This is not a review, and I don't hand out stars either. It is part of my annotated reading list. Whatever first comes to mind when I pick up the book. More about it in this blog post.
written on October 25, 2026, read June 2010
Recently, while working on another text about a book by Carl Sagan, I was looking for a video on YouTube. I really liked one of the comments there: “Every disaster begins with a scientist who was ignored.”
It is, after all, a recurring trope in films: a scientist is ignored by a politician, and the politician later dies in exactly the disaster he was warned about. Just like the villains always smoke, or anyone who drove apart the now-separated family has to die.
The line about the ignored scientist would be quite entertaining if it didn’t reflect reality so well. In these films there is always the warning scientist – somebody has to deliver the exposition, after all. The ignoring politician is needed too – somebody has to create the conflict. And the politician’s death is part of the catharsis.
And then you see Carl Sagan speaking about global warming before Congress. In the video you can also see a young Al Gore. Sagan talks about exactly the problems we have today – and the video is from 1985.
About 20 years later, Al Gore would release an Oscar-winning slideshow raising the same problem once again. Not much has happened since.
Disaster films rarely get a sequel. Science as an academic Bruce Willis – the man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time twice – hardly ever appears in cinemas. In reality, we manage it: instead of realising that science might be right, we reach for the same excuses the next time round in order to do nothing.
With the climate, there even was a sequel about the same disaster: Al Gore released a follow-up in 2017, and one may justifiably ask how much more exposition we actually need. By now, the number of warnings far exceeds the number of endings in “The Return of the King”.
When I read Carl Sagan’s last book “Billions and Billions” (German title: “Gott und der tropfende Wasserhahn”, literally “God and the Dripping Tap”)1, which he wrote shortly before his death, I had exactly this feeling. He writes about the dangers of CFCs, which were initially played down by a lobby with economic interests. Then he turns his attention to global warming and paints the same picture there.
The worst part is that with CFCs we proved that we can tackle such problems. Some 30 years after the book, the ozone layer is visibly recovering. It will take many more years until it has fully regenerated, but it is on its way.2 It went so well that some people now even consider the ozone hole a hoax. And yet in Germany we argue about “technology openness” and highly efficient combustion engines. At this point you can still ask yourself what conservatives actually conserve. Sagan asks this question on page 129 of the German edition of his book. I marked it in pencil many years ago. It is a good question.
Sagan recounts that he was once given a glass sphere containing a small shrimp world – completely self-sufficient except for sunlight. I find that a beautiful image: we are shrimp with the ability to change the inside of our glass sphere. But right now we are using that ability to heat the sphere so much that it turns into shrimp soup.
In the book, Sagan tells the story of Cassandra, whose prophecies nobody believed. If Sagan were still alive today, he would probably feel a deep kinship with her.
I want to close with the feeling I have now that I am holding the book in my hands again after a long time, in order to write about it: anger. The book is almost 30 years old. It’s all in there. We have done little. A few days ago I read Robert Habeck’s “Arctic Meltdown”. Parts of the “Arctic amplification” Habeck talks about can already be found on page 151 of Sagan’s book. The lie that fossil fuels are cheaper than renewables: page 175. None of this is new. It’s all in there.
What is killing us is not the asteroid we didn’t see coming and could no longer do anything about. It is us. And that makes me angry.
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I don’t like the German title. The original is called “Billions and Billions”. ↩
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Until I read this book, I didn’t know that Margaret Thatcher was a chemist, had understood the problem and played a major part in bringing about the Montreal Protocol (page 124 of the German edition). Think of her what you will. I know quite a few people who would set up a circle of hell just for her, and I can even muster a certain understanding for that. But it shows that it can be quite useful to have a scientist in that position rather than a hedge fund employee when it comes to safeguarding the foundations of our lives. ↩