First signs of spring have arrived in parts of south 3 weeks sooner than average | Hacker News Reader

First signs of spring have arrived in parts of south 3 weeks sooner than average

usanpn.org

99 pointsbookofjoe118 comments

One data point means little but:

This is the first time in my life that my Ontarian city has been completely free of snow until late January. We had a bit at Christmas that lasted two days. We had about 10 days this month that stayed above freezing day and night.

Here's several thousand data points from our local meteorologist showing less snow in an average winter now than 40+ years ago:

https://www.woodtv.com/weather/ask-ellen/ask-ellen-did-snow-...

Not many are gonna like this, but if we had to choose, global warming is a “better” scenario than global cooling. No one likes a bad ice age.

I suspect what not many like, myself included, is the unsupported assertion that if not for global warming we'd be entering an ice age.

Why do you consider it unsupported? The temperature going a little up and down over the decades has been used as an argument even by the climate change deniers, i don't think anyone would contest that...?

And it was just starting to go down when the industrialization started, which reversed the the direction within 50 yrs.

I consider the assertion unsupported because it was asserted without support, as if no more controversial than to say that water's wet. Generally, when advancing a heterodox claim, one does well to source it so that interlocutors and audience members can evaluate it on some more substantial basis than whether they feel like taking a stranger's word for it, which around here people mostly (and correctly!) won't.

That really wasn't the alternative.

> That really wasn't the alternative.

The Earth's average temperature has trended up and down for millions of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age with a trend downward.

So I can concede that there are 2 prevailing trends possible. I happen to think that Global Cooling is preferable.

These prevailing trends happen over hundreds of thousands of years. Over two or three centuries, the most prevailing trend so far has been "basically exactly the same as before".

Up in Vermont over the weekend a local gardener I met at a bar told me over the last couple of decades all his planting has moved up a month. Later that night I read an article by a ski industry analyst that revealed that the ski season is generally considered by those in the business to be 34 days shorter than in 1982.

In Alberta we are skiing a month earlier and a month longer than we did in the eighties. Largely due to snow making. I think they could go longer but it's hard to get the crowds once the golf courses open. Sun angle is what melts the snow at any rate. Has more of a bearing than rain or a couple of degree difference in temps from year to year.

Anecdotally I've shoveled snow literally one time this year (and last) and haven't bothered to pull out the snow blower in the last three years.

Within the last month in the US midwest it got below -50 with windchill and over 2 feet of snow

Coldest and snowiest winter where I live in Colorado for many years.

This is what Colorado used to look like in the winter (source native). Also this: http://www.thorntonweather.com/noaa/snow.php

I dunno. I feel like Iowa classifies as the midwest as well and we've had a couple cold days but that's about it.

Funny, I was in Iowa recently and being unable to shower because the pipes froze + decent snowfall was definitely a meme

The areas near the Great Lakes are one of the few places where Global Warming is expected to actually lead to more stable climates. In large part to the cooling effect of the lakes themselves

My friends in Ottawa and Toronto have sent lots of pics of an especially snowy winter this year.

I live in Toronto. It hasn't been that cold or snowy. There have been 2-3 big snows and it's all melted in between

Huh? It's unusually snowless this year. Toronto and area didn't really get anything of any consequence until earlier this week.

It's also about 5-6 C warmer than average, and we keep getting rain. In January.

Too cold - caused by global warming. Too hot - caused by global warming. Spring early - global warming. Spring late - global warming.

My point is you can’t extrapolate a single thing about climate change from a single year nor a single region. Scientists who aren’t trying to get in the NYT agree with this.

The name for these people are “mediaologists” rather than meteorologists.

If everything can be explained by a single phenomenon, even contradictory results, that's no longer science but religion. With science you create a hypothesis and if the hypothesis is contradicted by the outcome, then you have made a discovery.

Saying every outcome is explained by global warming is like saying everything can be explained by God.

If you throw someone over Niagara Falls in a barrel, they will be pressed against the bottom of the barrel and then banged violently against the top. And probably the sides, too. Taking someone from a stable regime to a chaotic, unpredictable regime will produce all sorts of weird results.

If you swallow some plastic explosive and I press the detonator, some atoms will go left, and some will go right.

The fact I can't predict which are which means explosive theory is a religion. So say ahhhh.

