> The 2012 USDA hardiness zones were calculated using the average lowest winter temperature for the observation period of 1976-2005. The new zones are calculated using the years 1991-2020. These two observation windows overlap. Colors show the difference between the two 30-year averages for each place on the map.
So while climate change may or may not be the explanation for broader trends in the map, you cannot rule out noise for any particular location, especially given that the methodology uses the lowest winter temperatures in that window as the basis for the zone. That's a fundamentally noisy metric. For example, this drops the blizzard of 1978 -- one of the largest ever in US history -- from the dataset. It's hard to know how that affects the zones without careful inspection, but major weather events like that can easily affect simple outlier analysis. You can see this in the dot plots for Raleigh (the default), which had two outliers in the winters around 1995, and then an otherwise flat series of data. What was the prior dataset? We don't know. Just look at the two default examples:
It would only take a small number of cold or warm winters to shift those means in either direction.
I don't want to overemphasize a silly little article about plants, but IMO, the fact that NPR buried this information while hyper-focusing on specific locations is just another failure of basic journalism. Telling people that an arbitrarily defined metric has been changed is meaningless, unless you tell people the specific change that was made. It should be the first or second thing they tell you, not buried in a hidden footnote.
I appreciate data skepticism, but your point about the 1978 blizzard doesn't really help, as blizzards and snow events in general are not generally associated with extreme cold events.
Also, the site tells you about the changes in whatever place you plugged in. I'm not clear on why you're calling this "hyper-focusing on specific locations". It's literally telling you what's going on in your neighborhood and gives good reasons to even then discount the new number.
Unless you're seeing a wildly different website than I am, this is a strange definition of "up front and clear".
But just to belabor the point a bit, if I were a journalist covering this, my lede -- the very first paragraph of the story -- would be something like this:
"Recently, the USDA updated its plant hardiness map for the first time in 11 years. Among other changes, it based the definition of winter temperatures on data from 1991-2020, dropping data from 1976-1991 as part of the update. This resulted in a calculated increase in lowest winter temperatures in many locations across the United States."
Simple. Factual. Unbiased. Provides necessary context. It isn't that hard to be a good journalist here. I hesitate to speculate, but my suspicion is that this was buried because it weakens a narrative that the writers and editors were trying to achieve, by adding nuance.
Look at the Raleigh graph - there are a few outliers, but the average (the one number being reported) is right in that cluster of flat years. And that's what's apparently gone up 5°
There is always going to be information lost when you condense 30 years into 1 number, but you are "pushing a narrative" far more than they are
For Raleigh (new zone high 8a, almost 8b) there are three winters in the low end of the "previous" zone of 7b in the last 10 years. For St Louis (new zone 7a) there were two winters in zone 6b and one in 5b (!) in the time since 2013. There were an equal number of winters in the "old zone" of 6b and the "new zone" of 6a in the dataset shown. Even calling that an outlier is stretching the definition of the term! And I didn't cherry-pick these examples...these were the ones NPR chose to highlight.
This isn't "pedantic". It's a basic understanding of statistics and the methods being applied here.
This was a time period in which scientists actually improved these technologies and practices, and we stand on the shoulders of that progress. They were doing the best they could with what they had.
Geocentrism was also well on the way out 300 years ago.
My point is mostly that people in the past did some great work, and having weird beliefs didn’t diminish that. People in the future will think we were similarly clueless for all kinds of reasons. You just do the best you can with the information and environment you’ve got.
The part about measurements is fair (they weren’t standardized at the time), but the rest is irrelevant. The decision of whether or not to use data should be on the basis of its scientific rigour and veracity, not the scientist’s beliefs.
Climate Instability sounds sort of clearly bad (I think most people consider instability bad).
For solutions I’m in favor of really aggressive carbon taxes and sanctions/secondary sanctions against that don’t implement them. But that’s the sort of thing better left to regulators and diplomats.
My thought process was: Climate change is mostly bad, but it sounds like a sort of neutral, or even natural process. Environmentalists have done a good job pointing out that it is bad, but the name isn’t doing them any favors. Instability seems to be one of the major side effects and instability is very obviously bad.
I guess I’m curious if there’s a “pro-fixing the problem” argument against “climate instability.” By default I’m going to assume that I’m mostly being downvoted by climate deniers. But I’d be happy to be educated otherwise, if there’s a real argument against calling it instability.
Climate change feels euphemistic compared to climate instability. Like, all things change, so it's chill, right? I like "instability" because it feels like the time of chaos and contempt that the scientific consensus tells us we're facing.
