Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
However, one other thing differentiates the older and newer epochs: The variance is much larger for older data. On the one hand it could be that increased variance is due to natural phenomenon (cooler weather?) or random error of less reliable measurements. However if that larger variance is due to systematic error (e.g., different methodologies/sources which were not accounted in the model (e.g., using hierarchical modeling), then there is a possibility that the difference between older and newer data are not that dramatic. What an interesting (and alarming) figure.
Whats interesting to me is how big the spread is until the 1900s where not only is the blossom date trend increasing, but the individual blossom dates are grouping much closer together as well. I wonder if this is an error in measurement or if there is natural explanation for this variance reduction in the last 100 years.
Wow.
Kyoto was the capital of Japan for close to a millennium.
The point, though, is not the politics, but that modern Kyoto bears very little resemblance to pre-1900 Kyoto.
See the satellite image here (there should be a red border around Kyoto city): https://goo.gl/maps/FZZbj7UFi4m
Sell also Scrubs, filmed in LA but set in "San Frangeles" although never admitted in the script. They wanted to avoid the LA/SF/NY trend of mentioning place names and expecting the whole world to know what you are talking about. For the longest time I thought scrubs was set in Florida.
Summer is when the jet stream is to the north, and we get included in the band of warm air that California always enjoys. Winter is when it moves to the south, putting the Seattle area in the cold band that Alaska always endures.
The jet stream is late this year.
The trees that held out the longest without turning are coloring minimally ok, but the earlier foliage was non-existent. This coincides with the last month of summer featuring no rain after an incredibly wet start and middle.
And it's not widespread.
That we've seen it before or that it isn't widespread doesn't mean that it's not a problem or a sign of a problem.
In what appears to be the source article: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20181018_04/ the arborist clarifies, "this year trees have lost their leaves, stripped off by violent winds or left to wither from salt exposure."
Assuming it's because of global warming simply because it's an unusual environmental occurrence seems to be a popular pattern. Several news sources extrapolate to that as well, along with references to the pattern of earlier spring blooming in DC and Kyoto (more likely attributable to the urban heat island effect, as it started well before CO2-induced warming would have been significant).
Global warming is a large scale and long term problem, and the first thing you would expect is an increase in frequency of previously uncommon events - take warm weather: historically there may have been a few year where the temp got to X degrees, from an average of Y degrees. But now the average Temperature has increased by a small amount. That shifts the entire normal curve of temperatures up. So now instead of X degrees being the 99th percentile (say) it becomes the 90th. The wonders of normal curves and statistics ensures that as small changes accrue the current extremes will rapidly become more common - a 1% increase in average temperature (random Number here) results in a frequency shift of more than 1% for the extremes.
Then we get to the localized vs global issue. Global warming in an average increase in temperature across the world. The world is big, and so there will always be area that are substantially higher or lower temperature than other places, but by virtue of the above statistics over time the high temperature pockets will become larger and more common. The high temperature pockets and the increased energy in the atmosphere increase movement of the atmosphere around the globe - so yes you may also get occasional pockets of uncommon low temperature. that is likely cause by uncommonly “high” temperatures in the cold parts of the world pushing the higher than average cold air into new locations. Over time the average temperature of the cold areas will become “warm”.
Finally, many biological and physical behaviors are purely a function of very specific temperatures. A lot of the biological behaviors (in plants especially) are direct products of physical laws - gas and fluid expansion being most common. Plenty of amphibians have gender determined entirely by temperature - something like 23.4c being the exact cutoff. Water freezes/thaws at exactly 0c - it doesn’t matter how small the difference is.
All of the above is stuff any kindergartener knows.
So in my opinion it's best to cite your own evidence regardless of how accepted your beliefs are by an establishment, rather than just saying the other side has the burden of proof. Whether or not this comes from a pre-curated set of talking points is up to you.
If you want to bring up new evidence and arguments that are not settled then go for it, but asking everyone to post their pedigree to talk about evolution or climate change is just catering to an american audience who is purposefully putting their fingers in their ears - we have no reason to cater to willfully ignorant people.
That said, I'm going to assume that based on your comment, you aren't actually interested in science or anything beyond talking points provided by others.