An oldie but a good one:

Climate change makes for shorter winters http://www.techtimes.com/articles/95188/20151016/winter-will...

Climate change makes for harsher winters http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/26/global-wa...

Climate change means less snow https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/snowfall...

Climate change means more snow http://phys.org/news/2011-03-global-snowstorms-scientists.ht...

Climate change causes droughts in California http://earthsky.org/earth/has-global-warming-worsened-califo...

Climate change causes floods in Texas and Oklahoma http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-...

Climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places drier… https://www.ncas.ac.uk/index.php/en/climate-science-highligh...

…except when it makes wet places dryer… https://www.ncas.ac.uk/index.php/en/climate-science-highligh...

…and dry places wetter http://mashable.com/2015/10/05/south-carolina-floods-global-...

Climate change causes more hurricanes http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070730-hurri...

Climate change causes less hurricanes http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/05/global-warming-means-...

Climate change causes more rain (but less water) http://www.livescience.com/496-irony-global-warming-rain-wat...

Climate change causes less rain http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040401/full/news040329-10.ht...

Climate change decreases the spread of malaria http://www.nature.com/news/global-warming-wilts-malaria-1.96...

Climate change increases the spread of malaria http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/climate-change-increasing-malaria-r...

Climate change makes San Francisco foggier http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Get-ready-for-even-fog...

Climate change makes San Francisco less foggy http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/7243579/Fog-...

Climate change causes duller autumn leaves http://www.livescience.com/39820-climate-change-fall-leaves....

Climate changes causes more colourful autumn leaveshttp://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/nov/18/thisweeksscie...

Climate change makes for less salty seas http://www.livescience.com/3883-global-warming-sea-salty.htm...

Climate change makes for saltier seas http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/oct/27/climate-c...

Climate change causes Antarctica to lose land ice http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/12/antarctic...

Climate change causes Antarctica to gain land ice http://www.wired.com/2015/11/antarcticas-ice-gains-dont-mean...

Climate change makes the earth hotter… http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/climate/ipcc_feb2007.h...

…unless the earth isn’t getting hotter… http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/04/the-robust-pause-resis...

…in which case climate change can explain that, too. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3155568/Have-...

Roughly half of your links are to junk climate change deniersources like Wattsupwiththat.com and the Daily Mail.

Plus the first one I clicked (Mashable.com) didnt say what you summarised it as.

It's almost as if climate change causes the climate to change!

You know that different places and times are different places and times, right?

Anthropogenic warming is increasing at a non-linear rate. If you are not preparing practically, financially, and emotionally for this fact, you are being myopic. I still hold out hope for fusion-based geo-engineering or radical innovation to battery technology. However, with every day that passes the potential for these solutions seems to further elude us.

When I was a kid in the 90s I had a teacher who was freaking out about peak oil. He was "preparing frantically" for it through extreme measures like not having children.

A few decades out, all those who were too "myopic" to freak turned out to be the winners. Like, if you were too dumb to know about peak oil you ended up making smarter decisions.

I think there's a healthy chance we'll look at our current mindset in a similar way a few years/decades out.

Frankly, I think the tide is already shifting. Even in this thread, enough folks are comfortable to say "just ain't that worried about it" which would have been unthinkable to admit even a few months ago.

> unthinkable to admit even a few months ago

not sure what social groups you spend time in but I'd have guessed the majority of Americans don't really care. While two thirds of Americans think the government should do more to address it. In Gallup polling asking Americans which issue is the most important to them, only 2% put climate change as their top issue. The peak in 2022 was 5%. Also in May:

- the govt/leadership, 19% - inflation, 18% - economy in general, 12% - immigration, 8% - unifying the country, 5%

As someone who's organized climate strikes and protests I am definitely not surprised by these results.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...

I've gone from caring about climate change to complete apathy. The reason for my change in mindset is that I don't want to live in a world envisioned by climate change activists.

A few examples:

1) I want to live in a world where people can fly. I want my children to see the world and experience different cultures.

2) I want to eat meat.

3) I want to enjoy the benefits of concrete.

There aren't any practical methods of achieving carbon-neutral air travel, meat, and concrete (among many, many other things). The changes often proposed by climate activists are to stop flying and eating meat (I don't often see it suggested to stop using concrete because most people realize it's impossible). I don't know what the world will be like if we continue on our path. Perhaps climate change will ruin everything, perhaps it won't be as bad as predicted, or maybe we'll find a solution (e.g. geoengineering) I do know that life without modern conveniences is worse than life today. So to me, the choice is between something that might not have a future vs. something that definitely doesn't have a future.

