More Evidence, As If We Needed It, of Global Warming, part three

I am posting this on the day on which Europe is having its warmest May on record, passing previous records by a long ways. The ways I am keeping cool is by sitting under ceiling fans and not doing much except writing. But this series of essays is not about global temperatures directly, but about their effects on the seasonal activities of plants.

I conducted a sixteen-year study of budburst dates in Oklahoma deciduous trees, and I found that winter buds opened in spring earlier and earlier each year, consistent with global warming. The results were highly significant. I did not, however, have time to publish this study in a scientific journal before I retired. I decided instead to publish it on my website. Here is the link to the article, with illustrations. Please note that the mailing address on the cover page is now obsolete; you may contact me through the website email link (stanriceauthor@gmail.com).

I here address an interesting point about this research, aside from its unsurprising conclusion. And that point is, how do we avoid bias?

Here is a photo of mulberry buds.

Everyone is biased, including scientists. The people who proclaim themselves to be unbiased (politicians, industry leaders) are in fact the most biased people in the world. Scientists are much less biased, and for good reason. The process of scientific research requires specific steps to be taken to deliberately avoid bias. So, when I conclude that global warming is occurring, a politician (such as the infamous Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, who said whatever oil companies paid him to say) could accuse me of being biased. This is true, but I, unlike him, deliberately designed my research to minimize the bias. Take that, Jim Inhofe! I cannot tell him this, because he died in 2024.

Here is how I did it. For sixteen years, I walked around and noted the budburst dates of a couple of hundred trees. In the back of my mind, I was thinking that the sixteenth year would have much earlier budburst dates than the first year. That, of course, is bias. But budburst is a continuous process. If you note down the very earliest date on which the buds appear to reawaken in the spring, you get an early budburst date; if you note down the first date that the leaves or flowers emerge from the bud, you get a medium budburst date; if you note down the date on which the leaves or flowers are fully expanded, you get a late budburst date. I had to choose some indicator of budburst; I chose the date on which the bud swelled just enough to allow the tissues inside the bud to be visible. And once I had chosen this indicator, I had to stick with it for sixteen years. You can see this in the color photos I included in the article, and in these blog essays.

The technical term for choosing a standard of measurement is construct validity. You can read about it in my book about the adventure of scientific discovery.

There is, in addition, a tradeoff between how detailed your observation can be and how many observations you can make. You cannot measure everything everywhere. When it comes to spring budburst studies, they fall into two categories:

First, satellite measurements. Satellites can measure buds turning green in the spring over hundreds of square miles. This allows the results, such as earlier budburst, in any one location to be generalizable over a larger area. This gives satellite measurements external validity, that is, they are valid not just for the area in which the measurements were made.

Second, there are ground-based studies, such as mine. I am sure of the budburst date and species for each tree. But, as I openly admit in my article, the external validity of ground based studies is limited.

I will explain, in the next essay, yet one more interesting point about scientific research into global warming.

More Evidence, As If We Needed It, of Global Warming, part one

I conducted a sixteen-year study of budburst dates in Oklahoma deciduous trees, and I found that winter buds opened in spring earlier and earlier each year, consistent with global warming. The results were highly significant. I did not, however, have time to publish this study in a scientific journal before I retired. I decided instead to publish it on my website. Here is the link to the article, with illustrations. Please note that the mailing address on the cover page is now obsolete; you may contact me through the website email link (stanriceauthor@gmail.com).

Here is what I indicated on my website:

Global warming is something that is already changing the world in a way that will make human civilization difficult. One indicator of global warming is that buds open sooner in the spring than they did previously. Here you will see the evidence.

It is difficult to think of a more important scientific topic today than global warming. The Earth is getting warmer far more than it ever did in the past by natural climatic variation, and the reason is clear: humans are putting massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There are many consequences of this, for the natural world and the human world (for example, food production). The subject could fill an encyclopedia; as a matter of fact, I was under contract to write the Encyclopedia of Global Warming for Facts on File, but they discontinued the project before I had written any actual entries, just the overview.

