From Harvard University
An early sign of spring, earlier than ever
Researchers say record-high temperatures led to earliest spring flowering in history
Record warm temperatures in 2010 and 2012 resulted in the earliest spring flowering in the eastern United States in more than 150 years, researchers at Harvard University, Boston University and the University of Wisconsin have found.
“We’re seeing plants that are now flowering on average over three weeks earlier than when they were first observed – and some species are flowering as much as six weeks earlier,” said Charles Davis, a Harvard Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the study’s senior author. “Spring is arriving much earlier today than it has in the past.”
To explain spring’s early arrival, Davis and his co-authors, Boston University biology Professor Richard Primack, BU postdoctoral researcher Elizabeth Ellwood and Professor Stanley Temple at the University of Wisconsin, point to temperature increases resulting from global climate change. Using data collected in Massachusetts and Wisconsin from the mid-1800s to the present day, they show that the two warmest years on record – 2010 and 2012 – also featured record breaking early spring flowering.
Significantly, researchers found that the early arrival of spring was predicted by historical records, and that plants haven’t shown any sign of reaching a threshold for adjusting to warming temperatures.
“It appears that many spring plants keep pushing things earlier and earlier”, Davis said.
To conduct the study, Davis and colleagues relied on two “incredibly unique” data sets.
“The data were initiated by Henry David Thoreau in the mid-1800s,” Davis said. “He was making observations on flowering times across Concord, Massachusetts for nearly a decade. In central Wisconsin, the data were collected by environmental pioneer Aldo Leopold beginning in the mid-1930s.
“The striking finding is that we see the same pattern in Wisconsin as we see in Massachusetts,” Davis said. “It’s amazing that these areas are so far apart and yet we’re seeing the same things–it speaks to a larger phenomenon taking place in the eastern United States.”
“Thoreau and Leopold are icons of the American environmental movement and it is astonishing that the records both kept decades ago can be used today to demonstrate the impacts of climate change on plant flowering times,” Primack said.
While it’s clear that continued monitoring of flowering times is needed, Davis also expressed hope that the study provides a tangible example of the potential consequences of climate change.
“The problem of climate change is so massive, the temptation is for people to tune out,” Davis said. “But I think being aware that this is indeed happening is one step in the right direction of good stewardship of our planet.” Davis continued. “When we talk about future climate change, it can be difficult to grasp. Humans may weather these changes reasonably well in the short-term, but many organisms in the tree of life will not fare nearly as well.”
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It’s better than we thought!
Peter Hartley says:
January 16, 2013 at 7:00 pm
“. . . and caused flowering to occur much earlier”
And that isn’t necessarily good.
What the so called GHGs fail to do is hold the temperature up on clear nights at an elevated (say >2,000 feet) site. In the past few years I’ve had walnut trees leaf out and then lose all their leaves from cold. Even some of the native plants have suffered this fate, arrowleaf balsamroot being one.
http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/intermountain/Greendale/images/arrowleaf_balsamroot_lg.jpg
Bloom early =1; 2 = freeze; 3 = flowers, fruit, and leaves turn black; 4 = they drop; 5 = some things grow a 2nd set.
They say you can’t do just one thing. Seems appropriate in this context.
“The problem of climate change is so massive, the temptation is for people to tune out,” Davis said. “But I think being aware that this is indeed happening is one step in the right direction of good stewardship of our planet.” Davis continued. “When we talk about future climate change, it can be difficult to grasp. Humans may weather these changes reasonably well in the short-term, but many organisms in the tree of life will not fare nearly as well.”
I am going to have to brush my teeth again, can’t get the taste of vomit out of my mouth. I keep having a visual of a 120 lb weakling skipping across a meadow with a hand full of flowers…
Early springtime flowering in the Eastern US? You would think the gardeners and farmers there must have already noticed!
“jimshu says:
January 16, 2013 at 9:58 pm
Can’t say this is happening in New Zealand. Quite the opposite- spring is later and summer is shorter.”
Well I don’t know what is happening just across the Tasman Sea, but here in Australia we are experiencing a continent wide record breaking heat wave with attendant bushfires. Here in Melbourne it was 41 C (106 F) today, and the January rainfaill has been a fraction of the long term average.
