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

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 do with the data?

(This is a photo of the just-opening buds of black hickory. Oaks have lots of bud scales, but hickory just has two big scales for each bud.) 

My statistical analyses indicated quite clearly that all but one of the 22 tree species had earlier budburst over the course of 16 years—an average of about one day earlier each year. But this is an average. Budburst came later in silver maples—but this is because they died in the summer droughts. Pecan trees opened their buds about one day earlier each ten years, whereas sweetgums opened their buds about three and a half days earlier each year. This means the makeup of our forests might change with global warming, since not all tree species will react to it the same way.

Also, it is completely incorrect to assume that global warming means that each year is warmer than the previous year. One year can differ strikingly from the next. What we are looking for is an overall trend. This is obvious from the data presented in my graphs in the paper.

Science must also avoid what is called extrapolation. We cannot simply take this one-day-per-year rate and extend it into the past or the future. Particularly, the future. If, for example, sweetgums opened their buds three and a half days earlier each year (with the average date in my study being February 24 in 2009), this would mean that in 2029 they would open in the middle of winter, about December 19, and back in 1999 they would have opened at the end of March. I was on site in 1999, though I’d not yet begun my measurements. But I know they opened before the end of March. And they cannot open their buds in December unless winter completely vanishes. This is unlikely to happen. At least, not soon.

What this means is that one-day-per-year earlier budburst is what I observed in the study period, but there were earlier times, and may be later times, when this rate did not occur. Extrapolation is invalid, as Mark Twain explained. If the Mississippi River gets 10 miles shorter each year, then at some point, Twain quipped, St. Louis and New Orleans would be next to each other and need a joint board of aldermen. If it gets 10 miles longer each year, then in a few years it would stick out over the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America?) like a fishing rod.

Scientists should not extrapolate beyond their data. We can interpolate, within the range of data, but not extrapolate outside of it. All I can say is, this is what happened during my sixteen-year study period. As you can see from the figures in the paper, budburst dates sometimes came earlier (especially 2017) and sometimes later (for example, 2018). It changes every year, but these changes are against a background of earlier budburst, as indicated by the statistical analyses.

Yes, sixteen years in which at least twice a week, during February and March, I walked past each tree and looked for budburst. It sounds like a lot of boring work. But it was not, for me: I came to know each of these trees as an individual, and I looked forward every year to its emergence from dormancy.

As indicated in these four essays, the science of global warming is not just something to argue about—and we are all tired of arguing—but an invitation to the adventure of scientific discovery. We can, by using science, listen to what the trees have been telling us all along.

Cause and Effect: The Last Refuge of Denialists, part two.

One of the most important ways in which denialists use a deliberate misunderstanding of multiple causation (see previous essay) is to ridicule global warming. In this essay, I will look at just one example of an effect of global warming that is dominating the news now (September/October 2020): the wildfires in the west, particularly in California.

Scientists are certain that global warming, primarily of human cause, is already increasing the number and severity of wildfires. Of course, global warming is not the only cause. Another factor that makes wildfires in California so big and deadly is the accumulation of dead wood in the forests. I have seen first-hand that buildup of dead wood is also a problem in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where I taught field botany for eleven years. Once a fire gets started, there is an incredible amount of fuel for it to burn. (Then, of course, yet another cause is whatever ignited the fire. It is usually lightning strikes, though in one case it was sparks from fireworks at a gender reveal party.

This is hierarchical causation: a spark starts a fire, which burns a massive accumulation of dead wood. This is multiple causation: once the fire starts, it is more likely to spread if global warming has made hot, dry conditions worse than they would otherwise have been.

But some people who deny global warming like to ignore multiple causation. They blame the dead wood, then ridicule one of the other causes, global warming.

According to an article, California has been allowing dead wood to accumulate in its forests for decades.

Why has the dead wood accumulated? Because there is no easy way for humans to get rid of the dead wood. Nature’s way of clearing away dead wood is, in fact, fire. Fire is a part of all natural ecosystems, particularly coniferous forests in California. Almost without exception, scientists claim that we need to have natural fires to reduce the accumulation of dead plant matter. In Oklahoma, where I work, fire is the best way to control the spread of red cedar.

The ash from the fire releases nutrients back into the soil, actually promoting the forest to grow back more vigorously (see my YouTube video). Some species of trees actually require fire in order to germinate, as shown in another of my videos.

The problem is that there is no safe way to start control burns, that is, small fires that burn away the wood in wild forests but not on private land holdings. It is so easy for a control burn to get out of control. If California conservation officials started a control burn, which would clear away wood and reduce the risk of future fires, and if a puff of wind sent the fire onto private land, where it destroyed a house, the state might be on the hook for millions of dollars of liability. The article linked above said that, in order to bring California forests back into a stable fire balance, it would be necessary to set fires to wild forests the equivalent of the area of Maine. There is simply no way to do this safely. Having participated in control prairie burns in the Midwest, I can tell you they are risky undertakings. We have a university class in which an expert fire manager was teaching techniques of control burns; the fire got out of control and burned a fence, for which either he or the university (or insurance) had to pay. This was a scientific expert, in a grassland. Imagine what would happen with a fire crew in a dry forest full of dead wood.