Every scientist and scholar, except for fringe people who are either dedicated to extremist politics or paid by corporations, accept the reality of global warming and its human cause. Even many Republicans accept it, although most of them have now been kicked out of the Party. Even Exxon-Mobil accepted it decades ago, until they repudiated their own research for political reasons. The United States is the only major country in the world in which the government opposes the science of global warming. First George W. Bush, then Donald Trump, removed global warming from government websites. Other countries, such as in Europe, know that they can no longer trust American scientific information about global warming.

One reason for this worldwide acceptance of the science of global warming is that it is confirmed by the convergence of many different lines of research. Fields as different as meteorology, geology, and biology all confirm that global warming is real. One small area of research is one in which I was involved: phenology, which is the seasonal patterns of biological activity. In particular, deciduous trees lose their leaves every autumn and open new buds in the springtime. In recent decades, with global warming, tree buds have been opening earlier and earlier in the spring.

Many different sets of data confirm this. Many of them result from satellite measurements which show that forests turn green earlier every spring. Some are based on direct observations of trees and other plants. I have a data set that I worked on for sixteen years and that had over six thousand data points. These observations showed that, in my sample of deciduous trees, budburst occurred about a day earlier every year from 2006 to 2021. There are two particular points in which my data set is important. First, they come from Oklahoma, near the southwestern extreme of the deciduous forests, while most data sets are from the northeast United States or from Europe. Second, my data are longitudinal; that is, I kept track of the same trees for sixteen years. This is longer than the lifetime of any research grant; but my research required no funding. I just kept data sheets about budburst times on the trees near where I lived and worked.

The saying goes, Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But my claims were not extraordinary. They are the same as everyone else’s, even though they were based on an entirely separate data set. If my observations were different from everyone else’s, they might be suspect. But my conclusions are the same as those of nearly everyone else who has studied the changes in spring budburst resulting from global warming. As such, my conclusions are not particularly surprising, except that the fact that the trees opened their buds a day earlier each year much surpasses most studies, in which budburst occurs a day earlier each decade.

 

This photo shows post oak (Quercus stellata) buds just beginning to open.

In the next essay, I will address some particularly interesting features of this research project, which will give us an insight into the process of scientific thinking.

The Climate Has Changed Before, So Don't Worry?

Nearly everyone now knows that climate change is real, and that humans are either causing it or making it worse. So I don’t discuss it with anyone anymore. I had a contract to write Encyclopedia of Global Warming for Facts on File but they discontinued the project. Fortunately I got paid an advance for just writing a headword list.

Now the fossil fuel protagonist argument is, “The climate has changed before, so don’t worry about it. Just keep buying our oil and gas, and let us make our money, and quit whining.” This is a really bad argument. The reason is that, yes, the climate has changed, even within the past millennium, but it has had disastrous effects on societies. So the argument that we don’t need to take any action to prevent climate change is like saying, “The Black Death didn’t kill everyone, therefore we do not need medicine and public health.”

About 800 years ago, a great civilization collapsed. It was the Misssissippian culture, which covered most of eastern North America, centered in what is now Cahokia, Illinois. Never heard of it? That’s because most pre-contact Native American history has been erased from our national consciousness.

Cahokia was one of the biggest cities in the world at that time. The only way it could support the number of people that it did was because of intensive agriculture, mostly corn, squash, and beans. This civilization collapsed because of political unrest but also because of a drought. If the Natives had lived off of hunting and gathering, the way most people think they did, then the drought would have had little effect. But the drought caused the collapse of their intensive agriculture. This is an example of how climate disruption (in this case, a natural one) caused the collapse of a civilization, as explained in this Scientific American article. I will also write about this in Chapter 2 of my upcoming book.

Society enables a stability that allows humans to survive natural disasters. But sometimes these disasters can exceed the capacity of society to rescue the humans. The Mississippian civilization is an example. Most of the people survived, and they continued planting fields (just not as many), and the trade networks survived.

This is all that remains of Cahokia. We can only hope that our modern civilization does not disappear the way theirs did.

For Conservatives, All Causes Are in the Service of Racism

 

I am a member of several organizations that defend the teaching of evolution against creationist attacks, including the Oklahoma Academy of Science (OAS) and Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education (OESE), both of which I am a past president. We have put a lot of effort into opposing creationism. If that was our main intent, then it was all a waste of time.

More recently, OAS and OESE has put a lot of effort into opposing global warming denialism. If that was our main intent, then it was, also, a waste of time.