But... then I realize I'm wordsmithing a problem. While rhetoric is important and all, I think many of our current issues get over-talked and under-actioned. I don't know that the wording is significant relative to other barriers to bringing about change.
I don’t love “climate change” because it sounds too euphemistic, IMO. But the wording isn’t the biggest problem anyway. A
nd it has solid associations at this point.
Human factor here: Sometimes, change can be a good thing. You don't hear that instability can sometimes be a good thing.
The term is often misattributed to Luntz, but it existed before him.
I think instability sells it better to someone who is not sure if they believe in climate change because they can personally see it (worsening hurricanes, worsening cold snaps, hotter days).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40344698
I think the responses were reasonable. I’m still convinced Climate Change is not a very good name, somebody suggested Climate Crisis which just sounds better in every way. But anyway, the name is not the most pressing part of the whole thing.
Even where I am it’s considered a temperate climate and a friend’s grape crops were almost totally destroyed from a snap freeze in late February. He said it wasn’t that uncommon for the freezes to happen when he started, but what changed is how early the vines start budding, like you mentioned.
Late-starting crops can bypass this problem, but my understanding is that they often need irrigation because they grow into the tail of summer. That’s not really viable here either, as water’s gradually diminishing from our extended drought.
In the last 5-10 years we struggle to even get on the ground until mid-May. This year is no exception. May 13th already and we have only half of a field planted so far.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mcdougall-cr...
the whole area is actually surprisingly dry in terms of rain due to being in the rain shadow of the mountain. the lakes nearby make it tolerable, but even a small shift in climate patterns will turn the area into a near-desert.
And yet just after that in 2021 we had temps drop to 0°F or slightly negative. In each of the subsequent 2 winters we've also had temps drop lower than anything shown on this graph :)
* https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/20/533662790...
* https://www.azfamily.com/2023/07/20/how-extreme-heat-can-imp...
Air is no longer dense enough:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_altitude
* https://skybrary.aero/articles/density-altitude
* PDF: https://www.faasafety.gov/files/events/NM/NM07/2023/NM071202...
Can you do that with temperatures not in kelvin (with true zero)?
1 to 4 degrees Celsius is not a 300% increase in anything but the integer representing temp. Try that in Fahrenheit or with a negative value.
Edit: I think I initially missed your point that percentages are kind of silly to use anyway.
Well, technically any absolute scale: Kelvin is the most common, but Rankine has the same feature. (It just uses Fahrenheit-sized degrees instead of Celsius-sized.)
Our problem during winter storm Uri is that the Texas electrical grid almost failed and we had to power for nearly a week in subfreezing temps.
For the last 8 years or so, ~April 20th has been very safe. I usually pick the first weekend after ~April 15th, which doesn't have an overnight low under 38 on the 10 day forecast. Haven't had an issue yet.
Thankfully some of the stores are starting to break the "rule", because for a long time it was impossible to even get plants before Mother's Day.
I'm guessing that the lawn itself is incidental, and by not mowing you're letting flowers (including dandelions and clover?) grow?
Also, I'm gonna be up front about my ulterior motive: I hardly mow my lawn anyways and would love to have another reason to justify / rationalize what I'm already doing :)
But still - genuine question.
There's debate about how effective it is, but that's the theory at least.
The perfect lawn is a relatively new thing - blame Scott lawn and other lawn-care companies.
This year, this year the day before Mother's Day saw a hailstorm that decimated much of our cold-weather early crops (arugula, peas, spinach etc.)
For example, every +0C day in the winter leads to snow melt. The total amount of snow collected per winter depends highly on the number of +0C days in the winter. Your average temperature might only go from -11C to -10C, but if there are 20 additional +0C days, you might end up with a lot less snow cover.
4.5 degrees warmer since when? And where?
About this data
The 2012 USDA hardiness zones were calculated using the average lowest winter temperature for the observation period of 1976-2005. The new zones are calculated using the years 1991-2020. These two observation windows overlap. Colors show the difference between the two 30-year averages for each place on the map.
My area is 3.8F warmer using this method.
The George W. Bush administration (e.g. via Frank Luntz) advocated for the term "climate change" because Republican strategists wanted to leverage perceived uncertainty about global warming as much as possible.[0]
This is a PR effort that seems to have largely succeeded (both in adoption and its goals) and it's unfortunate that when we are literally talking about warming we adopt a term that is less precise; you are talking about global warming here.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.c...
It's conflating two things, Luntz and Republicans at the time did want to push a narrative of uncertainty surrounding greenhouse gas emissions and they wanted to switch terminology in a pro-environmental move because of the existing connotations surrounding global warming and "environmentalists" made it hard to get any Republican support.