It appears to me that California has allowed wood to accumulate in its forests because of the fear of lawsuits. Anyone who lives in a fire zone, let me know: would you be happy if a control burn, which would make life better for future generations, destroyed your home?

The article took an extreme position, however. The author accused the fire control agency CalFire of letting wood build up in order to create new wildfires. Why? Because the money and the glamor comes from fighting wildfires, not from doing control burns. The firefighters get lots of hazard pay, and, friends have told me, it is nearly a carnival atmosphere. The author of the article compares it to “the Halliburton model.” This is a conspiracy theory that says Dick Cheney, who headed up Halliburton corporation, fanned the flames of the Iraq War when he was vice president of the US, in order to get billions of dollars of contracts from the federal government. I am willing to believe almost any conspiracy theory about Dick Cheney, but even I am a little skeptical about this one. Cheney starting a war to get contracts for Halliburton? I haven’t seen quite enough evidence for this.

We’re stuck between a rock (Iraq?) and a hard place. We need to burn that dead wood, but we need to avoid destroying human habitations. This is a problem created by human civilization. The Natives who lived in the forest before Smokey the Bear got there had temporary dwellings, and could usually just get up and move if they saw a fire coming. If you have a big house back in the woods (or, worse, in the chaparral), you can’t do that. You may save your life, but nothing else.

The article also says that California should adopt the model that is successful in the Southeast: namely, control burns. The author seems unaware that control burns are easier in the Southeast because it rains more, and fires are less likely to get out of control.

The denialist problem is this: Denialists say that dead wood causes wildfires and global warming (which doesn’t exist, and they ridicule it) does not. The simple fact is that both of them are causes, just waiting for that spark. Denialists should stop twisting the truth by focusing on some causes and ignoring others.

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.

A Message I Sent to President Trump

This past week has been a banner week for global warming. We finally understand that President Trump has Godlike powers even over the weather. So, we have nothing to worry about. Trump will protect us from the consequences of global climate change.

Here is the email I sent to the White House:

“Dear President Trump,

I wish to praise you for your Godlike power, wisdom, and ability. Many Christians worship you, but I have hesitated to do so. Perhaps I should reconsider. Last week you told global warming to come back, “we need you.” And it did! In Oklahoma, where I live, it was 20 degrees, and very soon after you spoke your holy words, the temperatures increased to almost 80. The very weather obeys you! How can anyone, now, deny your Godlike power?”

I assume nobody on the White House staff will read this, certainly not Trump.

Another reason this is a banner week: Trump is appointing one of America’s most famous climate change deniers, John Christy, as his science advisor. Christy vigorously maintains that, because of his Christian faith, he will never believe that global climate change is occurring. But now he might have to reconsider whether it is God, or Trump, who controls the weather.

Even if he does read this, I doubt that Trump would catch the sarcasm.

Global Warming Denialism: A Religion

The global warming denialists are the controlling force in America. They are economically powerful and their viewpoint reigns in the federal and many state governments, led by the Denialist In Chief, Donald Trump. They deny all scientific evidence of global warming and claim that the vast majority of scientists, who accept the evidence of global warming, are dishonest.

The science of global warming is accepted by nearly all other nations and their political and economic leaders. The United States stands almost alone in rejecting modern science in this and in some other ways as well. It is certainly the only economically powerful nation whose government denies global warming. Most global warming denialist organizations are American. There is an international organization, known as Clexit (named in imitation of Brexit), which has members from 26 countries, but few if any of those countries officially deny global warming.

There is no scientific evidence that could possibly convince denialists that global warming really is happening. Not only is it a pseudoscience, but it is a religion, since most of its adherents cling to denialism with a religious zeal. Some will even go so far as to say that God will not permit global warming to occur. Senator Jim Inhofe cites Genesis 8:24 as evidence, although that verse says absolutely nothing about global warming. God is in control of the weather, he says. So I guess when powerful hurricanes keep hitting the United States and other countries as well, we need to blame it on God. Certainly not on humans. Absolutely not on Republicans.

It is not merely the scientific evidence that American leaders reject. It is the economic evidence. American leaders say that we cannot afford to make the changes that are necessary for us to reduce carbon emissions. (They are probably right; we are spending our money cleaning up after powerful hurricanes, and, soon, building a border wall.) But economists everywhere in the world, including some in the United States, claim that the cost of doing nothing about global warming will be immense. Already municipalities that are not preparing for global warming are receiving lower credit ratings, which means they will have to pay higher interest rates on loans. The reason is simple. If a city does nothing to prepare for rising sea levels and powerful storms, investors might lose their money in those cities.

