Now My Hair is On Fire About Climate Change!

[leftchick]

My Forsythias are BLOOMING and it is F***ING DECEMBER! I have been gardening all of my adult life and I have never seen what is happening to my plants ever happen before. Forsythias on occasion may bloom a little early if the weather warms in February but December? This is just incredible. Also my roses are pushing out new leaves and I imagine the buds are not far behind. My tropicals are behaving as perrenials when they should be annuals in my zone. THIS IS DECEMBER IN ZONE 7!!!

Or it used to be. Kind DUer bloom posted this for me the other day. It seems the Garden zones have all been remapped! I am now a zone 8!!

http://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm

Zone Changes
This animation illustrates the general warming that has occurred from 1990 to 2006. Click the play button to see how the hardiness zones have changed.



I am truly freaking out here. :cry:

[grasswire]

1. daffodils poked their way out of the dirt in November here

they're at least an inch and a half tall. You're right. It's nuts.

[leftchick]

3. we have had seventy degree days for two weeks now

I imagine the trees will be budding soon as well. This is insanity.

[Mojorabbit]

2. Every year I plant tomatoes in the fall

and take a chance of a frost. Right now I am harvesting them and it is a balmy 77 degrees here in fla.
My mango and peach trees are in bloom. freaky.

[MamaBear]

4. Same here.

It was 60 degrees in Manhattan over the weekend. I've lived here for twenty years, and that has happened before.

The newspapers are saying that El Nino is responsible for our mild winter this year, and also for the lack of Atlantic Ocean hurricanes over the summer.

Still ...

Still, I love it when the wealthy out-of-towners are stuck dragging their big fur coats around with them everywhere in the warm weather. Many people won't leave a fur in a hotel room, and some of the entertainment venues won't check them (like, for example, the Metropolitan Opera).

[leftchick]

6. well there is a plus

perhaps the fur trade will dry up?

[MamaBear]

9. LOL

That would be a welcome change!

[RedEarth]

5. Noticed this past weekend, we have blubs coming up....

...that's two months early...

[cobalt1999]

7. We can grow oranges now here in Northern Florida.

Used to be you really didn't get any fruit out of them in this part of the state. Now, our orange, lime, and lemon trees actually are producing. Won't be long before they start planting orange groves in Georgia & Alabama.

[Batgirl]

8. freaking out in Michigan over my lilac bush

which is covered with green buds, some of which have sprouted into green leaves which isn't supposed to happen for at least 4 more months.

And I have a climbing rose that decided a few weeks ago to send out new green shoots that are festooned with new green leaves. Scary.

[Robbien]

10. The US no longer has any Zone 2's and Zone 3's are so scarce

that Zone 3's should be put on the extinction watch list for the US.

[valerief]

11. Malaria and EPA-approved (it's such a joke) DDT can't be far behind. nt

[lectrobyte]

12. Extremely strange weather here in NC. 72 at Christmas? WTF, over.

[Virginia Dare]

13. One of my azaleas bloomed this fall...

it had never bloomed before, and yes, my spring bulbs are popping up as well. I know all of this weather can be reasonably explained by El Nino, but it seems that these patterns just keep getting more extreme.

[leftchick]

14. it isn't just El Nino

this is the one of the scariest threads yet on Climate Change....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x75486

Daisies have been poking though the grass at Austria's St Anton resort. Azure Alpine gentians are blossoming even 3,300ft up, while spring forsythia are giving the valleys an unprecedented splash of colour. And over in the French Alps, fruit trees are already coming into bud.
...
But those wishing to consult the authentic harbinger of Alpine spring will find little consolation. Standing on the Promenade de la Treille in Geneva's old town, it is neatly marked with a plaque declaring it to be the city's "official" chestnut tree.

Every spring since 1818, a special city official has watched the tree (and two of its predecessors) to spot when it puts out its first bud, and solemnly record the date on a special noticeboard in the town hall. It usually falls some time in March, though it has at times crept forward into February. But this year, for the first time ever, the tree burst into bloom in late October - and is still sporting flowers and leaves. Winter appears, officially, to have been cancelled.



:scared:

[GreenPartyVoter]

25. *snap* I was gonna post a link to that too. Scary, eh?

[Virginia Dare]

34. Thanks for the link...

very frightening indeed. I too fear for our future.

[G_j]

15. mine too leftchick

seriously pissed off, have been for a while

:mad:

[leftchick]

16. I am beyond pissed off now

I am truly fucking scared for the future. My children's future. :cry:

[KoKo]

21. I wonder if the "paving over" of the triangle with all the new homes and roads

isn't contributing to the warming trend, too. It's not just emmissions when one looks at how the dark roads absorb heat and the roofs and driveways.

Every place that has boomed that I've lived seems to have problems with plantings. A landscaper once told me that when you build and bring in new plants (some that aren't really native to your area or hybrids) that it takes a long time for the "environmental balance" in the new neighborhood to occur...like decades.... It kind of made sense...

Also...my azaleas are dying one by one....started with the peculiar weather about three years ago.

