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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
by binarymax 5mo ago
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.
- lysace 5mo agoAnecdotes like that with a 1 year horizon.. that's what we call weather. A 1,200 year time series.. that's definitely in the climate area.
- BobbyJo 5mo agoWeather can be due to climate, and time series are composed of anecdotes.
- lysace 5mo agoKey words: can be Longer time series are indeed composed of many samples/anecdotes.
- tshaddox 5mo ago> time series are composed of anecdotes 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.
- billfor 5mo agoIf you go back a few million, that's also climate. We're still in an ice age. https://www.climate.gov/media/16817 https://www.climate.gov/media/16817
- b112 5mo agoI'd trust such data a lot more, from any other source.
- t0bia_s 5mo agoIt's about trust anyway.
- b112 5mo agoWeird that there are any downvotes. The current administration in the US, spent its first few months literally pulling down and replacing data on US government websites. These included many categories of scientific data, including most especially climate data. HN was literally in an uproar, some users were trying to back up data. And yet now we see people posing such questionable data from US government websites? Please. No output from the US should be trusted at this point. It's all ideologically tainted.
- altcognito 5mo agoLonger 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.
- sandworm101 5mo agoClimate 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.
- jfengel 5mo agoThe 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.
- lysace 5mo agoThe single visible data point is interesting, as an illustration Seriously…
- edbaskerville 5mo agoInterestingly, 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? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens%27s_theorem
- dylan604 5mo agoWe 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".
- lotsofpulp 5mo agoThat 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.
- altcognito 5mo ago(And prop 13, and a lack of will to build new housing) for additional reasons housing is expensive in CA
- timr 5mo ago> A 1,200 year time series.. that's definitely in the climate area. Superficially, sure, but this is not a good dataset for any climate related argument. Cherry trees live about 100 years under optimal conditions, so you’re talking about multiple generations of trees here, with significant adaptation and selection along the way (humans heavily influenced the development of these trees, and the current “standard” tree for cherry blossoms in Japan is actually a hybrid first created in the 1700s). In short, even if you set aside measurement reliability and consistency over time, this dataset is heavily confounded. As an aside, you’ll note that the primary change is that the lagging tail of the distribution is pulling forward (i.e. the distribution is getting narrower) not that the distribution overall is shifting forward. You can find trees blooming “this early” many hundreds of years ago, just not as often as now.
- adriand 5mo agoBut wouldn’t that be true for all periods in the dataset? You see ups and downs over the centuries, and in each of those centuries I’m sure humans heavily influenced their evolution. Then you see a pronounced upward trend that just happens to also coincide with what we know to be serious, sustained and highly unusual planetary-wide warming.
- timr 5mo agoSure, but it doesn’t matter. Confounding means that there’s an uncontrollable factor in the analysis. You can’t just assume that the uncontrollable factor is the same over all measurements in the dataset. Just to illustrate the point, the trend you’re describing (which you haven’t correctly described, but I digress) could be due to warming, or it could be due to selection in favor of earlier blooming varieties in the last generation. You can’t know which explanation is true, so you can’t draw conclusions.
- IG_Semmelweiss 5mo agoCould it be the incoming "strongest of all time" [1] el nino weather pattern that is expected this year with high probability ? Usually it is only the eastern pacific is mostly severely impacted, but maybe there's a correlation [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/23/down-to-earth-super-el-nino-extreme-weather https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/23/down-to-...