Some people may take a parochial view in that global warming gives them earlier blooming flowers (and presumably earlier die off of those flowers), but Australia is facing a dryiing out of the food bowl of the south east, and none of us are keen to move to sunny Siberia.
Leif Svalgaard says: January 16, 2013 at 6:54 pm re Japan cherry blossoms
These indirect indicators are interesting, so long as odd effects are recognised and can be accounted for, such as the CO2 fertilizer question.
We spent 20 days from 23 March 1992 following the cherry season from Kagoshima in the south to Maizuru in the centre of Japan & even sat where one of your referenced images shows.
For interest, recently, the opening of the first blossoms in Kyoto was 31 March 2001 and 3 April 2012 in the hills behind the city. I have not tried to plot these on the graph because the opening time is not defined too clearly.
> but Australia is facing a dryiing [sic] out of the food bowl of the south east
Tell that to the people affected by the 2010-11 and Feb/Mar 2012 floods in NSW and Victoria
An unusual -5C here in UK, Big fall of snow forecast for the next few days. Daily life to be severely affected (*)
And spring coming early is supposed to be a massive problem? Go figure.
(*) Not because we are stupid or incapable, but because until recently snow was pretty unusual in SE England. And local authorities took seriously the words of David Viner from UEA ‘Snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.
I live in Mass, not far from Concord, the site of Thereau’s data collection. Last winter/spring was pretty unusual. Golf courses in my area were open for play in March…as opposed to the “usual” time frame of late April. At the time, everyone you talked/listened to spoke of this as being unprecedented. Us “old timers” could be heard saying “Haven’t seen anything like this in a long time.” News media were fairly smitten with the story, frequently ignoring the fact that to the south of us, as previously mentioned above, parts o PA/Md were being hammered with winter storms that all passed to our south. Last winter (2011/2012) I plowed my driveway once. As in one time. That, too, was “unprecedented”. Many people in the media failed to make mention of the fact that in Oct 2011, that same winter, we had a devastating snow storm around Halloween. The reason it caused a tremendous amount of damage was that most trees still had most of their leaves, and we got hit with about 12″ of heavy, wet snow. My street was without power for 4 days. National Grid had tree crews here from thousands of miles away. That kind of snowfall in this area is very rare. I can’t remember it happening in the 20yrs I’ve lived in my current home.
So…when it was happening, it was unprecedented, and now, a year later, it’s apparently the norm, and it seems that now plants always flower 3-6wks early. And the only thing that gets called out is the early spring…no mention of the early “winter” just 5mos earlier.
Biased? Nah…us lay people that plant the flowers and gardens and play golf from time to time just don’t understand.
One of the things that jumped out at me was this statement: “Significantly, researchers found that the early arrival of spring was predicted by historical records, and that plants haven’t shown any sign of reaching a threshold for adjusting to warming temperatures.”
So this unprecedented spring was actually “predicted”?…funny, I don’t recall a single news item or press release that told folks “Hey…you’re not going to believe this, but your tulips are going to be up 6wks early next spring!”
This type of observational study is akin to saying “70% of people who died last year, died in a hospital. If you don’t want to die, avoid them at all costs.”
JimB
Philip Shehan:
The concluding paragraph of your post at January 16, 2013 at 11:59 pm says
Your paragraph includes two logical errors.
Firstly, it does NOT follow that earlier flowering implies earlier “die off” .
You are presuming that the growing season has moved to an earlier time of year. However, if – as the article and you assume – the earlier flowering is from warmer climate then the earlier flowering is an indication of a longer growing season .
In either case (i.e. altered time or altered length of the growing season), the earlier flowering is a result of a climate change.
Secondly, you are confusing weather and climate .
An individual weather record is set somewhere almost every day because there are many places and records have only been obtained for about a century. On the first day that a measurement site records temperature, precipitation and rainfall then it sets a record for each of those parameters. The following day it has three chances of breaking one of those records. And this is true for every measurement site. However, as time goes by there is an increase to the period between new records at each site.
There are 365 days in a year and hundreds of measurement sites. Records have not been kept at most of the sites for more than decades. Hence, a new weather record is set somewhere on most days.
