New USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map for gardeners shows a warming climate
Wintertime minimum temperatures in the U.S. have risen so much in recent decades that the United States Department of Agriculture decided last week to update their Plant Hardiness Zone Map for gardeners for the first time since 1990. The Plant Hardiness Zone Map is the standard by which gardeners and growers can determine which plants are most likely to thrive at a location. The map is based on the average annual minimum winter temperature, divided into 10-degree F zones. Compared to the 1990 version, zone boundaries in the new 2012 edition of the map have generally shifted one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States. This is mostly a result of using temperature data from a longer and more recent time period. The old 1990 map was based on temperature data from only a 13-year period of 1974-1986, while the new map uses data from the 30-year period 1976-2005.
Figure 1. Comparison of the 1990 and 2012 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Maps. Image credit: USDA and Arbor Day Foundation
Northwards, ho!
While humans are generally not attuned enough to nature's rhythms to tell if the climate is changing, plants and animals know the climate is changing. Many species of animals, insects, and plants have shifted their ranges poleward and to higher elevations in recent decades because of global warming. The 2007 IPCC report stated that "numerous studies document a progressively earlier spring by about 2.3 to 5.2 days per decade in the last 30 years in response to climate warming. That report also documented over 400 species that have moved their ranges poleward or to higher elevations because of climate change. For example, conifer trees expanded northwards into former tundra areas at a rate of 12 km per year between 1982 - 2000 in portions of Canada (Fillol and Royer, 2003.) Holly plants moved northwards by several hundred kilometers in recent decades into coastal Norway, Northeast Germany, Denmark, and coastal Sweden in response to warming temperatures (Walther et al., 2005.) As the climate continues to warm, plant and animal species previously unknown in many regions will appear, and will disappear from places they used to inhabit.
Figure 2. Change in the boundary line between conifer forest (taiga) and tundra between 1982 (grey line) and 2000 (white line) over Canada. In the grey box marked "Transect", the rate of northwards migration was 12 km per year, or 228 km (142 miles) in nineteen years. Image credit: Fillol and Royer, 2003, "Variability analysis of the transitory climate regime as defined by the NDVI/Ts relationship derived from NOAA-AVHRR over Canada", Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2003. IGARSS '03. Proceedings. 2003 IEEE International.
Jeff Masters
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Simply incredible, and something I never thought I'd see in my life, nor my kids in theirs.
thanks for the update doc
edit..sounds like everyone is now being told to take the day off. 405 & roads in the area are closed.
Food Crisis as Drought and Cold Hit Mexico
A drought that a government official called the most severe Mexico had ever faced has left two million people without access to water and, coupled with a cold snap, has devastated cropland in nearly half of the country.
The government in the past week has authorized $2.63 billion in aid, including potable water, food and temporary jobs for the most affected areas, rural communities in 19 of Mexico’s 31 states. But officials warned that no serious relief was expected for at least another five months, when the rainy season typically begins in earnest.
- - - - - - - - - -
Nearly 7 percent of the country’s agricultural land, mostly in the north and center, has suffered total loss, according to Victor Celaya del Toro, director of development studies at the Agriculture Ministry.
The drought, which has been compounded by freezing temperatures, has already pushed up the cost of some produce, including corn and beans. The governor of the Central Bank, Agustín Carstens, speaking last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, cautioned that it might cause inflation to rise later this year.
Article...
Release No. 0022.12
Contact:
Kim Kaplan
(301) 504-1637
"This is the most sophisticated Plant Hardiness Zone Map yet for the United States," said Dr. Catherine Woteki, USDA Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics. "The increases in accuracy and detail that this map represents will be extremely useful for gardeners and researchers."
"The new version of the map includes 13 zones, with the addition for the first time of zones 12 (50-60 degrees F) and 13 (60-70 degrees F). Each zone is a 10-degree Fahrenheit band, further divided into A and B 5-degree Fahrenheit zones."
"Compared to the 1990 version, zone boundaries in this edition of the map have shifted in many areas. The new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States. This is mostly a result of using temperature data from a longer and more recent time period; the new map uses data measured at weather stations during the 30-year period 1976-2005. In contrast, the 1990 map was based on temperature data from only a 13-year period of 1974-1986.
"Some of the changes in the zones, however, are a result of new, more sophisticated methods for mapping zones between weather stations. These include algorithms that considered for the first time such factors as changes in elevation, nearness to large bodies of water, and position on the terrain, such as valley bottoms and ridge tops. Also, the new map used temperature data from many more stations than did the 1990 map. These advances greatly improved the accuracy and detail of the map, especially in mountainous regions of the western United States. In some cases, advances resulted in changes to cooler, rather than warmer, zones."
Link
Best to just stop having kids. There's land up there, but most of it is not arable.
Brisbane
Tropical Cyclone 3-day outlook for The Coral Sea
Issued at 2:30pm EST on Wednesday the 1st of February 2012 and valid until end
of Saturday
Existing Cyclones in the Eastern Region:
Nil.