It is even possible that the conservative Right to Life proponents do not really care very much about unborn babies.

Conservatives, I have come to believe, do not really care about creationism, or global warming denialism, or even anti-abortion causes. These causes merely serve to promote their ultimate extremist agenda, the central tenet of which is white supremacy.

Numerous recent events, some major but others largely unnoticed, illustrate my point. The act of domestic terrorism (so defined by the FBI) that led to the January 6 invasion of the Capitol was not people defending creationism, or global warming denialism, or the Right to Life. If you engaged any of them individually in conversation, they would probably proclaim their hatred of evolution, global warming science, and abortion. But their loud and clear message on that day was white supremacy. That’s what January 6 was all about. It was not merely some guys who flew off the handle in anger. Someone planted bombs on the same day. Their attack was planned. And it was white supremacist.

But consider the smaller things also. Donald Trump says things about global warming and abortion (he left creationism to Mike Pence). In connection with July 4, 2020, Trump said that “the American way of life began in 1492.” He thus dismissed any contribution from Native Americans, blacks, or Hispanic natives of the land that would only later become the southwestern United States. Rick Santorum is well known for his defense of creationism and opposition to abortion. But on April 23, 2021, he revealed his racism when he said that America was birthed [by whites] "from nothing” before dismissing Native Americans as having nothing to contribute to “American” culture. This caused something of an outcry in America, especially from chiefs of Native nations such as Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee tribe. But the reaction overseas shows that Santorum’s remarks contributes to an image of America as a bastion of white supremacy.

For both Trump and Santorum, white racism was the goal toward which all their other beliefs pointed.

By spending our time, as my fellow OAS and OESE members have done, on creationism and global warming, we are treating a symptom. And not even a real symptom; I suspect it is just a disguise to hide the white supremacist agenda. I urge my fellow science activists to consider that, while it is important to speak out that all races have a common evolutionary origin and global warming threatens all races, direct opposition to anti-evolution and anti-climate statements by conservative leaders is a waste of time. The conservatives can crank out misinformation a thousand times faster than we can dissect and carefully explain their errors. They already know their errors, as do their followers.

I have written five science books, all of which could be seen as opposing the conservative anti-evolution and anti-climate stand. But this was not their purpose. If I had structured any of these books as having anti-conservatism as their main focus, they would have been a waste of time. I have just published the sixth (and not the last) instalment of a series called “Creationist Funhouse” in the national magazine Skeptical Inquirer (see the table of contents for the previous articles here). Everyone who reads the magazine already know creationists are wrong. But I used a wry ridicule of creationism as an invitation to discover the wonders of fossils, molecular biology, and ecology. This, I believe, is why I have received such positive feedback about the articles. Nobody wants to see me scowl and say, “creationists are wrong,” but they want to smile with me and learn new things about science, things that creationists cannot allow themselves to enjoy. I urge my fellow science activists to proclaim the beauty of science and the worldview—which does not include white supremacism—that it promotes.

And I believe that OESE would consider the main purpose of teacher workshops on evolution and global warming (with help from the Oklahoma Meteorological Survey) to be helping teachers to enjoy teaching science more and raising a new generation of young people who share the joy of science. This is what OAS does also. Because we focus on the joy of science education, we have been successful.

I can only hope that white supremacism dies away, though I fear it will not. Every time I think it might be in decline, I see a new Confederate flag in my neighborhood in Durant, Oklahoma. But if white supremacism does die away, maybe it will take creationism and global warming denialism with it.

Of course, there are individual conservatives who are not racist. I know some, and so do you. Some are even black, such as Senator Tim Scott who told viewers after President Biden’s April 28 speech that America is not a racist country. (I cannot find any links to this event that does not require you to subscribe to a newspaper.) But it is not the moderate Republicans who have the most guns or who reached their most recent climax on January 6.

This article represents my viewpoint and has not been endorsed by OAS, OESE or any other scientific organization.

Global Warming Denialism: What Fundamentalists Are Forcing God to Say

Fundamentalist Christians insist that, since God controls the seasons and the weather, there is nothing that we can do to alter it. This is the basis for their insistence that, no matter how much carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere, global warming will not occur unless God wants it to. That is, if God has decided that global warming will occur, then it will occur even if we totally cease all carbon emissions; and if God has decided it will not occur, then we can pour all the carbon we want to into the air and nothing bad will happen.