> 1) I want to live in a world where people can fly. I want my children to see the world and experience different cultures.

If you're worried about future generations you'd want to limit the effects of climate change, which means reducing carbon output. Sending more carbon into the atmosphere now means our descendants will experience more dramatic climate change impacts, and also need to reduce their output even more. Or to put it another way, the more flights avoided now the more flights can potentially be taken in the future.

You could just fly less and eat less meat. Well, at least you're honest in your nihilism, hedonism, fatalism, whatever one would call it. The "this is fine" dog refusing to entertain a world where it's not drinking a cup of tea.

Or, you could fly and eat (and have children) to your hearts content and find out in a few years or decades that all the doomsday predictions turned out to be wrong (or, postponed another few decades again) and come out the winner.

Pretending like that's an option is certainly the most convenient way to go about it.

Could have been said about any prior crisis.

It seems empirically born out that continuing your life and alternating things slowly is the winning strategy, compared to changing everything on a dime because some thing is scaring you at the moment. Is seems that there's always the thing that is obviously going to kill us, that in retrospect, hasn't and just got replaced with the next anxiety.

> Could have been said about any prior crisis.

There is an element of survivorship bias here. The only people around are those who have survived past crisis. So you'll never meet people who didn't plan for a crisis and perished as a result of their lack of planning.

This mindset always catches me off guard no matter how many times I come across it. I can’t think of hardly anything more boring to care about than airplanes and meat and concrete, three things that probably could not change the quality of my life in any quantity in any way but superficially, three things that millions of people currently go without happily. Like what kind of lifestyle do you lead that these 3 things weigh so heavily? I happily minimize my use of all three of those things for even a small chance of making future lives better. I’m always shocked when I read how narrow some peoples spectrum of desires are.

> I can’t think of hardly anything more boring to care about than airplanes and meat and concrete, three things that probably could not change the quality of my life in any quantity in any way but superficially, three things that millions of people currently go without happily.

Just curious, what do you care about?

> - the govt/leadership, 19% - inflation, 18% - economy in general, 12% - immigration, 8% - unifying the country, 5%

Seeing these bullet points listed out explains much of the reason we’re currently headed for some more war in the future.

Humans seem hard wired to believe the world is ending. There is always some Armageddon being expected by large segments of society.

Of course, that doesn't mean they'll always be wrong!

> which would have been unthinkable to admit even a few months ago.

That's more about feeling safe to be publicly seen to dissent. For people's actual beliefs you'd have to look at "revealed preferences" sort of things.

There's a fallacy in assuming this crisis will end like all other crises. Seems like a big risk to take when the planet's ability to sustain civilization is in question.

I agree that it is unlikely to be increasing precisely linearly, but do you have a more specific claim?

It is my understanding that the GCMs in use have many “tunable” parameters some of which are strongly stochastic, the component of the models are coupled, there are feedback loops that are poorly understood—some positive some negative, these feedback loops operate over all possible time scale from minutes to centuries. The systems of differential equations describing the models will not be analytic and worse will have chaotic solutions.

The dozens of existing GCMs don’t agree, but I’m not an expert so I can’t know which ones to trust. Furthermore, expert climate researchers very careers are at stake so there is no effort that I can detect to make all the data sets, source code, and design justifications open in ways to allow inspection by outsiders like myself.

I have worked professionally on environmental models only twice (over 40 years ago). One had the worst code I ever had to review (and I’ve taught CS at the university level!) and the other made simplify assumptions so ridiculous that the results were meaningless.

I used to be able to download pictures of hand written recorded weather station temperature data from 100 years ago. Now, I can no longer get to it from NOAA or NASA websites. What happened to it? (Perhaps, my Google-foo is failing me.)

I think many would agree that climate research is important or even existentially important for humankind. We already fund the research with our tax dollars. Why can’t the research be performed as openly as free software foundation projects? If I’m curious about the kind of LRU algorithm used by the ZFS file system cache, I can just clone the repo and read it myself. If I don’t understand why an Emacs feature has been deprecated, I can peruse the emacs-dev mailing list archive.

I want everyone (and especially those that are climate scientists) to have easy access to the data and climate models.