Potential Cyclones:
The monsoon trough extends across north Queensland and the northern Coral Sea
and is expected to develop further over the next few days. A weak low currently
sits over eastern Gulf of Carpentaria waters and is forecast to move east into
the Coral Sea late in the week. The low is forecast to develop further over the
Coral Sea and continue to move east, away from the Queensland coast, into the
weekend. If this low does become a tropical cyclone it is unlikely to have any
significant impacts along the Queensland coast.
Thursday: Very low
Friday: Moderate
Saturday: Moderate
NOTE: The likelihood is an estimate of the chance of each system being a
tropical cyclone in the Region for each day.
Very low: less than 5% Low: 5% - 20%,
Moderate: 20% - 50% High: Over 50%
The area of coverage for this outlook is the Coral Sea and northern Tasman Sea
west of 160E.
click image for loop.
click image for loop.
doesnt somethin in the standards, say something about bickering and carrying on personal disputes? TO A NEW BLOG ???goodbye. POOF
Sounds like the accuracy between the 2 maps are greatly in question....along with all the other Crap we see about GW!
lol
(I am reminded of the cactus walking toward water in 'Rango')
Most of the visible changes in the map are primarily due to changing from 10 zones to 13 zones! Some areas did have a warmer zone, but many actually have a cooler zone. The map only looks warmer because there are more zones, and the colors were shifted "upwards". They could have shifted the colors "downwards" and the media would all be reporting on the "coming ice age" again.
If places north of the current line, aren't frozen tundra anymore, as it might have been in years past. Pollen can fly around(be transported by insects, animals. etc) , and land in new areas of land to germinate and sprout trees.
"Compared to the 1990 version, zone boundaries in this edition of the map have shifted in many areas. The new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States."
Seriously, debate the causes or the effects of climate change, if you wish, but debating the fact that it's happening is beyond silly at this point. The planet is warming, period. And the new zone map has made accommodations for that.
If the new map had only the past 13yr period like the old map instead of a 30 yr period, we would have seen even more shift. I really like the new attention to detail, elevations, using more data to come up with the lines. From a gardener's perspective much improved. Especially around my interest in WNC. There we'd adjust our planting zone to the elevation more. This map way better reflects that. Of my three areas I grow in the SE none changed.
On the subject of gardening..my blog is updated with (besides tropics) the Feb growing info..what days are good to plant by the moon, when to plant what in FL (there is links for some other states in the SE). ECFL..we are planting the good stuff this month.. All beans, cantaloupes, corn, cucumber, eggplant, peppers, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, all squash, tomatoes, watermelon, beets*, carrots, celery*, collards, leek, mustard, parsley, snow peas, potatoes*, radish & turnips*.
Even as the science of global warming gets stronger, fewer Americans believe it’s real. In some ways, it’s nearly as jarring a disconnect as enduring disbelief in evolution or carbon dating. And according to Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman College sociologist who’s studied public attitudes towards climate science, we’re in denial.
“Our response to disturbing information is very complex. We negotiate it. We don’t just take it in and respond in a rational way,” said Norgaard.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared in 2007 that greenhouse gases had reached levels not seen in 650,000 years, and were rising rapidly as a result of people burning fossil fuel. Because these gases trap the sun’s heat, they would — depending on human energy habits — heat Earth by an average of between 1.5 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by century’s end. Even a midrange rise would likely disrupt the planet’s climate, producing droughts and floods, acidified oceans, altered ecosystems and coastal cities drowned by rising seas.
“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future,” said Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, when the report was released. “This is the defining moment.”
Studies published since then have only strengthened the IPCC’s predictions, or suggested they underestimate future warming. But as world leaders gather in Copenhagen to discuss how to avoid catastrophic climate change, barely half the U.S. public thinks carbon pollution could warm Earth. That’s 20 percent less than in 2007, and lower than at any point in the last 12 years. In a Pew Research Center poll, Americans ranked climate dead last out of 20 top issues, behind immigration and trade policy.
Wired.com talked to Norgaard about the divide between science and public opinion.
Wired.com: Why don’t people seem to care?
Kari Norgaard: On the one hand, there have been extremely well-organized, well-funded climate-skeptic campaigns. Those are backed by Exxon Mobil in particular, and the same PR firms who helped the tobacco industry (.pdf) deny the link between cancer and smoking are involved with magnifying doubt around climate change.
That’s extremely important, but my work has been in a different area. It’s been about people who believe in science, who aren’t out to question whether science has a place in society.
Wired.com: People who are coming at the issue in good faith, you mean. What’s their response?
Norgaard: Climate change is disturbing. It’s something we don’t want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it’s not there, and keep it distant.
For relatively privileged people like myself, we don’t have to see the impact in everyday life. I can read about different flood regimes in Bangladesh, or people in the Maldives losing their islands to sea level rise, or highways in Alaska that are altered as permafrost changes. But that’s not my life. We have a vast capacity for this.
Wired.com: How is this bubble maintained?
Norgaard: In order to have a positive sense of self-identity and get through the day, we’re constantly being selective of what we think about and pay attention to. To create a sense of a good, safe world for ourselves, we screen out all kinds of information, from where food comes from to how our clothes our made. When we talk with our friends, we talk about something pleasant.
