Letter to the Editor (orginally published in the Washington post, also submitted to WUWT)
For the second year in a row, we’ve had peak cherry blossoms later than the average date of March 31. In 2013, they were nine days late; this year they were 10 days late. That’s not a big surprise; after all, the usual peak date itself is just an average.
But what is curious is how The Post’s coverage of cherry blossoms veers into discussions of global warming in some years but not in others. In 2012, when the blossoms peaked on March 20, one front-page article was ominously headlined, “Much-too-early bloomers? As temperatures rise, scientists speculate that cherry blossom times could advance by a month.” A Capital Weather Gang blog post that month was headlined, “D.C.’s cherry blossoms have shifted 5 days earlier: What about global warming and the future?” Why enjoy an early spring when you can turn it into a teachable moment?
Needless to say, this news angle wilted a bit in the past two years.
When it comes to global warming, the recent late blossoms don’t prove much. But for that matter, neither did the early blossoms of years past.
Sam Kazman, Washington
The writer is general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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So that’s why the daffodils that never stray far from home flower first! OK, so we impact micro-regional temperature through UHI. How much does worldwide urbanization raise worldwide temps? Does UHI ever stay out late and fraternize with that floozy CO2? What do their kids look like? Are they hot ?
Climate Catastrophe: A Superstorm for Global Warming Research (Spiegel)
lsvalgaard says:
April 26, 2014 at 8:18 am
Here is a Japanese record of Cherry Blossoms spanning the last 1000 years
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Cherry-Trees-Japan.pdf
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There was another study by Aono that I’ve unfortunately lost the link to that quantified the UHI using cherry blossom dates between rural and urban settings at similar latitude and elevation. When the resulting UHI estimation was subtracted from those parts of the data exposed to it, the over all trend was still positive, but the uptick at the end disappeared. If I recall correctly, the city used to quantify the UHI was Kyoto, which I found rather amusing.
@ur momisuglyHans Erren at 8:56 am
Do you have a link?
All I can find is a gavin @ur momisugly 7 March 2014 that made a prediction based on trend of May 3 and has a less that 22% chance of anytime before April 26 (2014 breakup day)
So, if the blossoms are occurring later (last two years), are we experiencing global cooling? Less UHI affect?
Go easy on me – I’m just an average guy not an academic.
Here in Vancouver, BC, our cherry blossoms are just finishing up, and we had a relatively mild winter. I have no idea when the average is for coastal BC (or Japan – Cherry blossoms are very big!) however it would be an interesting research area for some student looking for a project that is visible and obvious for warming/cooling and trying to figure out what is an influence on blossoms besides the weather (if something else is an influence)…
The record of US cherry trees kept by the US Park service is here. This goes from 1921 through 2011, nowhere near as long as the Japanese record, but it shows clearly there is nothing unprecedented about an April 10 bloom, just as there was nothing unprecedented about a March 20th bloom that got Harry Reid all a-twitter in 2012. The document does not say whether these dates are first bloom or peak bloom.
The US Park Service record records bloom for two different varieties — Yoshino and Kwanzan — Yoshino appears to bloom about 14 days earlier. From the dates given in the USPS article referenced from the Washington Post article, it appears they are talking about the Yoshino variety. The actual quote from the USPS cherry blossom expert Robert DeFeo is:
Gaa! botched the blockquote tags. WUWT readers will no doubt figure out where the DeFeo quote ends and I pick back up again.
Go over to BreitBart…breaking info now, somebody said something anti climate change…oh dear!
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/04/26/Former-NASA-Scientist-Global-Warming-is-Nonsense#comment-1356635701
Without going into a lot math, even though the PDF file you referenced from http://www.lief.org specifically followed their CAGW religion and claimed that today’s cherry blossom festival prove that today’s temperatures are the hottest ever over the past 1000 years, that’s not actually the case.
None of the recent cherry blossom temperature proxies are hotter than the dates between 1000 and 1450, and that period was spanning a length of many more years than today.
Further, though the increase in recent years was steadily upward, that increase is ALSO a “proof” of the Little Ice Age over in Japan – There is a very distinct “COLD PERIOD” in Japan between 1600 and 1900! Now, what I cannot explain is why the MWP “peak” in Japan trailed that in Europe and elsewhere by 200 years, nor why the LIA “dip” in Japan was 200 years later than in Europe.