Not only do most economists in the world believe that global warming is a real threat, but most believe that a carbon tax is the most sensible economic incentive to promote action. This is the belief of this year’s two winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics: William D. Nordhaus and Paul M. Romer, both of them prominent American economists.

[Photo from New York Times]

In economics as in science, American scholars lead the way in dealing with global warming. Certain large American corporations, and the politicians whom they own, however, lead the way toward denialism. Around the world, American scientists and economists are in demand (a university in China wants me to teach for them, and I am not even a prominent scientist), but the world largely distrusts the American government. According to the New York Times, Robert Stavins, head of Harvard’s Environmental Economics Program, says, “Any Nobel Prize linked with global climate change will inevitably be seen as an international critique of Mr. Trump’s outspoken opposition to domestic and international climate change action.”

The Republican Party, especially their leader who prides himself on being offensive, has begun to alienate the world. When he says “America first” he means “America only,” as if we can survive all by ourselves. French president Emmanuel Macron tried to befriend Trump, inviting him to Bastille Day celebrations last summer, so much so that commentators started calling it a Bromance. But since that time Macron has denounced Trump, using colorful language, and announced that France would not make further trade deals with America as long as it rejects the most recent international climate change agreement. I cannot find a transcript of his speech, but when I heard part of it, I clearly heard him use the word bêtise, which translates into stupidity.

We have many of the world’s best scientists and economists, but the world increasingly thinks our government is stupid. Can you blame them?

Denialism is a religion because denialists believe it so strongly that they are willing to send us into a future of economic decline and possible collapse. Republican religious zeal will take us to the end of civilization.

The Cultural Evolution of Mimicry and Deception

Mimicry and deception are everywhere in nature, thanks to evolution. Some mollusks attract fishes by waving fishlike gills. When the fishes approach, the mollusks lay their parasitic eggs on them. Orchids mimic bees and wasps, and attract bees and wasps, which try to mate with the flowers and only end up pollinating them.

Mimicry and deception are everywhere in human society, thanks to cultural evolution. I want to briefly share an example. What do you do if you are pretending to be a scientist, and you are trying to spread your gospel which just happens to be totally contrary to all scientific data? And you want journalists to spread your gospel for you? Well, you cannot do much, unless someone gives you a lot of money. If you have the money, you can pretend to be a real grown-up scientist and you might convince journalists to believe you.

Let’s suppose you are trying to convince people that there is no such thing as global warming. The first thing you can do is to send out your literature in an envelope that looks like it comes from a legitimate source. Thousands of us scientists received an envelope that looked like this:

This plain white envelope looks like it is from the New York Times. But where is it really from? You don’t want people to know, so you put your return address, but not your name. A journalist would notice, but only if he or she had time to look closely. It doesn’t actually claim to be from the New York Times, because the NYT logo is in the lower, not upper, left.

The second thing is to have literature that looks really, really slick. A journalist might not take seriously something amateurish, such as the “National Sunday Law” weird religious pamphlets that millions of people (42 million, in fact) have gotten in their mailboxes. Those pamphlets were obviously printed up at a local rural Oklahoma print shop. But the anti-global-warming book inside the white envelope was really slick:

Third, the name of your organization should closely imitate that of a respected scientific organization. For example, if I wanted to make my literature look like it came from AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s premier scientific bodies), I could call my group the AAAST (American Association for the Advancement of Scientific Thought). Only an experienced scientist might notice the difference; a journalist might not. This global-warming denialist group called itself the NIPCC, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which looks really similar to the pre-eminent world body that studies climate change, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

Fourth, you get together with other similar groups, and you praise each other’s work. This book was published by the Heartland Institute, but was co-sponsored by CO2science.org (Craig Idso) and by the Science and Environmental Policy Project (Fred Singer). Craig Idso and Fred Singer are in fact co-authors of the Heartland book. If you visit the website of the latter group, and click on “about us,” you will find a blank, at least I did. You see, the three authors have formed three organizations, each of these organizations has gained the endorsement of two other organizations, and all three are well-funded, perhaps from the same source.

Suppose I wanted to convince everyone that the Earth was the center of the universe. I could start up that AAAST that I mentioned earlier. Then I could get some of my friends to start the STAA (Scientific Thought Association of America) and others to start the Ptolemy Institute, and I would instantly have two other societies endorsing whatever I might say, that is, if they want to still be my friends and receive...

And receive the funding that we all receive from the same source. The Heartland Institute keeps its funding sources secret. But leaked documents reveal that most of their funding comes from the Koch Brothers, who get their wealth from people burning lots of oil. They probably get a few dollars here and there from other sources, but Heartland is mostly a front for the Koch Brothers. If I had a rich donor, I would ask that donor to fund three institutes, not one.