The fundamentalists base this belief upon Genesis 8:22, in which God tells Noah right after the big Flood, “While the Earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” This verse does not say that global warming will not occur, so long as the seasons continue. There are no scientists who say that global warming will cause seasonal and geographical differences to cease to exist. But to fundamentalists, this verse means that God is in charge of climate and seasons, and that whatever happens on Earth is whatever God has already planned. We cannot reduce global warming by driving smaller cars, nor can a rich televangelist make global warming worse by flying around in a private jet.

This would be a laughably trivial matter except that it is the principle upon which the Republicans who are largely ruling America believe. The most famous global warming denier, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, has said that, because “God’s still up there,” the “arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”

But the Bible also suggests in several places that God is also in charge of your lifespan. God has already decided how many days you are going to live, and there is nothing you can do about it. The verse that says this most clearly is Psalm 139:16, in which the psalmist records words he attributes to God: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.” Fundamentalists usually use this verse to prove that an “unformed substance” (an embryo) is fully human (“my” unformed substance). Almost in passing, they acknowledge that this means our days are numbered.

Elsewhere, Jesus says that the hairs of our head are numbered. I remember listening to evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong on the radio telling us all that his hair was falling out, and that if he counted them, he could calculate the exact date on which he would become bald. He seems to have been unaware that, in most cases, when a hair falls out of a follicle, a new one grows back.

Perhaps “numbered” just means “limited”? The hairs of our head, and the days of our lives, are finite, and we should be mindful that we will not live forever, and we had better get our lives in shape before it is too late. This is a good interpretation, but is not a fundamentalist one. The psalm says, regarding “the days that were formed for me,” every one of them. Each day of our future was written individually in God’s advance plan. In another psalm, the psalmist said that our lifespan was limited to 70 years (or, he concedes, maybe 80). I knew someone who literally believed he would drop dead on his 70^th birthday. But most fundamentalists would say that only God knows how many days we will live, and each one of us has a different number of days. This assertion is scientifically untestable (how could you ever prove that someone died on a day different than the one written on God’s secret list) but seems to be a straightforward literal interpretation of Psalm 139:16.

If fundamentalists then took this verse one step further, they would have to conclude that your number of days is predetermined, no matter what you do. Don’t bother with eating healthy food; go ahead and drink and smoke; don’t worry about hiking or walking, just go ahead and sit on the couch and listen to televangelists and Fox News all day, because it won’t make any difference. Eating vegetables will not make you live any more, and eating fat and sugar will not make you live any fewer, days. Fundamentalists generally do NOT take this interpretation. Instead they say that God made your body and you should take care of it, at least a little bit.

If God is in charge of the climate, and He is also in charge of your lifespan, why do fundamentalists tell us there is no point in working toward planetary health, but that it is important to work toward personal health? I think there is only one possible reason: they are using Genesis 8:22 as an excuse to ignore, or even be hostile toward, the science of climate change. Their fundamental beliefs therefore appear to be, “God is in charge of everything except when He isn’t,” and, “God’s truth is whatever the Republican Party says that it is.”

God is the tool of the fundamentalists. You would think that one advantage of being God is that you are in charge. But, poor little God; He has to do whatever the fundamentalists tell Him to do.

Go East, Young Man

Horace Greeley famously urged young Americans to go west. But my advice to young academics is to go east.

Unless personal ties totally prevent you from going there, China would probably be a wonderful place for young American scientists. In two recent issues of Science magazine (9 December and 16 December, 2016), China bought huge advertisements to tell you young American scientists how much they want you. They bought 72 pages of some of the most expensive advertising in the magazine world to invite you. This is in addition to the numerous smaller advertisements about which I reported earlier this year. Though they did not say so, it is clear that they are capitalizing on the hostility that American scientists are receiving from the Trump Administration.

France has made their call even clearer. At the head of the news section in the February 10, 2017 issue of Science, there is a quote from Emmanuel Macron, who is the new president of France. Macron issued a “solemn call” to American scientists. He said, “From next May, you will have a new homeland: France.”

