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.”
richardscourtney
“I shall ignore any further attempts you make to try and deflect this thread onto that.”
Fine,
But you introduced the deflection, (in bold typescript):
“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.”
Don’t expect me to remain silent when you constantly misrepresent me and call me a liar. Do as you said you would. Go find the post(s) or stop your false accusations.
So we essentially have a study with limited data from two out of the lower 48. Excellent. And the location of said results were collated from where geographically? I’m going to hazard a guess that some of those locations weren’t quite so urbanized in the 1930s, and definitely not the mid 1850s.
CO2 increases alone can easily account for most of the earlier Spring flowers in the UK where warming has not occurred. Higher CO2 makes these plants more temperature tolerant and thus able to grow and bloom earlier with no need for earlier warming. As temperatures have not come at all close to the highs of the 1930s, this earlier blooming is a last-half of the century thing. I wonder when they started observing flowers. I bet it was quite some time ago and in the 1930s Spring was much earlier. But, we must remember that nothing existed before their short memories noticed it.
@ur momisugly Philip Shehan, in response to your-
Philip Shehan says:
January 17, 2013 at 3:18 am
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.
Sorry that’s not what I said.
I said-
“Can’t say this is happening in New Zealand. Quite the opposite- spring is later and summer is shorter.”
And the point of my original post was that in the late 60’s/early 70’s our warm months were the longer part of our year, whereas, now our warm months start later and are shorter, and the cooler months prevail. The shoe anecdote was to verify that it is not just age giving me a golden view of my sunburnt youth.
Philip Shehan:
You disrupted two WUWT threads with your silly claim that global warming is accelerating. I and others repeatedly showed you that global warming has reduced to being indiscernible from zero trend over the most recent 15+ years which shows recent deceleration and NOT acceleration.
Now, in this thread you have presented a series of posts which attempt similar disruption but have the brass neck to pretend you did not make the claim.
And, in your post in this thread at January 17, 2013 at 11:05 am, you demand me to provide evidence that you did! OK, below I copy the first of your series of posts on the matter from each of the earlier two threads.
Please note that in one you say
and in the other you say
Jimshu: Yes I recognised that along with the typos I had not repeated your statement accurately but I understood your point to be what you wrote – spring is later there and the summers shorter.
Again, that may be so but it is not what we are experiencing on this side of the Tasman. That said of course I don’t know what the bureau of meteorology says about whether there will be an early end to this summer. But it’s been a stinker so far.
Again Richard, it is you who went off topic, and I will defend myself against false claims.
Again Richard, you are misrepresenting me, so I shall respond:
Thank you for quoting directly what I argued at the very beginning of the thread:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/03/agw-bombshell-a-new-paper-shows-statistical-tests-for-global-warming-fails-to-find-statistically-significantly-anthropogenic-forcing/
Philip Shehan says:
January 4, 2013 at 8:43 am
Quoting from the paper:
“3.1 Time series properties of the data
Informal inspection of Fig. 1 suggests that the time series properties of greenhouse gas forcings (panels a and b) are visibly different to those for temperature and solar irradiance (panel c). In panels a and b there is evidence of acceleration, whereas in panel c the two time series appear more stable.”
Informal inspection of the temperature data of panel c does show acceleration, matching that of the greenhouse gas forcing plots in a and b. The temperature rise appears less dramatic due to different scaling factors used in the 3 plots, but the acceleration of the temperature in the last 40 years compared to the previous 80 is clear to the naked eye. This is confirmed by a formal fit of temperature data to a nonlinear equation.
The discussion is about what the authors claim an “informal” inspection of the entire data set from 1880 to 2007 shows.
In that post I said that comparing the last 40 years with the previous 80 (actually closer to 90) did not support the claim that the temperature was “more stable” ie closer to a linear fit than the data in the other panels.
You and Boehm then banged on incessantly about what was occurring over short periods of time. I replied that shorter periods of time, say 17 years could not be taken as representative of the entire period, which is what I was discussing.
You fail to give the context of the other quote from me:
“informal examination shows an increase in the rate of warming over the period”
The period in question is 1880 to 2007.
There is nothing in the quotes given that supports your reply (“Absolutely not!”) that this statement by me was inaccurate:
‘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.’
Flowers, huh? Punxsutawney Phil is the expert on when spring starts. He doesn’t pay any attention to this flower BS; the message from Gobbler’s Knob is the one to watch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punxsutawney_Phil
Philip Shehan:
re your post at January 17, 2013 at 2:04 pm.
Whatever. You were wrong then and you are wrong now.
I repeat that this thread is about the growing season and NOT you.