Fifth, you have to make your funding look like it is not all from a single place. Heartland claims that it receives 60 percent of its funding from foundations, 19 percent from individuals, and 18 percent from corporations. But, you see, the Koch Brothers have a foundation, and a corporation, and they are also individuals!

Other “think tanks” are more transparent about their funding. The Cato Institute (whose lie-filled diatribe against Rachel Carson somehow got repurposed into a chapter in a book that was inexplicably published by National Geographic) acknowledges the Koch Brothers right on their homepage.

But, as it turns out, the Heartland Institute is not just funded by oil interests. It must also be funded by tobacco corporations. Heartland proclaims that smoking is bad but it should not be in any way discouraged, except in kids. This is so ridiculous that nobody could believe it, even the tobacco corporations themselves. Heartland’s website claims that anti-smoking advocates “personally profit” from their opposition to smoking. They give no data, not even any anecdotes, to support this preposterous claim. They imply that tobacco corporations aren’t in it for the money but they just want to make life better for everyone. But all of the profits (from book sales, or salaries for scientific research) that come from opposing tobacco amount to just a few hours’ worth of tobacco corporation profits. Their statement indicates that teachers such as myself who try to get students to stop smoking are reaping profits from this. But I have not earned one penny from my anti-smoking educational efforts.

What this amounts to is that Heartland will say anything if you pay them enough. Only oil and tobacco can pay them enough.

I don’t think I need to convince you that what Heartland and its associated groups are doing is wrong. I wanted to tell you about it because of the deceptive practices that they use, practices worthy of any sinful orchid or any parasite. The only thing more amazing than their strategy is that people fall for it.

Earth, We Have a Narrative, Part Two.

As I said in the preceding entry, scientists need to tell visceral, compelling stories if we are to have any chance that the public will notice the Truth that we Reveal. We have yottabytes of information about global warming, but Senator Jim Inhofe can simply say that God told him there is no global warming, and that settles it. (He vaguely refers to the Bible for support, but misquotes it.) We scientists are the Revealers of Truth, at least as much as any group of humans can be. We need to get our story out. This is part of the message I get from Randy Olson’s Houston, We Have a Narrative, which I introduced previously.

But how can we get a compelling, visceral story out of global warming?

The best stories have a single protagonist and often a single antagonist, good vs. evil. It is not as successful if you have a whole population of protagonists or antagonists. Stalin said that the suffering of an individual is a tragedy, while the suffering of a multitude is a statistic. He knew a thing or two about causing such statistics. I remember a church play when I was a teenager in which two girls were chattering away while a boy was agonizing over the suffering of the world. When he said, “My grandmother died,” the girls immediately stopped chattering and came over to comfort him. Then when he said, “Not really, but a million other grandmothers died,” the girls went right back to their chattering.

The protagonist need not be perfectly good or the antagonist perfectly evil, but they need to be there. But with global warming, the protagonists are the thousands of scientists and environmentalists who are trying to lead the world toward an atmospheric carbon balance that will avoid catastrophe. And the antagonists are everybody, including many scientists, who simply consume too much energy, directly or indirectly, by driving vehicles that are bigger than they need to be, using the air conditioning more than we need to, etc. Corporations are also antagonists, but they are responding to our demand. Oil companies could not make money if we decided we don’t want to burn as much oil.

But maybe here we have the kernel of a good story here. Let’s start building a plot. The antagonists are two gray-haired men who just happen, by merest chance, to resemble the Koch Brothers, mega-giants of the oil industry. And in their bored-room, they are depressed, because they have seen all the economic analyses that show that demand for oil is decreasing even while most economic growth and jobs are in wind and solar. Renewable energy is good for the economy, but not for them. Oh, wait, this is getting good. Into the bored-room comes the daughter-in-law of one of the men. She cries as she sees the charts on the smart-boreds. (I can do even better. Got it!) She is holding their little granddaughter. She says, Daddy, you promised me that oil was the key to a golden future for our family, but all around me I see climate disasters, and I just know that my daughter, your grand-daughter, is going to grow up in a cataclysmic world of climate disruption. Oh, Daddy, how could you do this to me? To her? Then, of course, you need the morally-conflicted son who finally decides to leave his high-paying oil job and join Earth First! and sabotage bulldozers. And then...

You get the point. You can see why this kind of fiction might never get published and would never become a movie, since there is so much money and political power (are there any politicians who are not wholly dependent on industry money?) against it. Now, meanwhile, there is a protagonist. A climate scientist who just happens to look like Michael Mann is driving out in the countryside at night, headed into New York City where he is going to fly, at the last minute, to France, where he will be warmly embraced by President Emmanuel Macron, who has invited American climate scientists to move to France (this part is real). He has just said goodbye to his father, who happens to look like James Hanson. But, in a scene that I am shamelessly stealing from the movie Silkwood, somebody forces his car over to the side of the road...

