A subset of climate change scientists and activists are known in the mainstream science community as doomers. These are often credentialed and legitimate scientists who prefer the scarier interpretations of data, and who tend to have hair-on-fire reactions that they pass on to the general public. This does not help us in the broader mission of helping the public understand the science. Assertions that underestimate the amount of warming or the severity of effects do not help; assertions that overshoot the mark also do not help.

I wrote a substack on this, which you can visit HERE.

There has been some discussion about this recently. For some, if you look at the changes in global surface temperature, it seems like the rate of warming has increased. For others, an apparent uptick in rate of warming is just a normal short term shift in the rate of warming that is offset by prior and future downturns in rate. Regardless of whether there is a change in rate of warming, the question itself brings up a number of sub-questions of interest. Some of these questions are about climate science, some are about how to wrangle and interpret data, and some are about the rhetorical interface between science and the public conversation.

I have some thoughts.

I am a writer of things including science, some fiction, and even a little (not very good) poetry. This includes Greg Laden’s Blog.

I co-run a podcast called Ikonokast, which focuses on science and science advocacy.

I’m an educator and public speaker. I speak and write on matters of climate change and the energy transition, as well as race and racism. I visit local schools to guest-teach in areas of scholarship, various biological or ecological topics, and race. I tutor students, mainly through Chariot Learning.

I’m an advocate for the environment, and I serve on the board of the DFL Environmental Caucus.

I’m a co-leader in the pro-democracy movement known as Indivisible, where I serve on the boards of Plymouth Area Indivisible and Indivisible MN03. I created and organize Indivisible Ink.

I’m an active DFLer, in Senate District 42.

In my former days as an academic, I advanced theories on the so-called ape-human split, and the origin of our genus, and I worked with the Efe hunter-gatherers of the Ituri Forest (PR Congo), and in South Africa.

Let’s start with two Native American related titles:

The Sea-Ringed World: sacred stories of the Americas by María García Esperón, Amanda Mijangos, David Bowles.

Fifteen thousand years before Europeans stepped foot in the Americas, people had already spread from tip to tip and coast to coast. Like all humans, these Native Americans sought to understand their place in the universe, the nature of their relationship with the divine, and the origin of the world into which their ancestors had emerged.

The answers lay in their sacred stories.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants, and Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults.

Every single person seems to be reading this book right now. Are you? No? Well, that is easily fixed: Lessons in Chemistry b Bonnie Garmus.

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.

Speaking of novels, and this is especially for all you Minnesotans since it is set in the famous town of Lillydale (doesn’t really exist): Bloodline by Jess Lourey.

In a tale inspired by real events, pregnant journalist Joan Harken is cautiously excited to follow her fiancé back to his Minnesota hometown. After spending a childhood on the move and chasing the screams and swirls of news-rich city life, she’s eager to settle down. Lilydale’s motto, “Come Home Forever,” couldn’t be more inviting.

Her fiancé tells her she’s being paranoid. He might be right. Then again, she might have moved to the deadliest small town on earth.

Best science fiction of the year (except it was published a few years ago), from an author who mostly does not write science fiction: Saturn Run by John Sandford.

For fans of THE MARTIAN, an extraordinary new thriller of the future from #1 New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Sandford and internationally known photo-artist and science fiction aficionado Ctein.

The race is on, and an remarkable adventure begins—an epic tale of courage, treachery, resourcefulness, secrets, surprises, and astonishing human and technological discovery, as the members of a hastily thrown-together crew find their strength and wits tested against adversaries both of this earth and beyond. What happens is nothing like you expect—and everything you could want from one of the world’s greatest masters of suspense.

The Bitter End: the 2020 presidential campaign and the challenge to American Democracy is the best analsyis of the American Electorate, using amazing techniques and an unbelievable sample size:

John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck demonstrate that Trump’s presidency intensified the partisan politics of the previous decades and the identity politics of the 2016 election. Presidential elections have become calcified, with less chance of big swings in either party’s favor. Republicans remained loyal to Trump and kept the election close, despite Trump’s many scandals, a recession, and the pandemic. But in a narrowly divided electorate even small changes can have big consequences. The pandemic was a case in point: when Trump pushed to reopen the country even as infections mounted, support for Biden increased. The authors explain that, paradoxically, even as Biden’s win came at a time of heightened party loyalty, there remained room for shifts that shaped the election’s outcome. Ultimately, the events of 2020 showed that instead of the country coming together to face national challenges?the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, and the Capitol riot?these challenges only reinforced divisions.
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