Keep to the topic because it is interesting.
Richard
Where I live, in midway in the province of Alberta. Lovely springs we have where for the last 9 years my pear tree would have blackened blooms and new leaves, it has only been two years now that we have had fruit from the tree.
The springs are still cool, we get snow in May still, but last year we were lucky and it missed us. So we planted early and people don’t plant until June in my area, because killing frosts still happen. Normal dates for planting were the third weekend of May, but we moved it to second week of June ourselves (10 years ago), many gardeners have done the same thing too. It really is the luck of the draw to have your garden survive if you plant too early.
Alberta is many regions of differing climate, and having lived in Lesser Slave Lake town, and Calgary. Now living over 250 km north east of Edmonton. I ended up travelling twice a week, and did get to see the seasons arrive. Most of them have been arriving early, but plant growth didn’t show it during supposed early springs except for some hardier trees except the white spruce trees (we call them swamp spruce) which has been late the last 5 years or so in some areas. Except for the autumn which starts to show itself second week of August (for the last 4 years), when it normally started Second week of September in previous years.
I still wouldn’t trade living here for city living, just have to learn to live within the climate means of any region, just as you learn to live within your monetary means.
The mango season here in South Florida is being messed up due to not enough cold hours to make the mango trees want to flower and fruit. It has been warm enough that some trees are have bloomed prematurely. Just my report from here…. I am not a “warmist”
BTW Southern California has been unusually cold the last two months
“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,”
And this is a problem because ….?
I was able to put in my tomatoes in March this last year. That’s a month early. So I had fresh tomatoes from my garden a month earlier than usual. What’s the problem with that? (Of course, there was that week in April when I had to go cover up the plants every night ….)
Barbara, as I stated earlier viewpoints such as yours are highly parochial.
Were I still living in Syracuse New York I may have a similar outlook. However, now I am back in Australia I have a different perspective. In spite of the good news about ticks not being able to cope with the heat here, (see that thread above) I and others have been pointing out the downside here, not the least of which is the continent wide record heatwave that is causing extreme fires.
Pacific Islanders whose homes are 2 metres or less above current sea level and are suffering from more frequent inundations with storm surges do not consider global warming a good thing. Nor do those in other agricultural areas that are undergoing change and many other people who are already coping with the downside of temperatures which have increased less than 1 degree C over the last century, with predictions of several, perhaps as much as 5 degrees to come.
The recent flooding of the coastal North East of the USA are also awarning of things to come.
.
Philip Shehan:
At January 17, 2013 at 11:34 pm you say
Really? How do you know?
Richard
Richard,
Because with the warming that will bring those nice early springs, sea levels will rise and storm surges will become more frequent.
Barbara, I also have my own copy of Watkin Tench’s account.
I am of partial aboriginal ancestry, but I have had the following letter published in anewspaper disabusing the politically correct who insist that there was sweetness and light on this continent prior to the arrival of the white man, giving Tench’s account of the ferocious intertribal warfare that was going on here when the white man arrived. Bennelong point where the Sydney Opera House now stands is named after the aboriginal Bennelong who became something of as favourite with the first governor Arthur Phillip:
Not all of those killers were white
Richard Frankland’s call for recognition of Australia’s first wars at the Australian War Memorial (“Australia’s first war needs remembering”, Letters 16/5) fails to correctly identify the belligerents.
Captain Watkin Tench of the First Fleet writes of the warrior Bennelong: “Love and war seemed his favourite pursuits, in both of which he had suffered severely. His head was disfigured by several scars; a spear had passed through his arm and another through his leg.
“Half of one of his thumbs was carried away, and the mark of a wound appeared on the back of his hand. Whenever he recounted his battles, poised his lance and showed how fields were won, the most violent exclamations of rage against his competitors in arms, those from the tribe called Cameeragal in particular, would burst from him.
“And he never failed at such times to solicit the governor to accompany him, with a body of soldiers, in order that he might exterminate this hated name.”
Philip Shehan, Brunswick
Unless I am mistaken, Shehan holds the belief that global warming is still accelerating. It is not. Since the end of the LIA, warming has never accelerated.
That belief is nonsense. It has no basis in reality. Now, even GISS, and Hansen, and the Met Office all admit that not only has global warming not accelerated, but that it has stopped.
Shehan’s wild-eyed rants are due to the fact that Planet Earth is flatly contradicting his belief system. Global warming is not “accelerating”, and anyone who claims it is is either crazy, or lying. I don’t think Shehan is crazy. Only Shehan knows the motives behind his false claims.
This comment sets the record straight: global warming is not accelerating.