At the last minute, it is the son of the oil magnate who rescues the climate scientist...

This would be a dangerous narrative to promote. Corporations would not like it one bit, and when they don’t like something, watch out. We are, therefore, left with the complex, less visceral narrative, not just because of oil industry money, but because the oil giants are not the only antagonists.

The climate denialists could come up with something similar. A novelist and screenwriter could come up with an evil, secret organization of environmentalists who want to kill the one, heroic climate scientist who knows the truth that global warming is a hoax. The evil environmentalists drive around in blue Priuses looking for their victims. The Antarctic ice isn’t really melting; it is the evil, evil scientists who cause the glaciers to fall apart by blowing them up with bombs. And the evil, evil scientists also issue false weather reports so that families with smiling, playing kids will have picnics in river valleys all unaware that a gigantic rain event is going to flood them to their deaths, over which the scientists will drool in glee. Of course, this kind of book is so stupid that it couldn’t get published.

Wait. The above paragraph is pretty much a summary of Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear. Millions have read it and think it is pretty much a true picture, with the names changed to protect the guilty. But while oil corporations could sue the ass off of anyone who would write the first novel idea I proposed above, even with the names changed, who has ever sued Michael Crichton for his novel? At least, a Google search turned up nothing. And he’s dead now.

The narrative that the oil companies are spreading is:

• The oil companies aren’t in it for the money. Oil executives make thousands of times more money than any climate scientist, but this does not, of course, color their perception. They are totally free of the love of money.
• The oil companies want to make the future more secure for you, your children, and your grandchildren. They could not possibly be sacrificing your future for short-term gain.
• The oil companies are the only ones who can save us.

With this kind of narrative, you can see why scientists like Michael Mann get death threats. People who buy into the oil company narrative see climate scientists as, practically, killers.

You can see the problem. Climate science explains things, while denialists simply accuse everyone else of being evil. The denialists have the thriller-story.

This is the same problem that almost any scientific topic has. Take diabetes. (You can have it. I have it, not too badly yet.) How can you tell a story that has a single protagonist and single antagonist? You cannot start a story with someone suffering multiple amputations or something; that would be too depressing. It would be better to start with someone who has just experienced his first, and frightening, diabetes-related event. He’s driving along in the country, and he happens to look like me, and drive a car like mine (a bright green Prius), and he suddenly starts going blind and has to pull over and park. It isn’t really blindness; it is an ocular migraine, in which a small gray circle like a solar afterglow spreads across the whole field of vision, breaking the visual information apart into twinkles and scrambling it. In fifteen minutes it is all over, the man’s vision has returned, but he realizes he should have taken the earlier warning signs more seriously. This is scary without being depressing.

But the antagonist? What would it be, a pancreas? Or would it be...ah, I’ve got it. The antagonist could be a pharmaceutical corporation that wants to charge one hundred billion zimbabwean dollars per pill for something you have to take twice a day. The protagonist is a botanist who studies a rare species of tree that has a phytochemical that can control diabetes, but the pharmaceutical companies know about it and are hunting him down to get him from threatening their multibillion dollar glucophage and insulin industry. Now, I wonder where that idea came from? Actually, I discovered a plant extract that kills bacteria, and a small pharmaceutical company was investigating it, but a big company bought them out and stopped the research. I imagine that it was because the chemical in my extract remains active even at high temperatures and after sitting on a desk and drying out for months, and would thus be very cheap to transport onto the battlefield and into the jungles... But, of course, I do not know any of this.

My point is that the only way to make major scientific topics such as global warming or diabetes into gripping narratives would be to do things like this to them. Or maybe some very creative person could come up with a middle road between boring and overdramatized that would work. We’re still waiting for that to happen, and it can’t happen soon enough.

Why I Will Not Talk with a Climate Change Denialist

That is, if I can reasonably avoid it.

I live and work in Oklahoma, the hotbed of creationism and climate change denialism. I feel like I am a missionary in a hostile tribe just because I accept scientific evidence. I am, for the most part, personally reclusive about my knowledge of evolution and climate change. I, of course, am quite clear about them when I teach and write, but I seldom engage in discussion about them with people who disagree. The only neighbors who know my views are those who have first declared their similar views to me.

I tell everybody I can about botany, the science of plants. But the reason I seldom speak in person about the sciences of evolution and global warming is that I will almost certainly experience personal attack if I do. Today, I joined in with other activists at an information table outside a farmer’s market to tell people about global warming. This is something I have not done before and probably will not do again. Most of the people who went by were supportive, to varying degrees. This is something you might expect from the visitors to a farmer’s market. But there was one climate change denialist who decided to subject me to a barrage of lies and tried to make me feel like I was a force of darkness and repression.