Now, what I cannot explain is why the MWP “peak” in Japan trailed that in Europe and elsewhere by 200 years, nor why the LIA “dip” i Japan was 200 years later than in Europe.
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Curry’s stadium wave?
Alexander Feht says:
April 26, 2014 at 9:02 am
“The Japan Cherry Trees link Leif provided is a decidedly AGW promulgating article.”
Alexander, read the article, it shows that the urban heat island effect is real.
Re article:
This a real treemometer! I think if we chose flowering species around the world for keeping temperature it would be the most definitive and be safe from algorithms used to discipline thermometers by the “CAGW department of corrections”.
Alexander Feht says:
April 26, 2014 at 9:02 am
The Japan Cherry Trees link Leif provided is a decidedly AGW promulgating article.
It shows the data. (Mis)interpret them according to your own bias.
RACookPE1978 says:
April 26, 2014 at 9:49 am
Might I suggest lag between Atlantic & Pacific basins in the thermohaline circulation, aka ocean conveyor belt, great ocean conveyor, global conveyor belt or meridional overturning circulation (which isn’t quite the same thing)?
The data analysis that was in WUWT, Posted on April 24, 2014 by Willis Eschenbach, and Seattle’s math contribution, are vary appropriate to this discussion. The End Times are statistically different.
The blossoms may vary, but for the climate scientist, its cherry picking time all year.
lsvalgaard says:
April 26, 2014 at 10:12 am
Alexander Feht says:
April 26, 2014 at 9:02 am
The Japan Cherry Trees link Leif provided is a decidedly AGW promulgating article.
It shows the data. (Mis)interpret them according to your own bias.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I’ve read the original studies by Aono that this article references and they didn’t strike me as particularly alarmist. That said, let’s keep in mind that cherry blossoms as a proxy suffer from some of the same limitations as tree rings. For example, they tell you absolutely zero about temps in the days following the blossom date. They are representative of temps over a very small part of the year. I’ve lived through plenty of harsh winters that that were accompanied by an early spring, and mild winters that were accompanied by a late spring as examples.
One of the reasons the cAGW acolytes wish to use cherry blossoms for their propaganda is because of the Japanese Cherry Blossom paleo reconstruction that showed the MWP warmer than today. After which Japan promptly pulled out of Kyoto in Cancun.
http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/09/peer-reviewed-cherry-blossom-reseach-confirms-japans-medieval-climate-warmer-than-current-one.html
I have just totaled the TSI per cycle between 1889 and 2008 and the CET Maximum temperature per cycle between the same cycles. They correlate 0.966851656.
TSI T Max
1889-1901 206235.1697 166.8
1902-1913 181648.5013 152.7
1913-1922 154349.3985 116.0
1922-1933 180288.8432 140.9
1933-1943 166644.4585 132.0
1943-1953 166645.3448 133.5
1953-1964 172128.3665 143.7
1964-1976 196692.6729 157.2
1976-1985 154380.2623 116.8
1985-1997 196708.3582 162.1
1997-2008 184431.2763 155.6
Correlation 0.966851656
Don’t know why but there you go.
Thanks. Even before reading I guessed that Urban Heat Island effect would be discussed. Here is a snippet.
Now here is something very interesting a bit odd. Only anecdotal though.
Kelvin Vaughan says:
April 26, 2014 at 11:43 am
I have just totaled the TSI per cycle between 1889 and 2008 and the CET Maximum temperature per cycle between the same cycles. They correlate 0.966851656.
The reason they correlate is that the cycles have different lengths – from 10 to 13 years – so simply ‘totaling’ the data will just correlate with the cycle length. If you divide each total by the length of the cycle the square of the correlation [the fraction of the variability that is ‘explained’ by the correlation] falls to R2 = 0.09, thus not significant.
Since Japan and the cherry blossom has be brought up I thought I would take a closer look.
What does the following tell me about global warming? It doesn’t even tell me much about Japanese warming!
By now you have to question the usefulness of the cherry blossom dates for measuring climate. There’s too much noise from UHI.
Kyoto didn’t have a McDonalds in 1950………..
Curse you Red Baron! 8<) I was going to point out that ALL of the recent area-elevation-regional cherry-blossom data you have presented validates the UHI impact around EVERY city worldwide: gradual warming up from the regional LIA "low" and a modern rise proportional to the distance from each city center. (Even the cherry blossom data shows the least recent rise nearest the coastlines, and – along the coast, furthest from the harbor. )