I know...I can see the changes in the South ....I grew up here and remember when the bees used to be all over in the Summer and the fireflies were so thick on Summer nights that you couldn't see between them sometimes. When the smell of blooms was like perfume it was so strong. ....Not any more. And, the Northeast had it's own problems when I lived there and development took over everything. :shrug:

[Lisa]

27. yes -- there are local changes being observed

There are broad regional and global warming trends superimposed on these, but there's definitely an "urban heat island" effect in metropolitan areas which has resulted in downtown cores being a couple of degrees warmer than outlying rural areas. In a large city, this can speed up things like flowering and leafing by 1-2 weeks! Climatologists like Tim Oke in Vancouver have even mapped the location of urban hotspots. As you say, the lower reflectivity of the paving and roofing materials does make a difference to microclimates. Even suburbs (where the buildings are more spread out and there's more greenspace) are warmer than the countryside.

And as we've seen, when a heatwave hits, those few degrees can make the difference between people living or dying, in the urban cores.

Another thing that paving does is make the surface less permeable. As a result, rainfall tends to result in faster, higher floods than before (all the water rushes off the concrete and asphalt). Not only that, but because the water is whooshing into the storm drains, less of it reaches the aquifer, so the groundwater level starts to drop (also bad for plants).

[KoKo]

29. Does Tim Oke have a book....I'll Google him... Thanks for the info!

I think in concentrating on "emmissions alone" doesn't give enough weight to loss of loss of trees and paving all over the world. One wonders about "wind currents" changing because of this. I think it's interesting how I-95 seems to direct storms these days.

I think Gore touches on this...but not enough because who wants to go after the "Developers/Real Estate/Business Interests" when one is trying to get a message out. You would be nuked immediately.

[Lisa]

30. he does -- a boundary-layer climatology textbook

... which I believe is still the standard for Canadian universities.

It's rather technical but gives a very thorough explanation of the "urban heat island" phenomenon. And he discusses the changing of local wind patterns too (flow dynamics changed by the "canyons" of skyscrapers, and even the circulation due to the urban core being warm enough to draw in air from outside). I believe that there's been quite a bit of work done since then (for example, one grad student I know was doing her MSc research on how to map urban heat islands using thermal satellite imagery). So if you do a citation search to see who's cited Oke's work recently, that would direct you to brand-new reports and papers on the subject. I'm pretty sure there's stuff out there on the effects of urban heat islands on ecosystems.

One thing I remember from Dr. Oke's book is that European cities don't seem to show the effects as much as North American ones. Something about the way they're designed and laid out (more compact?).

I haven't done microclimate work for some time, but I had to read up on heat islands because some of the long-term climate stations I'm using to monitor global warming need their data adjusted to account for the growing influence of cites. (Some of them are at airports, which were out in the boonies in the 1960s and 70s, but are now surrounded by suburbs ... in the case of Ottawa, this has actually made a difference to the city's temperature averages, and knocked it out of first place for "coldest capital city".)

p.s. I've never had Dr. Oke as a professor, but I was astounded that he remembered my name, after meeting me a couple of times at scientific conferences -- and even more amazed that he's so nice (some famous scientists can be like Hollywood celebrities, real prima donnas!).

[KoKo]

32. Great Explanation....thanks for your insight and the reference....

I will definitely look up Tim Oke's work...because Urban/Suburban/Ex-Urban fascinates me... Good to know folks are working on this...because it's a "hidden cause", imho...anyway.

:thumbsup:

[nam78_two]

17. K&R.nt

[kestrel91316]

18. No wonder I can't grow veggies anymore. I am probably

in Zone 10 (Mojave Desert climate) at this point. Sigh.

[YankeyMCC]

19. Somehow I knew

that when it started affecting more and more people's gardens there would be a tipping point of sorts in general awareness and outrage.

And there's nothing wrong with that of course. Yet there are people that are much more deeply effected.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2946168&mesg_id=2946168

[populistdriven]

20. Central FL is being over run by mold and fungus

The moderate winters used to keep it at bay. This crap is eating entire trees alive. You have to cut it down and either burn the stump/hole, bring in clean fill or plant something complete different in it and hope it is resistant.

[leftchick]

31. central Florida

will be the new coastal Florida if nothing is done to try and curb this trend.

[tnlefty]

22. So I was zone 7b and when I hit the play button and the yellow band

shifted it appears that I would now be considered what used to be 7a.

I freaked the other day when I noticed a neighbor's Bradford pear tree is budding because it's only been about 3 weeks since they shed all of their leaves. My crepe myrtles aren't dormant and they're forming leaf buds.

[leftchick]

23. I am waiting for the Bradford Pears to start blooming

another week of this and we will have White flowers on trees for Christmas.

:cry:

[tnlefty]

26. We were out working to clean up the last of the leaves that had fallen

and we also noticed that the weeds that we're usually combating in early spring we were pulling up.

Flies and mosquitoes are still buzzing around in Dec.! Crazy.

[GreenPartyVoter]

24. I've got irises, iceland poppies waking up and johnny jumps that nvr went to sleep. I live in

Maine.

[Dead_Parrot]

28. Well, look on the bright side

At least hair is carbon-neutral, so you're not making things any worse. :)

[Lady President]

33. All of Ohio is Zone 6

I had no idea that there had been an official change in garden zones. I'm 35, and I can clearly remember that the rule in Northeast, Ohio was to never plant annuals until Memorial Day weekend.

How can people not see the changes that have happened in only a couple decades?!? Terribly sad.

[InvisibleTouch]

35. We're Zone 6 now??

Didn't know that either.

My stinging nettles are coming up like it's spring. Of course, it takes a lot to keep stinging nettles down - for people who don't want them, they're a pest, and for people like myself for whom they're medicinal plants, they're wonderfully hardy. But still - they should be dormant at this time of year.