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 two

As described in the previous essay, 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, what do we measure?

This photo shows the giant buds, just opening, of black oak (Quercus velutina).

When we talk about global warming, we can mean lots of different things. It is better to talk about global climate change or even global climate disruption. For global warming, it would seem to be a simple matter of measuring temperatures and seeing if they increase from year to year. But this, by itself, is unsatisfactory, for reasons such as these:

Where do you measure the temperature? Air temperature may be warmest near the ground, and cooler the further you go up in the atmosphere. Air temperature is what affects budburst, since buds are up in the air. But soil temperature is also important, since warmer soil might mean earlier root activity and earlier rising of the sap. Aerial buds do not just open when it is warm enough but also in response to sap rising in the wood.

Temperature is enormously variable. You cannot simply measure it in one place and use this temperature to represent the air temperature. Meteorologists have little stations to measure air temperature (and lots of other things) in numerous locations, but even this is not enough. Temperatures can vary from one location to another just a few feet away.

When do you measure the temperature? The maximum temperature in the day, or the minimum at night? Also, we suspect that springtime temperatures are what matter the most, but winter temperatures can also be important. Some tree buds must have a certain number of days of winter chilling before they can open in the spring.

Other factors are always important, such as wind speed, soil moisture, and the moisture status inside the twigs.

It is not just the temperature that matters to humans, but how it makes us feel. Weather predictions indicate not only the actual temperature but the way it feels to the body. The same is true of trees. We are interested not so much in the actual temperature of the air as in how the temperature affects biological activities such as the opening of the buds.

The climate could be getting warmer even if the temperatures do not increase. Springtime could just come earlier and autumn later, without a change in the average temperature.

If all of this makes it seem hopeless to study global warming, I am happy to report that organisms themselves can transduce all the environmental variables, over time, into biologically meaningful measurements. In the case of trees, all of the variations in temperature, moisture, and wind can be summarized by budburst date, something that the plants, not we, control. Budburst date is the one variable I measured. I used weather data as background, but not for analysis.

By opening their buds earlier and earlier each year, the trees are telling us that it is getting warmer. See the next essay for other scientifically important concepts in the study of 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.

Glass Cathedral, a Religious Novel with a Lot of Science

Stan Rice’s novel Glass Cathedral deals with big religious questions not in the form of serious debate but in good-natured banter among three of the main characters, Dan (the atheist), Emilio (the evangelical Christian), and Misty (the Christian who has deep and serious doubts about her religion). I have written in my other blog about the religious aspects of this novel.

This is the author’s summary from Amazon:

The newspaper staff writers of a small desert town assume the strange light in the sky is merely sunlight refracted by ice crystals: atheist Dan Hardy; the spiritually-searching Misty Barbour; and even the confirmed Christian editor Emilio Villanueva. Then the light turns out to be God—maybe. This is enough to make Misty leave her doubts behind and marry Emilio. Dan, who was hoping to win Misty’s affection, is skeptical, especially since God showed up on no photographic images, and everyone in town saw God differently. The government authorities declare the light was a mass hallucination.

Emilio and Misty raise money to build a glass cathedral in the desert, near the place they think God appeared. When thousands of people come for the inaugural celebration, a storm pulls the glasshouse into the sky. Misty gets trampled. At the end, Emilio and Misty, who is now disabled, conclude that God’s work is to help people, not to build a cathedral, and even Dan agrees.

 What I want to say in this science blog is that Dan arrives at his atheism thoughtfully and at great personal cost.

His interest in science began when, as a boy, he saw a horsehair worm discharged from the anus of a dead cockroach. This got him interested in reading everything he could about biology and ecology, especially parasitism, which earned him the name Buttworm Boy. In a natural world pervaded by evolutionary mercilessness, Dan sees no room for a Creator.

His atheism is challenged when he meets, becomes attracted to, and becomes physically entangled with a Mormon girl, Margaret. Margaret is not an enthusiastic Mormon, but wants Dan to join her to raise nice kids. In this way, Dan discovers that religion does not have to be correct—as Mormonism is clearly contradicted by history—in order to fill a role in a person’s life. This, however, is not enough for him.