Okay, I started it. A man and his wife and baby were leaving the farmer’s market. Our information table was not within the market itself, but in the lawn of a nearby church that had specifically invited us to be there. I spoke first. I said, “Thank you for coming to the Farmer’s Market. By doing so, you have helped to reduce your carbon emissions, because you have bought local produce that has not been trucked across the country for thousands of miles.” I thought this was a positive thing to say.

But this was when the man decided to launch his attack. He said that there has been no global warming for the last ten years. I told him that my own research has clearly demonstrated global warming over the last twelve years. (I will present some of my data in another essay.) He simply said that I was lying and had made all of my data up.

But he did not stop there. He said that the government must have paid me thousands of dollars to do my research, and that I was being paid to say that global warming was occurring. I told him that I had done my research entirely for free. I would have told him that I gathered my data about budburst dates in deciduous trees by simply writing them down almost every day for two months each of twelve years, something that required no money. But I didn’t have a chance to do this. He just called me a liar again.

Next he said that Barack Obama was an evil man, a liar, and a hypocrite because of all the fuel that he burned in Air Force One to go to Paris to sign the climate agreement. Of course, when Trump uses a lot of jet fuel to fly to his personal vacation resorts at taxpayer expense, it is just fine. According to an AP report by Chad Day, published last month, “Flying Trump to Mar-a-Lago on Air Force One twice cost at least $1.2 million.” The report continues, “...documents made public Thursday by Judicial Watch are some of the first to put even part of a price tag on Trump’s frequent visits to his Palm Beach, Florida, club. The numbers reflect only the costs associated with the president’s plane, Air Force One. Not included are expenses for Secret Service protection or support vehicles provided by the Department of Defense, which must be airlifted into place.” This is just fine, according to Oklahoma Republicans, but Obama flying to Paris to sign the climate agreement was evil.

Why did the man criticize Obama flying in Air Force one? The key was that the man called Obama a hypocrite. You see, the reasoning seems to go like this. Democrats say that burning unnecessary jet fuel is bad for the climate. Republicans, however, say that they can burn all the jet fuel they want for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, if a Democrat ever burns any jet fuel at all, it is hypocrisy. For Republicans, however, it is not, since they say it is not a problem. This is like a thief saying that it is okay for him to steal money, but not okay for a person who disapproves of theft to do so.

So the only time a denialist will so much as listen to someone who disagrees with him or her is if that person lives in a hovel and is not responsible for any carbon emissions. Well, I don’t quite live in a hovel, but I am very frugal in my energy use. I didn’t get a chance to tell him this, but if I had, I imagine he would have called me a liar, just as he did regarding my research.

The man also claimed that, unless every other country in the world becomes perfect, the United States should not try to do anything at all. We will be, if he and Trump have their way, be the very last country in the world to reduce our carbon emissions. So much for America being a leader.

The man’s final attack was to say that environmentalists wanted to keep Africans poor and diseased and miserable because we want them to not have any electricity, any at all. This is, of course, not true, but I didn’t have a chance to say this. Another person who was with me started to say it, but the man refused to listen to it. We tried to tell him that locally-generated solar and wind energy makes electricity more accessible to rural African villages than would building billion-dollar power-plants, precisely because it would save the expense of thousands of miles of transmission lines from point of production to point of use.

I did get a last few words in to the wife with the kid. She told me she came to the market for safe food. I said that, even though we disagree, she was part of the solution to the climate problem. What she was doing was good for more reasons than she had known. I think she might have been inclined to agree with me on that one point—I sensed a distinct lessening of tension—but I think she did not want her husband to see her agreeing with me about anything.

There are some evolution and climate change denialists who are reasonable people, not necessarily in their approach to the information but at least in their approach to me. There are denialists who will not call me an evil liar. But they are rare enough that I think I will just stay away from any personal discussions on these subjects.

I think it is about time for this old missionary to retire. At some point, it is time to move to some place in which one is not constantly in fear of personal attack. France looks like a pretty good place, especially since the new prime minister has specifically invited climate scientists such as myself to move there. As explained above, if you accept science in Oklahoma you are subjected to the same kind of verbal attacks as black people were throughout the South in the pre-civil-rights era. If I had been black in the 1950’s and France had invited me to come, I would have taken the invitation very seriously.

Climate Change Workshop, part 5.

Nicole Colston, a graduate student at Oklahoma State University, gave the Saturday evening presentation at the climate change workshop sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education and the Oklahoma Climatological Survey. She got a master's degree in communication and held faculty positions as a debate coach. Then she found that she was really interested in climate change arguments, but recognized that she needed to know the science. So she came to OSU for a doctoral program in environmental science but is also a teaching assistant for in teacher education.