The high temperatures in Australia are a weather event, and – as the WUWT thread on Tench’s data reports – it is a rare but not unprecedented Australian weather event.
Weather events can affect plant growth; e.g. a sharp frost can kill a crop. But these are individual events which occur in an individual year.
The climate of a site is the range of expected weather events at that site. A change to climate can also affect plants; e.g. increased frequency of droughts will increase the ratio of plants with drought resistance to plants which lack drought resistance.
A change to the growing season over several years is an indication of a variation (change?) in climate. And climate changes everywhere all the time: it always has and it always will.
In conclusion, your post I am answering is as mistaken as your silly assertions (on two WUWT threads) that global warming is “accelerating” when global warming has stalled for 15+ years.
Richard
richards courtney: I was responding to what jimshu claimed is happening in New Zealand. He says the sping is loger there and the summers shorter. This is not the experience here in Australia, the southern part of which covers the same latitude as New Zealand. I can assure you as I look at my garden and the plants and trees across the road that the plants are struggling and the spring blooms prematurely dying off. The purple blooms on my Bouganvillia have already turned brown. Native plants in my garden, which evolved to cope with local conditions are in fact dying. As far as the climate here goes:
“The evidence for an increase in such [extreme] weather is clear. The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology have reported that Australia has experienced fewer very cold days and more very hot days than it did 50 years ago.
The current heatwave is breaking many temperature records. The nation’s hottest day occurred on Monday, January 7. For seven days in a row, from January 2-8, the average maximum temperature across Australia was above 39 degrees. And with the extreme heat has come bushfires, destruction, health problems, and disruption of infrastructure.
Record-breaking heat is, by definition, weather not experienced for as long as records have been kept. But it’s not just unprecedented heat the nation is facing…
This weekend the Climate Commission published a report by some of Australia’s most eminent climate scientists on the connection between climate change and the extreme heat Australia is experiencing.
The report concluded that: “The length, extent and severity of this heatwave are unprecedented in the measurement record. Although Australia has always had heatwaves, hot days and bushfires, climate change has increased the risk of more intense heatwaves and extreme hot days, as well as exacerbated bushfire conditions. Scientists have concluded that climate change is making extreme hot days, heatwaves and bushfire weather worse.”
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/rising-temperatures-make-mockery-of-rising-scepticism-20130114-2cpnz.html
richardscourtney:
with regard your assertion:
“In conclusion, your post I am answering is as mistaken as your silly assertions (on two WUWT threads) that global warming is “accelerating” when global warming has stalled for 15+ years.”
You issued a challenge at the end of this post to me:
“You say
‘I have never claimed that examination of the last 17 years shows continued acceleration. It does not. But the point I have been making over and over and over again is that choosing subsets of data, whether they go, up, down or level (and you can choose multiple subsets that do any of these things) simply cannot be generalised to a statement of the about 1880-2007 as a whole. Again, the 17 year period from 1940 to 1957 does not show an increase in the upward slope of the data (acceleration). It does not show an upward slope at all. It actually shows a decrease in temperature over that time. It is multidecadal trends I have been discussing.’
Absolutely not!
“Your major claim – disputed by D Böehm and myself – has been that global warming IS accelerating.
You have peddled that lie on two threads. That is what we have been discussing.
Now you say, “I have never claimed that examination of the last 17 years shows continued acceleration. It does not.”
YES YOU DID!
Your claim has been that global warming IS accelerating: it was NOT that global warming WAS accelerating.
I could search the threads and quote your pertinent statements but it is not worth the bother (unless, of course, you choose to contend the matter).”
I did so contend the matter as follows and you have failed to produce the pertinent statements.
“clivebest says:
January 12, 2013 at 1:30 pm
Philip,
Using IPCC’s new interpretation of calculus – temperatures are now decelerating !!
see here….
Philip Shehan says:
January 12, 2013 at 3:56 pm
clivebest, Again I don’t see any point of difference between us on the data, or the interpretation over the short time period you mention.
