We have a cherry blossom tree. It bloomed a week earlier than last year. We’re not in Kyoto but I did notice and it’s a bit strange. I also noticed some other blossoming trees that typically bloom for about a week, went green after 3 days.
And human civilization entirely sprung up during it, all of our nations, our cities, our pastures, our lives are built on the ice age. We need to start cooling the world down and we're doing the opposite
Longer periods can be called paleoclimate. As you may have noticed, most types of humans did not exist in previous climates, and we are unfamiliar with the conditions of those time periods, much less if we were to bring them upon ourselves in a period of time that isn't even capable of being shown on the chart you've chosen to use.
I'm just clarifying parent comment that "1200 years of data is climate" by saying that longer periods also are climate data. I could have posted a graph of the holocene as well (I don't know that it would materially change my point).
I made two points. The other was that we are in an ice age.
Normally, discussions of climate refer to the last 12k year interglacial period as having come out of an "ice age". You're using the broader geologic term referring to any presence of any polar ice cap as an "ice age", which would cover the last 3 Million years. So what you're saying is that in the 300k years homo sapiens have never existed outside of an "ice age" and that the our speciation (eg in savannahs of Africa) was driven by the many glaciations of this current Ice Age? Even homo habilis hasn't been around that long.
That's saying that since the continents and earth's currents haven't changed, we're in the same age, AMOC is a minor technicality, and the oceans would need to rise to the straight of Panama to be significant.
No, climate is based on consistent weather data over a long period. Across long enough periods the underlying assumptions that make climate a meaningful thing to talk about fail due to orbital mechanics etc.
Plate tectonics for example shows you can’t even assume an area’s latitude is consistent, just look at the fossil history of Antarctica. Humans have dumped so much carbon and methane in the atmosphere even 100 years ago was quite different.
It very much reads like you feel like you need to offer those particular points here to try to diminish concerns about global warming informed by the 1200 year Kyoto cherry blossom record. Is that not the case?
- The climate has *always* changed. It’s been warmer. And yes, it’s been cooler. There is nothing abnormal about the climate changing.
- There is actually very little scientific proof that the current up tick, is human-made. Yes, there’s correlation with the Industrial Revolution, but that’s all it is atm, correlation. There’s little verifiable proof. It’s speculative. It’s a theory. Yes, there’s overwhelming consensus, but that’s still doesn’t make it fact. And consensus has been off target plenty of times in the past.
- “The science” isn’t always as fact / truth based as it would like us to believe. Scientists are human too. Egos, career aspirations, groupthink, jealousy, etc. The scientific method is a stunning standard. Unfortunately, it’s implemented / executed by humans, flawed humans.
There’s three sources exemplify #3, of course there are others.
While the climate has always changed and there's nothing abnormal about that, it has never, ever changed anywhere near so radically in such a short period of time; the rate is what's abnormal. XKCD has a fantastic visualization of this:
So pair that with the correlation with the Industrial Revolution/increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and with the verifiable scientific fact that carbon dioxide works to trap heat...and surely you can at least see why there's overwhelming consensus, right? What would compel you to operate as though this isn't the most likely explanation for the unprecedented rate of warming we're seeing?
We better hope we're the cause of the warming, because then we conversely have a shot at slowing it or stopping it. If we are incapable of causing a change of this magnitude, then the actions we are taking to slow the change would likely be ineffective too, in which cause coming generations are in for a world of hurt.
As such, it always strikes me as bizarre when people question human contribution to climate change without by extension freaking out far more about the urgency of taking drastic action.
A better time range would be the average species lifespan of the plants and animals we eat. Too short a range highlights noise; too long a range highlights unrelated data.
We say the same thing about southern California. When the forecast is the same for 350+ days out of the year, that's not weather, that's climate.
I say that as someone from Texas that lived in LA for several years. Texas weather changes by the hour and this time of year it is advisable to keep an eye on it. In LA, you could go weeks without checking the "weather".
That does not make any sense to me. SoCal is famous for having stable, comfortable weather (and hence its high land price). Some places have volatile weather, some places have more consistent weather.
This is incorrect, and is a very common misunderstanding of what the term "anecdote" means and what the actual problem with anecdotal data is.
The dichotomy is between "anecdotal evidence" and "scientific evidence," and the important distinction is not that the latter simply has more data points than the former. The critical distinction is about the methodology used to gather the data, not merely the number of data points gathered.
Climate is also dimensional. Kyoto is a point. A point over time is a line, a line through a 3d set of data. That a single point is seeing an effect is interesting but not as significant as widespread changes. Only when multiple measurements create a 2d map of realtime data, which becomes a 3d bulk over time, should we draw conclusions. Sadly, that is also happening. But the later should be the topic of conversation, not a single very visible data point.
The single visible data point is interesting, as an illustration.
It doesn't prove climate change one way or the other, but that is a discussion that ceased to be meaningful decades ago. Climate change is real, it is significant, and it is caused by humans. Further arguments about that are a (deliberate) waste of time.
Having accepted that, and dismissed the time-wasters from the conversation, we can look around for things that we notice. One of them is the way it affects the times that trees bloom, giving us an opportunity to discuss the way that affects other aspects of the ecosystem.
That, in turn, helps inform conversation about just how important the consequences are. Unlike the fact of climate change, it's not obvious how much the consequences matter to us, and what should change to avoid them. That is a conversation worth having, but it has been impossible while we're still listening to people reciting decades-old falsehoods.
Interestingly, if you have one-dimensional observations f(t) of a k-dimensional strange attractor, the lagged vector time series [f(t); f(t - tau); f(t - 2 * tau); ...; f(t - (k - 1) * tau)] maps onto the full k-dimensional attractor. Specifically (as I check Wikipedia) it's a diffeomorphism, an isomorphism of differentiable manifolds.