The Unpersuadables : Adventures ith the enemies of Science by Will Stoor:

Why, that is, did the obviously intelligent man beside him sincerely believe in Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and a six-thousand-year-old Earth, in spite of the evidence against them? It was the start of a journey that would lead Storr all over the world—from Texas to Warsaw to the Outer Hebrides—meeting an extraordinary cast of modern heretics whom he tries his best to understand. Storr tours Holocaust sites with famed denier David Irving and a band of neo-Nazis, experiences his own murder during “past life regression” hypnosis, discusses the looming One World Government with an iconic climate skeptic, and investigates the tragic life and death of a woman who believed her parents were high priests in a baby-eating cult.

Using a unique mix of highly personal memoir, investigative journalism, and the latest research from neuroscience and experimental psychology, Storr reveals how the stories we tell ourselves about the world invisibly shape our beliefs, and how the neurological “hero maker” inside us all can so easily lead to self-deception, toxic partisanship and science denial.

Tangerine by Edward Bloor is often assigned to middle school kids. If you have a kid heading for middle school, get them to read this NOW so they can enjoy it, you read it so you can talk to them about it. Many messages, some subtle, very important commentary on modern American culture.

Three titles on evolution all three of which you should read. The history of life on earth is wonderfully summarized by my old buddy Henry Gee’s A very short history of life on earth. Best book of its kind ever, no kidding. Then, read my old buddy Don Prothero’s Evolution: What the fossils say and why it matters (2nd edition). Then, a new title from a new author, my frien Steven Therough’s A most improbable story. So you get the whole history of life, then a more narrowed down view that focuses more on verts, then the human story. A great sequence. I have designs to get one or more author on our podcast, Ikonokast. I’ll let you know if that happens!

Also check out Reality Check: How science deniers threaten our future, by Don Prothero.

A thought-provoking look at science denialism “for popular science readers who want better to be able to explain and defend science and scientific methods to others” (Library Journal).

“Prothero’s treatise will give the science-minded something to cheer about, a brief summary of the real data that supports so many critical aspects of modern life.” —Publishers Weekly

Michael Crichton wrote some very good books, some even being candidates for having been transformative in the world of science fiction. He wrote Jurassic Park, after all. When I was in graduate school, Crichton was on Harvard’s “Vising Committee,” a gaggle of notables with some credentials who provided wise oversight of things, including the Anthropology Department. During this time he hob-knobbed with my at-the-time best friend and advisor, Irv Devore, so I was constantly hearing stories of how movies are actually produced, and such. Crichton was generous. A significant part of my graduate research in what is now PR Congo was funded from his pocket (along with NSF and other funds). Interestingly, the field site I worked at, along with a few dozen other scholars over a decade and a half, seems to have served as a model for much of the framework for his novel, Congo. We did not have odd apes or missing jungle fortresses, but we did experience many of the other things in the book, including pods of hippos, corrupt customs officials, and various jungley things.

Then Michael started to go off the rails. Or, maybe, he started to rub against a third rails (racism and feminism) and caught on fire, in a bad way.

In 1992, he wrote Rising Sun, which touched on Japanese-American relations and contrasts. It might have been insightful and informative. Or, maybe it was a poke in the eye to an emerging American liberal philosophy. One review noted, “he knew Rising Sun would ruffle feathers, the vehemence of the reaction came as a surprise. Challenges to his economic premise – that the United States is selling its future to Japan – failed to materialize. Instead, he recalls with obvious annoyance, American critics labelled him racist.”

We now, of course, recognize eye-poking “I was only asking questions” racism for what it is. Looking back, it seems a little like Crichton helped invent that. Indeed, Crichton’s published response to this criticsm, noted in his AP obituary (oh right, should mention that: he’s dead), included “because I’m always trying to deal with data, I went on a tour talking about it and gave a very careful argument, and their response came back, ‘Well you say that but we know you’re a racist.'” The Wikipedia article on this book, from which I liberally steal the quotes I’m using, notes that “Crichton has gone on record as saying that he intended his novel to be a “wakeup call” to U.S. industry and that he is more critical of the United States than Japan.”

The movie Rising Son met mid-level reviews, and re-ignited the discussion of anti-Asian racism.