Nicole had been told that there were no schoolteachers who talked about climate change in class; but she found over a hundred even in her single survey. Nicole's survey showed that 81 of 125 respondents had experienced no "pushback" against teaching about global warming. This was about the same number who reported no pushback against teaching that the sun is the center of the solar system. Nevertheless, it is Nicole's personal crusade (and one of mine) to try to counteract climate change misinformation, primarily because it is deliberate misinformation. It is not sincere misunderstanding. As some writers have pointed out, there is an organize climate change denial (political) machine which, among other things, distributes free books to school superintendents saying that global warming is a hoax. These books are often quite openly abusive, e.g., a teacher shooting at Al Gore with a shotgun as he runs away with a pack of polar bears. Books supporting global warming do not, to my knowledge, use these kinds of tactics. You will find that Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway is firm but calm in tone and amply documented. Despite the barrage of misinformation, and the huge amounts of money spent by the Koch Brothers and the anonymous donor who funds about half the budget of the Heartland Institute, polls indicate (said Nicole) that 80 percent of Americans believe that humans are causing global warming.

Nicole then mentioned a number of resources and pieces of advice about how to help students understand global warming and how to avoid myths. For example, in Oklahoma, it does more harm than good to frame global warming in terms of criticizing the use of oil. (I do this, but for college students; it might be counterproductive for middle school students.) Also, don't pour on too much science; if students are confused, they may just disregard the subject and keep thinking what their parents and preachers have told them.

In order for climate science to make a difference in the world, it will need enthusiastic spokespeople like Nicole Colston.

NCSE has a new blog

The National Center for Science Education has long been the principal organization that opposes creationism. More recently it has expanded its coverage to include climate change denial. They have now started a blog. It is an informative and information-rich blog, in contrast to some other anti-creation blogs which seem to me to be mostly rants. Personally, I plan to check out the NCSE blog frequently. Its focus appears to be on the creationist and climate science controversies rather than on explaining the science itself. Anyway, don't stop visiting my blog, but you can add theirs to your list. It is called Science League of America, an historical reference to a group started back in the 1920s to oppose the growing tide of fundamentalism in America.

Our Overwhelming New Challenge: The Denial of Physical Reality

Science educators have always assumed that we will be challenged by creationists. More recently, we have been challenged by global warming denialists. Major science education associations, whether national (such as National Center forScientific Education) or local (such as Oklahomans for Excellence inScience Education), now consider it their mission to respond to both challenges.

But now the conservatives are attacking every branch of science. And they are attacking physical reality itself. This means that there is nothing that scientists can say or science educators can teach that will make any difference, since we always base our statements on physical proof.

The major example that has been in the news recently is Representative Todd Akin (R-MO) who is running as the Republican nominee for Senate. Even the Republican Party withdrew support for him when he made comments about “legitimate rape.” I am not sure whether the Republicans were all that upset about his scientific claim that a woman’s body can “shut down” a pregnancy. He apparently knows nothing about human anatomy and physiology, nor did he consider it worth his while to find out. Apparently he was satisfied with just making something up and saying it. Apparently reproductive anatomy and physiology is under attack by some conservatives.

And there are some conservatives who use biblical statements upon which to base their beliefs that the Earth is the center of the universe and does not move and that there are Methuselahs living inside the Earth.(Note: my browser indicates that the anti-Copernican website above may be unsafe to visit.) Warren Chisum, who was at one time the second most powerful Republican in the Texas House of Representatives (he is leaving office January 2013), informed some of his colleagues that the fixedearth.com website revealed important information indicating that the Copernican view might be a hoax.

I had an experience on August 31 that took me totally by surprise. I was teaching general biology, and the topic was global warming. I was presenting evidence of global warming. In a previous section of the class, I had talked about the Antarctic ice layers, and how scientists could determine global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from them. I was expecting, and got, a challenge about how global warming is part of a recurring cycle; I told the student that yes, indeed, it was, he was right, but I then explained how the global warming that is occurring today is different from the previous cycles of warming.

What I was not expecting, in this section, was loud criticism from two creationist students that, since the Earth is only 4,000 years old (I assume they meant since the Flood) there could not be 400,000 layers of ice in Antarctica. That would mean that 100 layers of ice would have to form every year for the last 4,000 years. This, I said, would have to be a miracle. They were unwilling to defend the idea of God doing such a deceptive miracle. The conclusion was, apparently, that I was lying about there being thousands of ice layers in Antarctica. I showed them a photograph of the ice layers that I had taken (not, of course, all 400,000 of them) but this was not good enough for the students. I suppose photos can be faked. What I had experienced was an attack on the admissibility of physical evidence itself—their religious view simply did not permit the existence of those ice layers. I was totally unable to know what to do next. Fortunately other students told the creationists that they had come to learn from me not from other students, and class went back to normal except that I could not concentrate.