Presumably the earth system isn't at anything resembling an attractor right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are trying to use related techniques to try to detect qualitative changes in the system dynamics (like bifurcations).
Maybe someone more knowledgeable could chime in on whether/how measurements at a single point on the earth's surface might be used to do that?
I had visited to see the cherry blossoms in 2017 and felt that we were going too early but actually made it for the peak. It’s scary how quickly the dates are shifting.
I wonder what impact the earlier blooms have on the trees over the coming years, as this does not seem to be natural.
A dataset curated by humans, spanning over a thousand years, is awe inspiring on its own. The first person to record their observation must have had no idea what they started. Are there others like this?
It's entirely possible that modern horticultural techniques are resulting in the trees going dormant earlier, accumulating the required chill hours, and then breaking dormancy earlier. It's quite likely that the care of the trees has changed substantially from 1900 onward.
My fruit trees bloomed later this year. It has been a cold spring in my corner of the Midwest, colder on average and we are dropping below freezing the next few nights :(
Don't worry though guys, climate change isn't real. /s
1200 years is a serious timescale, I think humans generally struggle reasoning about long durations or very vast distances. Which leads to them instead postulating how all these other more present, more recent and nearer things can be to blame when what you really need to do is zoom out (in space and/or time).
If only we had a plausible hypothesis that covered not only early blossoms in Kyoto, but hundreds of other observations in climate all in the direction of a rise in global temperature, be it in urbanized areas or in remote regions like Antarctica or glaciars... Damn scientist, they might be sleeping or something.
If these events where random noise then they would distribute in both sides of the climate models; We don’t observe that. Events only seem to match or be worse than expectations.
A 1,200 year time series.. that's definitely in the climate area.
That's saying that since the continents and earth's currents haven't changed, we're in the same age, AMOC is a minor technicality, and the oceans would need to rise to the straight of Panama to be significant.
Plate tectonics for example shows you can’t even assume an area’s latitude is consistent, just look at the fossil history of Antarctica. Humans have dumped so much carbon and methane in the atmosphere even 100 years ago was quite different.
- The climate has *always* changed. It’s been warmer. And yes, it’s been cooler. There is nothing abnormal about the climate changing.
- There is actually very little scientific proof that the current up tick, is human-made. Yes, there’s correlation with the Industrial Revolution, but that’s all it is atm, correlation. There’s little verifiable proof. It’s speculative. It’s a theory. Yes, there’s overwhelming consensus, but that’s still doesn’t make it fact. And consensus has been off target plenty of times in the past.
- “The science” isn’t always as fact / truth based as it would like us to believe. Scientists are human too. Egos, career aspirations, groupthink, jealousy, etc. The scientific method is a stunning standard. Unfortunately, it’s implemented / executed by humans, flawed humans.
There’s three sources exemplify #3, of course there are others.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-has-there-been-so-littl...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosau...
https://longevity.stanford.edu/how-the-sugar-industry-shifte...
https://xkcd.com/1732/
So pair that with the correlation with the Industrial Revolution/increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and with the verifiable scientific fact that carbon dioxide works to trap heat...and surely you can at least see why there's overwhelming consensus, right? What would compel you to operate as though this isn't the most likely explanation for the unprecedented rate of warming we're seeing?
As such, it always strikes me as bizarre when people question human contribution to climate change without by extension freaking out far more about the urgency of taking drastic action.
I say that as someone from Texas that lived in LA for several years. Texas weather changes by the hour and this time of year it is advisable to keep an eye on it. In LA, you could go weeks without checking the "weather".
This is incorrect, and is a very common misunderstanding of what the term "anecdote" means and what the actual problem with anecdotal data is.
The dichotomy is between "anecdotal evidence" and "scientific evidence," and the important distinction is not that the latter simply has more data points than the former. The critical distinction is about the methodology used to gather the data, not merely the number of data points gathered.
Not all anecdotes are scientific data points, but all scientific data points are anecdotes in isolation.
Longer time series are indeed composed of many samples/anecdotes.
It doesn't prove climate change one way or the other, but that is a discussion that ceased to be meaningful decades ago. Climate change is real, it is significant, and it is caused by humans. Further arguments about that are a (deliberate) waste of time.
Having accepted that, and dismissed the time-wasters from the conversation, we can look around for things that we notice. One of them is the way it affects the times that trees bloom, giving us an opportunity to discuss the way that affects other aspects of the ecosystem.
That, in turn, helps inform conversation about just how important the consequences are. Unlike the fact of climate change, it's not obvious how much the consequences matter to us, and what should change to avoid them. That is a conversation worth having, but it has been impossible while we're still listening to people reciting decades-old falsehoods.
Seriously…
Presumably the earth system isn't at anything resembling an attractor right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are trying to use related techniques to try to detect qualitative changes in the system dynamics (like bifurcations).
Maybe someone more knowledgeable could chime in on whether/how measurements at a single point on the earth's surface might be used to do that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens%27s_theorem
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/climate/japan-cherry-blos...
It was sad when I checked some time ago how many ancient Japanese companies have closed in tbe last 50 years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721771
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811668
1200 years is a serious timescale, I think humans generally struggle reasoning about long durations or very vast distances. Which leads to them instead postulating how all these other more present, more recent and nearer things can be to blame when what you really need to do is zoom out (in space and/or time).
My average comment quality is pretty terrible, but these are on par.
Urban heat islands, which are 1-7 degrees warmer [1].
[1] https://www.rff.org/publications/explainers/urban-heat-islan...