Another main character, Misty, is a dedicated Christian, at least until her comfortable religious world is shattered by the assassination of her fiancé. The main event of the novel—God appearing in the sky out in the California desert, or not—restores her faith. But what is it that brings Misty the Christian and Dan the atheist together for meaningful discourse? It is science, of course. They see, then carefully examine, the desert wildflowers, Dan as a scientist and Misty because Jesus said to consider the lilies of the field. That is, to look closely, carefully, and thoughtfully at them. This is something that very few Christians actually do.

The novel also contains other scientific plot elements. In the glass cathedral that Misty and her husband Emilio build out in the desert, a giant band-o-rama has hundreds of tubas that happen to play the resonant frequency of the building, so that it shatters and blows away like a giant jellyfish in a desert storm.

I think the author has a lively, almost childlike, sense of wonder, at the lilies of the field and the surprises that wait within the laws of physics. I think readers of this blog would enjoy Glass Cathedral.

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part four. Eternity

There are some other advantages to self-publishing, both of which surpass anything available to species in the wild.

First, you can make changes in your book even after it is published. I haven’t tried this, but I assume what you would have to do is to take down your original book from Kindle, and replace it with files with the appropriate changes. Or updates. Your book would therefore never go out of date. In nature, once seeds have been dispersed, they cannot be called back. A tree might be able to make slight alterations in the structure of the seeds from one year to the next, but not much.

Second, your book will never go out of print so long as there are at least a couple of people buying it. Amazon has always provided this service to the community of readers. If a used copy of a book can be found anywhere, you can find it on Amazon, which links to the book stores or individuals who have these rare items. In nature, seeds eventually die.

My books, including the Kindle books that do not exist in print form, are my legacy to the future, aside from a little bit of money and a lot of love for my kids. After I have died, the only thing anyone in the world will know about me, apart from increasingly faded memories, will be my books. Somebody who does not know me might buy a copy of Rima and find out what I have learned about rain forests, for example. My legacy will also include my website, which, if the host gets paid, does not itself know whether I am alive or not.

Alas, Kindle books cannot be exactly what the author would want them to be. You have to be careful with non-standard text. I read T. C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain, in which he inserted some lines in Spanish. Spanish questions end with a question mark, but also begin with an inverted question mark. Boyle correctly included the inverted question mark. But Kindle always inserted a nothing-symbol (a zero with a slash through it) just before the inverted question mark.

In particular, illustrations tend to be extremely messed up in Kindle books. Every kindle book I have read, by other authors, have incomprehensible illustrations. My four Kindle novels have only one image in the book itself (not counting the cover, which is usually pretty good) and that is my author photo. No matter what I do, Kindle inserts it sideways. I can just pretend that it is because I am an avant-garde tradition-breaker.

But even with these faults, a website or a Kindle book (or any other book) is a better remnant to leave for future generations than a gravestone which can be fancy even for the meanest sons-of-bitches who ever lived. A good book, however, cannot be faked.

Rima: A Retelling of Green Mansions for the 21st Century

Stan Rice is better known for his nonfiction works (see his website,) about evolution and science, but he has also published fiction, which I have reviewed previously in this blog. He has just published another novel, Rima: Green Mansions for the 21^st century.

 

I think we all realize (at least, all of us who have read Green Mansions by W. H. Hudson, published in the early 20^th century) that a new version of this story was needed. There are two main reasons.

The first is that the original Green Mansions was racist. Hudson, like H. Rider Haggard (She) and James Hilton (Lost Horizon), assumed that any advanced culture had to be at least the remnant of a white civilization: for Hudson, in the Amazon; for Haggard, in Africa; and for Hilton, the Himalayas. Rice, in retelling Green Mansions, has dispensed with civilization altogether: in Rima, the forces of nature itself (personified in the not-quite-human Rima) are intelligent, in a way. The protagonists are a male scientist from Ecuador, and the female scientist Rima from Peru.

Second, the topic has now become urgent. When Hudson first wrote Green Mansions, the rainforest seemed infinite; now, it is in danger of total destruction.

There is another thing that has become urgent. Many of us understand Donald Trump’s disapproval of illegal immigrants. But Trump also cancelled the visas of international graduate students who were in America legally, which was the case for the two protagonists in this book. (This really happened.) But it seemed impossible that Trump would actually try to bring rain forest ecological research to an end. But in 2026, Trump fired—without notice—the entire advisory board of the National Science Foundation. This has brought an immediate end to ecological research, particularly rain forest ecology research. In current reality, then, Trump is even more evil than Rice depicts him in the novel. When I was in graduate school, every graduate student aspired to be part of, and someday have her/his own, NSF grant. Those days are completely over. NSF once stood for National Science Foundation; now it stands for non-sufficient funds. Though published just this year, Rice’s novel is already out of date. A little.