These students had already challenged me earlier in the class. They said that if the atmospheric carbon dioxide readings were made in Hawaii, wouldn’t the volcanoes have messed up those measurements? This was a reasonable question and I answered it, in two ways: first, the Mauna Loa observatory is thousands of feet above current volcanic eruptions; second, the measured increase in carbon dioxide is uniform from year to year, irrespective of periods of volcanic eruption. I forgot all about this discussion until later, since it was a reasonable question. I did not become quietly upset until they attacked the existence of the 400,000 ice layers.

I think we will increasingly encounter such attacks. When we teach about the existence of human endogenous retroviruses (HERV) in our chromosomes, we can expect creationists to criticize their interpretation; but maybe we should now expect them to claim that HERV simply do not exist. Pseudogenes? Perhaps they do not exist either. If we said the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2004 went to the discoverers of the olfactory pseudogenes, the students will perhaps simply say that is an international scientific hoax.

Of course creationists reject radiometric dating. Uranium-lead dating is based upon the fact that zircon crystals do not incorporate lead while they are forming. Perhaps now I should expect creationists to reject the facts of chemistry and say that, in fact, zircon crystals do contain lead when they form, even though uranium atoms have seven shells with a valence of two while lead has six shells and a valence of four. How could I prove this to them? I can’t say, “I just happen to have a uranium atom here, and as you can see it has seven shells of electrons, with two on the outside.” Or, “I just happen to have a freshly-forming zircon crystal, and as you can see there are no lead atoms in it.” How should I handle this? I simply cannot prepare for every possible challenge to the reality of physical evidence. Meanwhile all creationists have to do is to say, for example, “I won’t believe that carbon atoms exist unless you prove it to me right here in the middle of class.”

There are some things I can prove to them, maybe. If they claim that photosynthesis will clean all of the additional carbon dioxide out of the air even during droughts, I can tell them I have actually measured photosynthetic rates in drought-challenged plants and drought does indeed reduce and eventually stop photosynthesis. Or maybe they would just say I am lying. What can I do?

Conservatives have become very good at reinventing reality. Lots of people consider the Republican Party to be the party of fiscal responsibility, as if the administration of George W. Bush (with a trillion-dollar deficit-funded war) had never happened. You will notice they hardly mentioned it during their convention. The only mention was by Jeb Bush, who said, “I love my brother.” Otherwise, for aught we hear from Republicans, the Republican Party was created de novo ex nihilo in 2009 in Edenic perfection.

I fear that we have a new generation of extreme conservatives coming along who do not believe in physical evidence. Truth, to them, is whatever their party or their preacher tells them, even if there is physical evidence or historical records against it. There has, perhaps, never been such a challenge to science or to science education. At least not since the clerics simply refused to look through Galileo’s telescope and see the moons of Jupiter.

Please post comments about your experiences, or suggestions about what to do.

Conservatives and their Alternate Planet

Have you noticed that conservatives live on a different planet? This is nowhere more evident than in their response to global warming. They deny the reality of one of the best attested facts in human existence. And they bolster it with appeals to religion, making things up that are not even in their scriptures.

In fact, we are all living on a different planet. As Bill McKibben points out in his new book, Eaarth, we no longer live on the old, comfortable planet Earth, but on a planet (which he calls Eaarth) in which global warming and its consequences have already become the norm. Political and religious conservatives have not yet reconciled themselves with the reality of Earth, much less of Eaarth.

The events of this week illustrate the fact perfectly. Three events have occurred that, while ignored by many people, are hugely ominous for the future of our planet.

First, climate scientists have predicted that areas near the oceans would get more rainfall, and get it in the form of big storms. They intended this as a future prediction, but it is the major fact of reality right now in Pakistan, which is having the worst floods in its history.

Second, climate scientists have predicted that areas in the middle of continents would experience droughts and heat waves. This is happening right now in Russia, at the same moment that Pakistan is flooded. Russia had not experienced temperatures of 100 F during the time that reliable records have been kept, but they have had temperatures over 100 F for almost two weeks now. The result has been a massive drought, with the biggest outbreak of forest fires in their history.

Third, climate scientists have predicted interruptions in agricultural productivity and international trade in agricultural products. This has just happened, today. On August 5, 2010, Russia announced that it was banning grain exports for the rest of the year. Add this to the near collapse of Australian grain production, and the price of grain on the international market will get even higher—which will, of course, affect poor people the most. Most Americans may not notice, because we can afford to pay almost any price for food, or so we think.

There are three stages of conservative response to global warming. The first stage is to deny that it is happening. The second stage is to claim that it is happening but is not being influenced by human activity. They are already beginning this second stage. The third stage is to just say that, oh well, we can’t do anything about it so we might as well go ahead and burn all the oil we want to.

These three viewpoints all contradict one another, but conservatives can comfortably accommodate them, because evolution has given us brains capable of maintaining mutually contradictory thoughts. Science has given us a way to transcend the limitations of our ape brains, but conservatives appear in this case to have no use for science.