As I wrote earlier:
“Philip Shehan says:
January 12, 2013 at 7:04 am
clivebest:
I do not disagree with much of what you write. But as I pointed out in my post to Werner it is possible to overinterpret the data by going into too fine a detail…”
To suggest that “direct effects of CO2 have been assigned to temperature” is incorrectly assuming naivety on the part of scientists assessing the possible effects of changes in climate on crops / plants. Springer and Ward (2007) reviewed the effect of elevated CO2 on flowering time and they report results for a large range of plants. Earlier flowering due to increased CO2 is by no means a response seen in all plant species (particularly not in wild species, less so in crops); in some crops and many wild plant species no response or even delays have been reported. More importantly, studies indicate that both in crops and most wild plant species earlier flowering is largely due to increased temperatures rather than elevated CO2 (e.g. Bloor et al. 2010; Hovenden et al. 2008; Craufurd and Wheeler, 2009)
Sources:
Springer and Ward, 2007 http://people.sju.edu/~cspringe/pdfs/tansley.pdf
Craufurd and Wheeler, 2009 http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/60/9/2529.full#sec-4
Hovenden et al. 2008 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2008.02419.x/full
Bloor et al. 2010 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10021-010-9363-0?LI=true
Warmists are always amazed when they “discover” that plants adapt, and do better when it’s warmer. Imagine how amazed they’d be if they “discovered” that plants love the higher C02 levels.
@Climate “Ace”, nice strawman argument. BTW, have you noticed that your C02 “thermostat” seems to be broken? Temperatures have flatlined for at least the past 16 years now, and counting. You Warmists better get to work on that, as it doesn’t bode well for your ideology/religion.
richardscourtney
D Boehm (now calling himself D Boehm Stealy) is the other person who has misrepresented my position over and over again, describing me as a liar and a fraud.
I have been commenting on a data set presented by the authors of a paper showing temperature trends form 1880 to 2007. Boehm and (richardscourtney) have been taking about subsets of data (and even data sets in central England).
When Boehm does stick to the point and discusess the entire data set he presents a doctored and deceptive graph.
He has repeatedly refused to answer a simple question:
“Philip Shehan says:
January 16, 2013 at 2:10 am
Once again, Boehm refuses point blank to answer a direct question:
What is the purpose of series 7 and the horizontal yellow line at 9 units on the y-axis?”
I will explain Boehm’s refusal to answer the question. In order to make his repeated attacks on me as a fraud and a liar, he needs to be able to claim:
“D Böehm Stealey says:
January 15, 2013 at 6:59 am
http://tinyurl.com/bkoy8or
That chart shows unequivocally that there has been no acceleration in global warming.”
His doctoring of the chart by including entirely irrelevant components such as series 7 which places a line at 9 on the y-axis means that the temperature data is compressed, making any deviation from a straight line fit less noticeable. He wants to give us a demagnifying glass with which to view the data, so he can claim it is “unequivocally” fitted by a straight line.
Without Boehm’s demagnification the graph looks like this:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/offset/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/trend/offset
Even Boehm does not want to try telling anyone that the temperature data is fit “unequivocally” by the straight line. And indeed it is better fit by a curve:
http://www1.picturepush.com/photo/a/11901124/img/Anonymous/hadsst2-with-3rd-order-polynomial-fit.jpeg
Graham W is not fooled by Boehm’s claim that the straight line fit is “unequivocal”
“Graham W says:
January 14, 2013 at 5:35 am
Philip Shehan: When drawing a straight line through the data from 1880 to 2007, compared to an exponential curve through the same data…Yes, the exponential curve fits the data better than the straight line.”
Boehm does not call Graham W a liar and a fraud.
He cannot admit that he placed series 7 and the yellow line on his chart solely for the purpose of demagnification in order to put one over on the viewer
The only fraudster in this matter is Boehm himself.
Not only do flowers like warmer weather, but so do humans.
I just finished an analysis of springtime arrival times by studying historical records going back to 1797 and pollen counts going back 4000 years. An extrapolation of the linear regression of springtime arrival date conculsively proves that the spring of 2042 will actually arrive in the summer of 2037 (July 12 to be exact).