Wired.com: How does this translate into skepticism about climate change?
Norgaard: It’s a paradox. Awareness has increased. There’s been a lot more information available. This is much more in our face. And this is where the psychological defense mechanisms are relevant, especially when coupled with the fact that other people, as we’ve lately seen with the e-mail attacks, are systematically trying to create the sense that there’s doubt.
If I don’t want to believe that climate change is true, that my lifestyle and high carbon emissions are causing devastation, then it’s convenient to say that it doesn’t.
Wired.com: Is that what this comes down to — not wanting to confront our own roles?
Norgaard: I think so. And the reason is that we don’t have a clear sense of what we can do. Any community organizer knows that if you want people to respond to something, you need to tell them what to do, and make it seem do-able. Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there’s no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.
Another factor is that we no longer have a sense of permanence. Another psychologist, Robert Lifton, wrote about what the existence of atomic bombs did to our psyche. There was a sense that the world could end at any moment.
Global warming is the same in that it threatens the survival of our species. Psychologists tell us that it’s very important to have a sense of the continuity of life. That’s why we invest in big monuments and want our work to stand after we die and have our family name go on.
That sense of continuity is being ruptured. But climate change has an added aspect that is very important. The scientists who built nuclear bombs felt guilt about what they did. Now the guilt is real for the broader public.
Wired.com: So we don’t want to believe climate change is happening, feel guilty that it is, and don’t know what to do about it? So we pretend it’s not a problem?
Norgaard: Yes, but I don’t want to make it seem crass. Sometimes people who are very empathetic are less likely to help in certain situations, because they’re so disturbed by it. The human capacity of empathy is really profound, and that’s part of our weakness. If we were more callous, then we’d approach it in a more straightforward way. It may be a weakness of our capacity as sentient beings to cope with this problem.
Image: Greenpeace/Flickr
“Cognitive and Behavioral Challenges in Responding to Climate Change,” Norgaard’s World Bank white paper.
See Also:
Should Earth Scientists Take a ‘Hippocratic Oath’?
Humans Halfway to Causing Dangerous Climate Change
Climate Change Caused Radical North Sea Shift
9 Environmental Boundaries We Don’t Want to Cross
To except climate change is to except change.
People resist change at all cost.
To except climate change is to except that you and every one else will have to change.
People change only when forced.
So far we have kept the government (we the people, see Citizens United for reference on this) from forcing the change
Looks like it will be nature (or god if that floats your boat) will have to take a shot at some forcing....
who you putting your money on for winning that one?
Whether it stays a little is the worrying part.
21 WxGeekVA "Sadly enough, yesterday in my mothers garden, the first daffodil flower appeared. That's almost two months earlier than they used to 10 years ago..."
The apricot tree went straight from losing almost all of its leaves to budding new ones. Never came close to doing that before. I suspect that bodes ill for its future.
Im going with the Singularity personally.
Granted. Do you have control of the "Off" switch for when it gets warm enough for you? A controlled lab experiment is far different from an experiment in the wild. ... Have you considered getting a greenhouse and not turning our atmosphere into one?
The Future comes with such change that it is immeasurable.
Be Nice to one another.
It's natural, our whole past has led to this moment.
Embrace it.
Why would it stay a little.
I've posted this Link so many times I know it word for word.
How do we know the Earth's climate is warming?
Thousands of land and ocean temperature measurements are recorded each day around the globe. This includes measurements from climate reference stations, weather stations, ships, buoys and autonomous gliders in the oceans.
These surface measurements are also supplemented with satellite measurements. These measurements are processed, examined for random and systematic errors, and then finally combined to produce a time series of global average temperature change.
A number of agencies around the world have produced datasets of global-scale changes in surface temperature using different techniques to process the data and remove measurement errors that could lead to false interpretations of temperature trends.
The warming trend that is apparent in all of the independent methods of calculating global temperature change is also confirmed by other independent observations, such as the melting of mountain glaciers on every continent, reductions in the extent of snow cover, earlier blooming of plants in spring, a shorter ice season on lakes and rivers, ocean heat content, reduced arctic sea ice, and rising sea levels.
And the USDA does not benefit at all for confirming or denying climate change, so they have no reason to make something up or cherrypick data for their own gains.
(Author: Me)
In particular order...
#1)Anthropogenic Warming - #2)Jet Stream Displacement Way North - #3)Severely Reduced Snowpack - #4)Anomalously Warm Temperatures.
Include LaNina / PNA / NAO wildcards
WED FEB 1 2012
SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS RETURN ON FRIDAY AHEAD OF A COLD FRONT
THAT WILL MOVE THROUGH THE REGION DURING THE DAY ON SATURDAY. A
FEW OF THESE STORMS WILL BE STRONG WITH GUSTY WINDS AND FREQUENT
CLOUD TO GROUND LIGHTNING. WE ARE FINALLY INTO A WET PERIOD THAT
WILL SEE THE CHANCE FOR SHOWERS INTO MONDAY.
Ok, only til Monday but I'll take it. :)
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