If you were actually interested in the science of this you would be able to provide studies that haven't been subsequently refuted, or been demonstrated to not actually compensate for the measured effect of global warming.
Solar cycles have been demonstrated to not explain the current changes in global temperature. The impact is not anywhere near fast enough to match current the last hundred years of change.
Random variance doesn't explain it - models for global warming predict increases in extremes of basically all events. Random variance is random so does not explain any changes with a measurable bias.
Conspiracy theories don't explain anything. 1) they're conspiracy theories, not science; 2) they depend on everyone lying about the temperature over time, except everyone agrees on what the temperatures are.
No hypothesis put forward, matches the core predictive ability of global warming theory: global temperature is increasing, as a result of increased CO2 and other pollutants introduced into the atmosphere by human, and human driven industries. This theory predicts increased global average temperature as long as greenhouse emissions continue, it explains ocean acidification, and it explains increased frequency "extreme" weather.
If you have some alternative hypothesis that matches prior atmospheric behavior over the last 200 years, and can also explain the things that global warming does, I'm all ears.
But I suspect you're just either a troll, or a talking point driven internet commenter.
I like how you explain things, very easy to understand. Thanks for the insightful comments.
You see, there is a difference in magnitude and velocity of the warming over the last century that differentiates the current warming to past warming cycles.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001282521... *
There are many more that refute this however:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14845
- https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018...
and it seems to me that current climate science is largely in the "it's human produced C02" camp.
You can search yourself for research at https://scholar.google.com.
* though note that ISTR this paper only revises anthropogenic climate change down to 0.6°C which is still pretty high, and sorry, I can't find a free PDF of this paper anywhere.
There are major examples in both directions here. In the overstating direction, between 2001 and 2010 the warming slowed to 0.11C per decade. [1] For the 17 years before then was 0.17C. Because the models just map past data to future, nobody predicted this. There is of course a matter of long term vs short term. But at the same time, I think it's important to ensure we don't use this as never-fail defensive tool. Everybody missing a decadal long period of dramatic change is something that should not be ignored and I think we've been disconcertingly quick to marginalize.
In the other direction many climate models underestimated the rate of antarctic sea ice melting. This is, paradoxically, then used as a defense of the models. 'See? We were just being conservative. The sea levels are rising even faster than we said!' But this is again a very disconcerting form of handwaving, that also seems to indicate severe bias. Something happening faster than a model predicts is no better than it happening slower than the model predicts. What it means is the same in both cases - the model is broken.
[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-global-warmin...
I don't entirely understand why people are so averse to these data. Do people think they're just fake or something? This does not mean that humanity is not contributing to the current warming trend. But the data show beyond any doubt that warming cycles do, and would happen, even if humanity did not exist.
There were not periods where 'over a few years we saw a bit of warming' - there have been centuries of major warming that increased the ambient temperature of the Earth by ~9 degrees celcius. The most recent warmining cycle, before the one we're currently in, lasted some 20,000 years.
[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Ice_Age_...
The importance of timescales is very simple: evolution requires many generations to adapt, and the larger the change the more generations are needed.
Literally no one argues that there have been no changes in global temperature. That is a straw man.
The problem with human created global warming is that it is much much faster than any prior cycle, and that the mechanisms that are causing it (increased CO and CO2) have compounding ramifications - like ocean acidification - that are causing direct damage to major ecosystems, including the organisms that do absorb CO2. I don’t recall any studies of prior occurrences of this - I would expect that the impact would be gaps in things like the cliffs of Devon, etc where you’d see large scale (global) die offs of more or less all mollusks.
How long of a time do you think would be the minimum to allow for the presumably substantial evolutionary changes that would be required for adaptation? How does this contrast against the warming, potentially upwards of 10 degrees celsius, that occurred some 330k years ago - to say nothing of the sharp increases in CO2 that also followed? In particular, how rapidly do you suppose that warming occurred?
[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Ice_Age_...
Japan's not big, but I mean this is as "widespread" as you can get while still having the word "Japan's" in the title.
Unrelated to that, the regular cherry blossom event has been happening progressively earlier due to climate change. The typhoons and heatwave that caused the irregular bloom were likely influenced by it as well.