Memorial Drive runs along the banks of the Charles River past Harvard. Just down the river is MIT. When my father attended MIT in the late 1930’s there was a spring snow, and the students were all going a bit mad due to Spring Fever and due to studying too hard for final exams. There was enough of a lull after the morning traffic for the students to build a wall of snow across Memorial Drive. The police came, and there was one heck of a snowball fight, before the students were driven back to their dorms.
I’d like to see anyone attempt to build a wall of snow across Memorial Drive nowadays.
Urban heat island, anyone?
Philip Shehan:
This is a reply to your three posts addressed to me in this thread.
re your two posts addressed to me at January 17, 2013 at 3:29 am and January 17, 2013 at 5:11 am.
On two threads you mounted a campaign claiming that global warming is “accelerating”. I and others refuted that nonsense.
I will NOT flatter you by wasting time on your daft assertion in this thread.
I shall ignore any further attempts you make to try and deflect this thread onto that.
You were wrong. Live with it.
As to your post addressed to me at January 17, 2013 at 3:18 am, please note that your first sentence admits Australia is differing from New Zealand. You say Australia is experiencing an unusual heat wave: nobody doubts that but Australia is not the world. Please read my post at January 17, 2013 at 2:57 am which you claim to be answering: it explains about the difference between “records” and “unprecedented”.
As I explained, Australia is having one of its rare but not unprecedented heat waves which is breaking records while global temperature rise has stalled.
Richard
It has long been my humble opinion that climate “science” is lacking in a good dose of humour.
We have an expresssion in Ireland and Scotland to describe this condition – it is Pofaced – this can be used as a generic term to apply to most catastropists.
This is a littel peon which i wrote some time ago and seems appropriate for this thread.
THE PLEADING ROSE
I am a vivid flowering rose
Delighting eye and balm to nose,
I thrive on heat of morning dew
But most of all on Co2;
So please don’t limit it the nigh
Or else I will just wilt and die,
I grow in rain and sun from skies
And gas to photosynthesize.
I’m not a scientist like you
With mega grants and pal review,
Please explain to a plant like me
The workings of I PCC;
Can it be wise to stop the clock
And turn it back to an epoch,
When i was cold and half this size
– true scientists helped me hybridize.
All those air-miles and pulp from trees
To promulgate your treatise,
Designed to spread alarm and fear
Of a trace-gas which I hold dear;
Your past deliberations show
If you were honest – ‘you don’t know’
What future temperatures will be
I hope it’s warmer – just for me.
patthepoet
Except when they don’t. Out here in the Skagit Valley in Western Washington they have Tulip and Daffodil festivals. In recent years they’ve been late due to the abnormally cold springs. Maybe some places are earlier, but not everywhere. That’s the problem with averaging temperatures and calling the average a record. Necessarily, half the temps will be lower than the average. The average gives a false impression.
OH MY! THE SKY IS FALLING! I guess these “scientists” do not subscribe to the theory of EVOLUTION! hmmm…. What shall we do? Everything is changing!!!!!
tgmccoy says:
January 16, 2013 at 6:50 pm
NE Oregon -spring of 2010 was late here. 2011, and a fairly normal but cold and wet one in 2012. 2013 well we havent seen above 36f mostly 25f as highs for the last 3 weeks…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I am in NC located where we see snow maybe once every five years…. They are predicting for tonight
Yuck!
I have seen this type of weather three times in the 19 years I have been here.
If spring was consistently starting 6 weeks early we would have noticed by now.
Justa Joe says:
January 17, 2013 at 8:30 am
If spring was consistently starting 6 weeks early we would have noticed by now.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It would show up in the Köppen climate classification. The mid west 20th Century graph by decade (bottom) shows climate boundary movement. The boundaries cluster together for nine of the ten decades The outlier is 1970 not 1990. The top graph showing the quartiles vs the century average, shows the first two quartiles, 1900 to 1924 and 1924 to 1946 as WARMER than the second two quartiles!
This agrees somewhat with Hansen’s graph of global temperatures produced in 1980. The first half of the 20th century was warmer than the second half before the Climastrologists started dicking around with the data and adjusting it UP.
Early spring…huh, not around here.
Our winters are getting longer, and the springs MUCH colder.
I suppose the extra CO2 could make the flowers bloom early, if they weren’t still covered in snow 😉