This novel was not an easy job for Rice to pull off. He must have extensive and intimate knowledge of his subject matter, as indicated by the author’s notes at the end of the book. The author has a graduate-school level of knowledge about rain forest science, although he indicates he has only briefly visited a rain forest (including the Jatún Sacha research station about which he writes), as well as the Andean highlands. He also knows a lot about pre-Columbian civilizations. He knows about real and important people in environmental issues, such as Wes Jackson, Wangari Maathai, and Dan Janzen. Even some of his minor incidents (such as when activist Thomas Brail camped in a sycamore tree in Paris, and was visited by actress Juliette Binoche), really happened.

You will enjoy reading Rima. It has some really funny scenes in it, such as when the monkeys get together to destroy a construction site. But the book is also dead serious. If you want to laugh, and to care, this is worth your novel-reading time.

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part three. Quality

You cannot just put your books on Amazon and expect people to find them, even if they would have enjoyed reading them. An author is not only competing with thousands of human authors but with computers that can generate AI garbage a hundred times a second.

An intelligent customer might want to verify that the author of a book is not an AI bot by searching the web for an author website. AI bots generally do not have author websites, though I could be wrong about this. But the author has to make it easy for the customer, who is usually busy and tired when looking for a book.

You have to promote your book. This means several things.

First, you need a platform. My platform consists of a brand new website designed by my son in law which, thus far, has only my non-fiction books on it; two blogs, which have collectively had over a million views; a YouTube channel, in which I pretend to be Charles Darwin; and Facebook. This does not mean I can just scatter announcements all over my platform. People read my blogs and watch my videos because they can learn something, usually about science, from them. If they suspect I am dumping cheap advertising on them, they will stop visiting. I have to make the announcements of my fiction books relevant to the platform. In my case this might be easy, since much of my fiction focuses on science (particularly, Darwin and evolution) which is exactly what my science blog is about, and faces a lot of religious questions, which is exactly what my religion blog is about. This is exactly the same situation as a tree faces out in nature: it has to have fruits and seeds that match the animals it is expecting to patronize them, rather than just random seeds.

Second, you need to catch their eyes in a pleasurable way. I will do this by having really attractive covers and short summaries.

The covers will be colorful and eye-catching and often create just enough cognitive dissonance that they will wonder what the book is about. I am fortunate that I have literally five decades of photographs from which to choose. I could never have guessed I would use them as book covers. It is also important to adjust the photos, not just with cropping, contrast, and coloration, but with special effects, which are now easily available on PowerPoint.

The short summaries must excite the reader and make them want to read the book. Here is an example of the first sentence of a summary, from a novel I wrote about Charles Darwin being a vampire: “You just thought you had seen the last of Charles Darwin.” The summary does not have to have everything in it. The summary of my novel The Confessions of Conseil take a swipe at the exalted image of Pierre Arronax, narrator of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. In Conseil’s voice, I call him Arronax the Arrogant who thinks his servant Conseil cannot possibly have a brain or a life of his own. Now this might create cognitive dissonance, therefore interest, among the thousands of readers who grew up (as I did) loving Jules Verne. I also portray Captain Nemo as a Marxist revolutionary.

Third, you have to deliver the goods. It has to be a good book—a good plot, good characters, good everything. I have to make readers feel good, even when unpleasant things are happening in the book. I have to remember I am writing for my readers, not for myself. I have to remove anything that is interesting only to myself, e.g., lists of plants. Only then will a reader—maybe, just maybe—remember my name and look for another book by me. I include a lot of humor, not gratuitous but as part of the plot and dialogue. I also frequently have sex, not pornographic but as part of genuine human encounters, and very rarely the full sex act. The sex is never degrading. And never gratuitous—it has to have a reason to be there. The Bible is my guide in this respect. There is a lot of sex in the Bible, but there is always a reason for it. Fiction should never have any gratuitous anything.

Will this fiction publishing venture work? I have made a conservative estimate that I will earn at least $75,000 for thirty books, which is $75,000 more than I would earn with my track record with commercial publishers. If it works, it will not be because of my business acumen but because I took my inspiration from the evolutionary success stories of the trees.