplistic definition of climate. Thus, 250 years ago, Priestley proved that the Earth’s atmosphere was both “contaminable and restorable” (230).

In the current Petrocene Age, humans’ ability to affect the atmosphere has grown exponentially. The ability of ordinary humans to use energy to drive fast or keep warm would have astounded humans a mere century ago.