The American federal government, and numerous state governments (such as Oklahoma, where I live), scientists are considered to be liabilities and even mildly dangerous. A law that its sponsors intended as a way of rescuing students from evil scientists narrowly missed passage in the Oklahoma House.

Personally, I just want to hold out until retirement. But for those of you younger scientists who have a little career flexibility, consider accepting an offer from a country that wants you.

Little Victories: Conversion of a Climate Skeptic (Guest Essay)

I am happy to post a guest essay from my botany student Matt Spears! It is his story of how his father finally came to admit that humans are causing global warming. I think it is interesting that his Dad’s reasons for rejecting global warming previously had more to do with political identity than with an understanding of science. Working against science denialism is an uphill fight but we can be happy for little victories!

(Beginning of guest essay)

My 70 year old father considers himself a conservative.  He calls me a liberal.  I am 31 now, but when I was about 18 years old I began to learn about things that at the time “blew my mind.”  I was learning about things I had never heard from my parents.  I was so excited to share these new ideas with them, but quickly discovered why my parents never talked about these things.  My dad called my new realizations about the world, which included global warming, “horse shit” and no matter what evidence I presented to him I was wrong.  It used to make me so angry.  It seemed like all of our time together consisted of arguments, but I was young, full of energy and very passionate so I persisted until years later when I got tired and gave up trying to get through to him.  I read a study where “permanent” changes were observed in the brains of people who would play violent video games every day.  My dad listens to conservative talk radio and watches FOX “so-called” news every day so I assumed that, for the most part, he has literally been brain washed to only believe what the talking heads of conservative media tell him.

Two weeks ago, while I was at my parents’ house, I saw a flyer about a discussion on climate change that would be held at a popular local bar.  The flyers were passed out at the Rotary group he attends every week.  I couldn’t believe that in my very conservative home town of Sherman, Texas a discussion on climate change was happening outside of a college or university and, most of all, my dad had brought home the flyer.  He agreed to go and met us there at the bar.  Two professors from the environmental science department at Austin College and the head meteorologist at the news station KXII were there to answer questions that those of us in attendance would ask.  It was obvious nearly everybody there already understood global warming, but there were two whom I recognized that did not.  One of those was the owner of the bar who made a short rant about his freedom to do whatever is in the best interest of business.  I just happened to be in the rest room for that and only heard the end.  After a couple of pints I began to chime in with comments and my dad followed.  He didn’t have much to say and was really just there to listen.  The speakers were all very thorough in their explanations of global warming.  It couldn’t have been any clearer to all of us who attended, no matter what our views had been walking in there, that global warming is real and our actions are making it happen at an alarming rate.

So, on the way home I called my mom to tell her all about it.  While we were talking I heard a click like somebody else was on the line.  My mom said it was my dad.  I said “Dad, what do you think?”  He replied “We’re doing it.” That’s all I needed to hear and I guess that’s all he needed to say because he just hung up.  I almost couldn’t believe it after all these years.  I want to gloat and tell him I was right all this time, but I know better.  Now, I hope he realizes that it’s not me who’s full of shit, It’s Bill O’Reilly.

(End of guest essay)

Welcome, Science!

With the inauguration of a federal administration that is more hostile to scientific research and understanding than perhaps any in American history, scientists are beginning to feel anxious. Not all scientists; medical research will probably do okay. But climate scientists, ecologists, and evolutionary scientists now feel like a persecuted minority. As a participant in all three areas of research and writing, I feel like I do not want the new government to even know what I think. Fortunately, unlike some climate scientists such as Michael Mann, who has been repeatedly persecuted by the Republicans, I am a small target.

Many other countries are much more open to scientific insights. Make no mistake: they are opening their arms to American scientists. One of these countries is China. In the fall of 2016, at least four Chinese cities bought two-page spreads near the front of Science magazine depicting themselves as wonderful places for scientists to live and work.

• September 9: Foshan “has an obvious advantage of industrial cluster.” The advertisement proudly displayed the data about how prosperous this city is, its 7.4 million residents and its 170,255 private enterprises.
• September 23: Nanhai advertised itself as close to the Hong Kong economically-open region, and “a highly civilized city worth visiting. It is also considered as the national sanitary city…and one of the highly-educated cities in Guangdong.”
• September 30: Sanshui promoted its industrial potential, but mainly depicted itself as a wonderful place to live. “The southern scenery is coquettish and graceful,” says the advertisement. “Here, with picturesque scenery, people live and enjoy the peaceful and prosperous environment as well as the wonderful and leisurely moment. Here, has got the breeze, drizzle and canoes on the river form the beautiful scenery of three rivers in the misty rain.” Thank God for Google Translate.
• October 7: Shundei advertised itself as a growing hub of manufacturing.