Then Crichton really stepped in it when he wrote Disclosure in 1994. This was in a way the reaction by the established patriarchy to the very very early days of the #MeToo movement.

An all too common story is that a man rising in the ranks of power has some sort of initial relationship with a woman, he then exploits her and tries to force her to do his bidding, possibly in a sexual relationship, possibly in a professional setting, or possibly both. This is one of the things HR rules were designed to address.

In Disclosure, Crichton takes this issue head on as the central theme of the novel, but he reverses the sexes of the protagonists, and ends up with the rising woman harassing the poor hapless man. Of course, that happens. But that is an unusual reversal. Unusual reversals are great material in a novel, right? So when Crichton dreams up this scenario for his novel, later made into a movie, he is just being a clever author, right?

Well, one reviewer would not agree with that:

Towards the end of my review of Rising Sun, I said, “Michael Crichton was kind of an asshole, right? I’m not off-base in saying that?”. With his follow-up novel, Disclosure, I can, without reservation, firmly assert that I think Michael Crichton was unquestionably an asshole.

God. Fuck this book.

My memory of the reception of this book, and the movie made out of it, conforms to this review. (I quickly note that the current Wikipedia page on Disclosure does not fully grok this problem. Any Wiki-writers out there want to look into this?)

Then in 2004, he went and wrote State of Fear. This novel was structured as a sort of documentary, with graphs and data and footnotes, and is a clear and absurd counter-argument over the reality and importance of global warming.

State of Fear was widely criticized by the community of climate scientists, scientific organizations, and science writers. To give a flavor, I’ll quote my friend Chris Mooney:

In the end, State of Fear bears little resemblance to Crichton’s most successful sci-fi thrillers, like Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain. Instead, it’s far more reminiscent of Disclosure, Crichton’s perverse attempt to address the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace by focusing on a case in which a woman harasses a man, rather than vice-versa. Similarly, in State of Fear the specter of a vast environmentalist conspiracy—a problem even less significant than sexual harassment of men by their female superiors—gets trumpeted while real concerns (climate change, for instance) get scoffed at. By the book’s end, one can only ask: What planet is Michael Crichton living on? Because this one is clearly getting warmer.

God. Fuck this book.

Crichton was not only on Harvard’s visiting committee, but he had been an anthropology major in my department, and his undergraduate senior thesis was to eventually turn into a novel, one I strongly recommend. That novel, Eaters of the Dead, was his 14th novel by most accounts, but it was really written far earlier as the thesis.

Published just before Eaters, was “The Great Train Robbery.” It is that novel to which I refer you now. The term “great train robbery” is confusing. There were more than one great train robberies. This one, the one in the Crichton novel, happened in England in 1855. Because the event, which really happened (and was known at the time as the “Great Gold Robbery”) involved the paraphernalia of burial of the dead, Crichton goes deeply into that practice as it was in the mid 19th century. The problem was, dead people regularly came back to life in those days, owing mainly to the preponderance of Type II errors in estimating a person’s live vs dead status. For that and other reasons, I found the novel really fun and interesting to read.

So all this leads us to this: At the time of this writing, and probably for about a day, the Kindle version of The Great Train Robbery is available cheap, for two bucks.

But you knew that.

What you may not have been thinking when you woke up this morning, and you are forgiven since there are some other important things going on in this world, is that this is the approximate tenth anniversary of the end of Watt’s credibility, which also coincides with the end of Roger Pielke Sr’s credibility, and a few other related casualties of ill intentioned fake science.

I’m reminded of this fact by my friend Victor Venema, who woke up this morning with a blog post: The 10th anniversary of the still unpublished Watts et al. (2012) manuscript .

The object lesson from this anniversary: Science marches on while pesudoscience withers and dies.

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So your $50 ()or $500) donation to this link will save America! In part!

Even $10. Whatever you’ve got. There is a deadline, so please do this right away. Must be done by July 18th.

Thank you for saving us all!

It sounds like a book based on Greta Thunberg, but in fact, the first edition of The Tantrum That Saved the World predated Greta.

The book starts out with the little girl inheriting a huge problem she didn’t ask for, reshaping her very strong emotions into positive and inspiring action. We then encounter information about climate change science presented in a way that is fully accessible to children. Finally, as all worthwhile things do, there is an action plan. My copy came with a nice poster.

Tantrums are bad. Except when they save the world.