No miracle technology is needed. Just the will to use the solutions we have.

Solar + wind + pumped hydro + transmission is better than any thermal neutron based fusion generator could ever be, and the toolkit does not end there.

The only ingredients that really need improving are iron nitride magnets and undersea Al cables.

The grossest excesses of the wealthiest 10% need reigning in, but other than that, abundance can exist for all.

Source on that first sentence?

actually seems pretty linear so far (tho extremely steep)

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

But most climate scientists agree there are many runaway effects we're headed for pretty directly like

- the runaway greenhouse effect

- ocean acidification causing the ocean to be less able to take up CO2 (the ocean is estimated to have offset 30-50% of co2 emitted by fossil fuels)

- more droughts -> deforestation -> hotter temperatures -> more droughts, etc

I could go on but you could also just read the IPCC reports. Believe it or not their quite easy to parse even for a layman. They make two versions of them, one for policymakers and one for academics but in my experience the academically oriented reports are actually more readable and useful

https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/

If you want to skip to the most depressing/dooming one check out the 2019 report on oceans and the cryosphere

IPCC reports tell a fairly good story imo. The earth is much greener for instance due to CO2.

There are thousands. Plus, just look around.

That doesn't answer their question.

Your account was one minute old when posting this retort. I think that answers something.

As for curious folks, they're highlighting the text in Q and r-clicking their way to answers.

How does one prepare for this financially? I am at a total loss!

Plants in Dallas are blooming a week or two ago. Given there was the big freeze in December followed by 2-3 weeks of 70s/80s temps, it’s no surprise really. Nature is really trying to bring back the prairie land here, I think we’ve had temps from -10 to 110 over the course of 3-4 month span.

> Nature is really trying to bring back the prairie land here

Quick, better hit it with that Roundup so we can maintain our sterile lifeless landscapes!

Lol, yeah. I tried to plant cold tolerant plants last year. But not all of them took the -20 windchill we got. I tried but there really are no native plants to this region that look very nice. It's mostly grasses and other weed looking plants. I'm looking at what did survive that storm in other peoples yards and that's all I'm going to plant going forward.

You'd likely have more success focusing on your soil health than individual plant species. Soils inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi can hold 50x as much water and plants that make these associations are more resistant to drought, frost, diseases, and pests. Plants are able to send signals to each other through these networks to

It's easier said than done though. Most people think you can just buy a packet of dried mycorrhizal powder and spread it around but depending on your soil it could actually take a year or two before its in a place where mycorrhizal fungi can really thrive. I'd recommend following the rules of ecological succession from a soil science perspective if you're interested. Jeff Lowenfels series (Teaming with Nutrients, Teaming with Microbes, and Teaming with Fungi) are great if you want something that goes deep into the biology, ecology, and biochemistry of it

Wait a week, cold is coming back.

Exactly what I've been saying. It's happened before and all the flowers die early and it's just ugly the rest of the year. The couple of uncommon hard freezes we've had means most plants/landscaping around the city is dead anyways. I just replanted mine last spring and probably lost 60% of it. It's annoying and expensive but what can you do...

In Texas? Push your politicians really hard to reduce CO2 emissions, it's the 9th highest per capita in the USA, and 3-5x higher than wealthy European countries.

I’m just trying to have a nice yard, not solve the world’s problems

Interesting that they use a couple specific ornamental cloned plants as the sources for the data. I was wondering how they gather the data and if aerial imagery is used but it looks like they use observations from a mix of the public and reaserchers. There are some other campaigns focused on different plant phenomena here https://www.usanpn.org/nn/campaigns

One plant surveyed is Chinese Lilac: https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/PlantFin...

The reporting questions are described here: https://mynpn.usanpn.org/npnapps/species/Syringa/chinensis

I live outside Manhattan and noticed today that some of my perennials started to sprout. I’ve never seen them this early in the season. It’s been an incredibly mild winter here. We’ve seen flurries once and the temp has been mostly 35-45f for weeks. I’ve worn my winter jacket only a handful of times.

// I live outside Manhattan

Total aside but I've never heard anyone describe a location this way! Is that a euphemism for 'jersey' or something? :)

I think it means that he is a student at Kansas State University.

Manhattan, KS - The Little Apple.

Long Island. I didn’t want to assume people knew where that was and I wanted to be clear that it was downstate. I know Buffalo has had a real winter and has had tons of snow.