Philip Shehan:
Your post at January 18, 2013 at 4:48 am says to me
It will? You know that? How?
“The warming”? What warming?
There has been no discernible (at 95% confidence) global warming for over 16 years.
But everything changes so either warming or cooling will set in sometime.
You say you know it will be warming. How? Did you ‘see’ it in a dream?
The altered growing seasons differ from place to place (as posts in this thread report), and this is because climate changes. It always has and always will everywhere.
And we need to hope warming will set in to provide the benign conditions of the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods because no sane person would welcome return to the terrible conditions of the Dark Age and Little Ice Age cool periods.
Cooling is especially bad because it increases storms and those storm surges you fear: warming reduces them because warming reduces temperature differences which cause storms.
Sea level has been rising for 12,000 years since the last glaciation. The rate of sea level rise has slowed recently probably because global warming has decelerated to zero.
In conclusion, I would be interested if you were to provide more details of the dream or ‘vision’ or etc. which has induced you to think you have supernatural powers to predict the future. I desire this information because I suspect your powers are as mistaken as your notion that global warming is accelerating.
Richard
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 16, 2013 at 6:54 pm
The Japanese consider the flowering of the cherry trees to be of special importance and have records going back 1000 years http://www.leif.org/EOS/Cherry-Trees-Japan.pdf. They find that the recent earlier flowering is due to urbanization [1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius].
*******************************************************************************************
Is this an example of cherry picking?
Sorry, couldn’t resist it 🙂
Steve T
Shehan says:
“Pacific Islanders whose homes are 2 metres or less above current sea level and are suffering from more frequent inundations with storm surges do not consider global warming a good thing. Nor do those in other agricultural areas that are undergoing change and many other people who are already coping with the downside of temperatures which have increased less than 1 degree C over the last century, with predictions of several, perhaps as much as 5 degrees to come. The recent flooding of the coastal North East of the USA are also awarning of things to come.”
Baloney. Willis Eschenbach has repeatedly demolished the horse manure about fast-rising sea levels, as did the late, great John Daly. Sea levels are not rising any more in the South Pacific than anywhere else. The global SL rise since the LIA is entirely natural. There is no testable, verifiable human signal in SL rise. None.
Further, the claimed “predictions” of rapidly rising global temperatures are similar horse manure. Repeating that bunkum might fly at thinly-trafficked alarmist blogs, but here at the internet’s “Best Science” site, we require testable scientific evidence. But there is no evidence that the extremely mild, 0.7ºC rise in temperature is anything but the natural recovery from the LIA. And there is zero empirical evidence that the planet is going to warm by 5ºC. That is simply a scary alarmist assertion, without any corroborating evidence. If anything, the opposite is true. Global temperatures have stopped rising.
Empirical evidence covering the past decade and a half indicates that global warming has stalled out. The dominoes are finally falling: Hansen, the Met, GISS, etc., are all being forced to admit that there has been no real global warming. Sorry about that failed conjecture, but then, it was always just a conjecture.
We had an early spring once, about ten years ago, after a mild winter. The red buds opened, the foliage burst out, flowers blossomed, very nice, two weeks ahead of the usual schedule. Then a late season freeze put a screeching halt to that baloney.
None of the atolls are threatened. Go ask the people in the Maldives. They say that everything is just fine.
D Boehm Stealey:
Richard Courtney demands that I stay on topic. He says that this thread is not about ME. This in spite of his spite of him introducing the topic of our previous discussion on other threads, (He was so keen to make sure people noticed he put it in boldface type):
“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: Don’t be too hard on Boehm for submitting a post which has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion here.)
Therefore, I am not permitted to defend myself from your collective misrepresentations.
I will therefore simply direct you to my comments on Courtney’s and your inability to comprehend that I was discussing the temperature data from 1880 to 2007 as presented by the authors of the paper in the discussion of the earlier thread:
Philip Shehan says:
January 17, 2013 at 3:29 am
And my discussion of your blatantly fraudulent activities in data manipulation
Philip Shehan says:
January 17, 2013 at 5:11 am
mpainter, The Maldives are in the Indian Ocean. Go aske the people of Kiribati. They are deeply concerned.
Shehan is complaining for only one reason: we are holding his feet to the fire. There is no acceleration of global warming. None. Even his cronies at GISS and the Met Office have had to climb down off of that nonsense.
And:
“The Maldives are in the Indian Ocean. Go ask the people of Kiribati. They are deeply concerned.”
So what? There is no unusual sea level rise in the Maldives, none at all. If folks are upset it is because climate alarmists like Shehan are feeding them nonsense.