Of course, they mostly want to attract the same scientists that American corporations want. But it has escaped nobody’s attention that China does not officially denounce scientists who study evolution, ecology, and climate science. If I were young and mobile and with a freshly-minted Ph.D. I would give China some serious consideration.

Many American cities could, and do, promote themselves in similar terms, and they are right to do so. Tulsa, where I live, has as its slogan “A new kind of energy,” meaning the promotion of entrepreneurship instead of just the continuation of Tulsa’s twentieth century image as an oil town. The difference is at the national level, where Beijing promotes science and Washington is antagonistic toward it.

In order to prevent the “brain drain” of scientists out of the United States, it is not necessary for the government to spend a lot of money. All we need is for the Republican leaders to quit making scientists sound like traitors. The Republican Congress has relentlessly pursued investigations of climate scientists in order to discredit them, and now they have a president who has proclaimed that global warming is a hoax.

I do not foresee a massive exodus of scientists out of America. But certainly more scientists will leave America than at any time in the past.

The Drama of Global Warming

Well, today I started teaching my general biology class about global warming, as I do every semester. Since I write science books (of which I have published four) and novels (thus far unpublished), I began thinking about why global warming is not a more prevalent theme in fiction. I thought about this as I walked to work. Walking is a good way to promote health but also to save energy and reduce carbon emissions. It is also a good time to think.

Global warming does figure prominently in most of the future scenarios of science fiction novels. However, the global warming that is occurring right now is largely absent from fiction. Why?

The main reason is that global warming is very real and is accelerating, but is still a largely gradual process. It is occurring over a time scale that does not lend itself to a plot line very easily. You can’t see it. You can see weather, but you can’t see climate change. You could write a novel about a big storm, but there have always been big storms; the novel would be about the storm, not about climate change. It is impossible to say that any particular storm (such as the one occurring right now in the Northeast) is or is not due to global warming. Any particular storm may or may not have occurred even without global warming. All we can say is that global warming is making storms stronger in general. How do you get a plot out of that?

There have been at least three movies or books based on global warming, and they illustrate three approaches to making fictional drama out of global warming.

First, in the 1990s, there was a TV movie called The Fire Next Time. The approach it took was to show how global warming shattered a family’s personal economy (the main character was a gulf shrimper) and how they came back together in the end. The plot was about the family, with global warming just being the background setting.

Second, a few years back, the movie Day After Tomorrow showed incredibly dramatic weather events. The movie started with a sudden fracture of an ice sheet and ended with a huge storm paralyzing New York City (even worse than the one that is descending upon them this week). This movie derived its plot line from exaggerating the trends of global warming. The ice is indeed melting (according to a study I read about today in the French media but have not seen in the American media yet), but it is usually hard to see. Antarctica still has a lot of ice.

Third, who could forget one of Michael Crichton’s last novels, State of Fear? In this novel, Crichton depicted all scientists, except a few brave outsiders, as filthy liars who have not merely invented global warming but who are actually causing the breakup of glaciers by setting off bombs! Scientists are part of a worldwide conspiracy, and they track down the true heroes (the ones who believe everything the Koch Brothers say) by following them in their evil blue Priuses. It was a poorly written novel that strained credulity so much that it was a third-rate piece of hack work. Every plot component was weak. This, from the man who wrote much better books such as Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park?

None of these works are actually about global warming. Is it possible to have a novel about global warming that is realistic yet also dramatic? Maybe one that is set in Bangladesh. Rising sea levels may inundate half of the country—including their incredibly productive agricultural land—this century. Could Bangladeshis flee over the border into India? India is already building a big fence to keep them out.

(Photo from Brisbane Times)

Maybe a young Indian man and young Bangladeshi woman could meet one another and kiss through the fence…I see plot potential here…Aside from something like this, global warming remains a major threat that is huge but slow, and which even those of us who study it have to measure its components rather than actually seeing it.