Nassau county, represent:)

Jersey, Brooklyn, or homeless is my guess.

People from Brooklyn will say NYC or Brooklyn

In my part of Montana, we had a record cold April last year. Also had a record cold day this past December, though Halloween was warmer than I remember in years.

Perhaps ChatGPT has something planned for us? Remember Agent Smith's speech from The Matrix?

>I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.

Love the speech like any other nerd, but I must say Agent Smith is wrong about it all.

Mammals do not "reach equilibrium" on their own. Check out some rat infestation videos on farms.

If anything viruses show more moderation. At any given moment we have of various flu, cold etc viruses around us, in our nose, gut, tongue, yet most of the time we do just fine. It is not the "amount" of virus around you that matters.

Not to mention in most parts of the world populations are declining, and rapidly at that. We have probably already passed the peak-child.

For another example, deer without enough natural predators around will end up in massive boom/bust cycles as the population explodes, strips every plant around bare, and then mostly dies off from starvation.

Perhaps they reach equilibrium in the long term. But then again, that's true of any* system given the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

*well, not really any, but close enough.

I mean, aside from a) mammals don't instinctively do anything of the sort and b) it's a movie, consider perhaps also the possibility that c) its writers may not really intend that you subscribe uncritically to a philosophy espoused, in however compelling fashion thanks to Hugo Weaving's brilliant performance, by its homicidal villain?

Animals tend to over time establish stable populations. Humans have devised ways to maneuver nature to move past these constraints, and industrialization has entirely broken them.

Right, because their environment imposes "stability" on them by killing them in various ways. The movie quote makes it sound like the woods are full of deer couples who conscientiously produce 2.1 fawns apiece.

Humans are doing exactly what every mammal would do if they could. We're just the only ones who have succeeded.

In large part because we no longer have any predators, which is the point of Smith's monologue; in the model of the human environment he espouses, he and his fellows are the predators.

"Stable populations" in the sense that they largely have relatively predictable population cycles [1][2] that can be modelled using population dynamics [3]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_cycle

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2404185

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_dynamics

Yeah, it’s a movie

Parts of the country have always had atypical weather, and always will.

Yup. I live in Phoenix and we’ve had freezing or below overnight lows in the past week. This mostly seems to happen the 2 weeks before or after Christmas but here we are in late January. Other years I recall that we’ve had highs approaching 80 in January. It is hard to draw conclusions based on small amounts of data points but every year I see these articles trying to draw conclusions again.

SF Bay Area was especially cold in November/December and then especially rainy until last week.

Every part of the country has variable weather.

If the average temperature today is 5C, that's an average of very cold measures and very warm measures.

It gets to 15C and people say "that's unusual because the average is 5C!". No it's not.

> ... always ... atypical ...

I think you're channeling Yogi Berra

That's the nicest thing I've been told in a long time :)

I wonder how earlier spring will affect different species of plants, animals and insects. Tough to imagine all would be positive or negative.

Possible that hibernating animals would need fewer winter reserves to survive and help some species, meanwhile early spring would mean lower pollination from unadjusted species, therefore lower overall food in nature.

Several empirical cases pointing in this direction also in Europe. Tawny owl chicks quitting the nest to early, and winter flowering shrubs too early or entirely missing this year

Can be a real trend or just anecdotal.

No real difference in Tampa other than colder weather being more frequent than recent memory. The one noticeable difference this year is that the pollen that causes my eyes to itch showed up a few weeks before normal.

Some of my shrubberies thought it was spring back around new year's, and then got all the new leaves and buds whacked when it froze again. It's not that unusual a thing to have happen.

Another relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1321/

Still cold here in North Dakota, the Alabama of the North

The commentary in this thread is downright embarrassing. Singular weather events say little to nothing about climate change. Climate change is real, the science is sound and the evidence is over-abundant.

I have a feeling that singular events are more often picked in favor of climate change?

Same goes with the scientific evidence too: some time series are used while others are dropped in favor of the argument. Or some time series adjustments are problematic as they seem to be intentionally skewed to favor the argument.

And in general, the whole topic is not about facts anymore, just about winning the argument.

People like to talk about the weather.

Good thing we got some of our smartest people working on generative models, the outputs of which are being banned across the web instead of solving intelligence as was the original goal.

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