[binarymax]

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.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

Could 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-...

[lysace]

Anecdotes 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.

[billfor]

If you go back a few million, that's also climate. We're still in an ice age. https://www.climate.gov/media/16817

[crowbahr]

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

[stinkbeetle]

The population explosion of the 20th century, and our modern way of life in general, has been powered almost entirely with fossil fuels. The lives of everybody living today and all our societies including 3rd world ones is built on coal and petroleum. Except the North Sentinel Island people.

It will not be possible to keep things going they are, no matter what actions or inactions we need or should take.

[ZeroGravitas]

We can make cheap modular energy capture devices in robotic factories now.

Things will not stay the same anymore than they could when people found oil.

[stinkbeetle]

People have been claiming for at least a quarter of a century that coal was dead, killed by much cheaper renewables. Today, we will consider ourselves very lucky if we have only just (i.e., in 2024-25) passed global peak coal. All those people and "experts", wrong. Repeatedly and totally wrong. Why? There must have been terribly bad data, bad models, bad economics, or bad assumptions they had been using. I have heard very little in the way of acknowledgement about that or any effort to find and fix the root causes of such failures. Are today's claims still coming from these same flawed approaches?

And it's not just coal of course. Coal was the proverbial canary in the proverbial coal mine because it was supposed to have been killed off long ago. But there's gas and petroleum and we are a decade from global peak carbon even by presumably the same kind of wildly optimistic / flawed projections.

And just passing peak carbon is not the goal. 1990 level carbon emissions were considered catastrophic and we're nearly double that now. Getting it down to well below those levels is just so uncertain and such a long way out that nobody really knows what that will take or how long it will be.

Making solar panels in Chinese coal powered factories doesn't just magically fix everything. Just like it didn't 25 years ago when they said it had killed coal.

[altcognito]

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.

[billfor]

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.

[kurthr]

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.

[Retric]

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.

[wk_end]

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?

[billfor]

Yes I am diminishing the case of global warming about the tree. The tree they kept records of 1200 years ago is not the cultivated one seen in many parks now. That tree is about a million years old. Article just says "Kyoto’s cherry trees", which would include the old and new ones. Importantly, the new cultivated ones bloom earlier.

This could be a case of trying to make a climate argument, when the underlying data is more nuanced. Maybe we should just say it's nice the trees are blooming earlier.

[chiefalchemist]

My understanding is three-fold

- 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...

[wk_end]

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:

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?

[vidarh]

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.

[chiefalchemist]

Simple enough… share links to the science that thoroughly proves what you’re saying. “Al Gore said it, it must be true,” isn’t going to cut it.

As for the “never ever”, that’s another assumption. The climate record over the looooong term simply is not that accurate.

Of course, there is a fair amount of correlation and circumstantial evidence, but parroting that as absolute fact and causation does make it scientific. There is a lot of “telephone” on this issue. Those using hundreds of years or even thousands should be met with skepticism.

To clarify: I agree 100% that the climate is changing. It always have. Unfortunately, the rabbit hole of proof is not that deep. Most of “proof” is based on consensus and groupthink dictated by “the experts.”

[adrian_b]

The argument that tries to belittle the current warming by pointing that in the past there have been times when it was warmer, does not have any value.

Besides the fact that a much lower temperature than in the past can do a lot of damage to the present-day beings that are not adapted to such temperatures, those higher temperatures from the past had been stable for long periods.

Now, when such a higher temperature from the past will be reached, there is no guarantee that the warming will stop there.

The greatest danger of the current warming is that, if we do not do anything about it, nobody can currently predict with any certainty that it would stop at a still acceptable temperature, matching a temperature from the distant past, instead of continuing towards even higher temperatures.

[rafram]

As a human, I do tend to mostly care about the period of the Earth's history that has allowed humans to exist. I'm sure the Mesozoic was nice, but I wouldn't want to live there!

[tardedmeme]

Apparently humans can't survive outside of an ice age, then. Maybe we shouldn't end it prematurely.

[tbrownaw]

Have we ever actually tried?

[guizadillas]

I actually live in a city that usually gets over 50 degrees Celsius for weeks and we pay a LOT on energy just to keep the A/C on. I don't think it is sustainable for the whole world and I'm afraid of what will happen here once we reach higher temps.

[tardedmeme]

Yes. You can try right now, in the Sahara desert

[red369]

Central Europe looks like it would have been lovely!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial#/media/File:...

The linked picture is just an artist's interpretation, not a photo, and I assume you were mostly joking too. I think we agree that it's not a good idea to hurry in warming the planet.

[rationalist]

A steamy, stuffy jungle without airconditiong might be a more appropriate example.

[tbrownaw]

I don't think the local plants and animals there match what used to be typical around the world prior to our current ice age.

[biophysboy]

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.

[shiandow]

Okay? Let's keep it that way then I suppose.

[b112]

I'd trust such data a lot more, from any other source.

[b112]

Weird 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.

[IIsi50MHz]

Perhaps they take issue with "_any_ other source". I agree that U.S. govt data is now suspect, but there are far sources. Maybe an s/any other/more reputable/ would be accepted?

[b112]

Mayhap

[t0bia_s]

It's about trust anyway.

[timr]

> 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]

But 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]

Sure, 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.

[dylan604]

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".

[lotsofpulp]

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.

[altcognito]

(And prop 13, and a lack of will to build new housing) for additional reasons housing is expensive in CA

[BobbyJo]

Weather can be due to climate, and time series are composed of anecdotes.

[tshaddox]

> 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.

[BobbyJo]

I think you are inverting things.

Not all anecdotes are scientific data points, but all scientific data points are anecdotes in isolation.

[tshaddox]

No, that's precisely the common misconception that I'm referring to.

[robocat]

Science isn't only frequentist

[lysace]

Key words: can be

Longer time series are indeed composed of many samples/anecdotes.

[sandworm101]

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.

[jfengel]

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.

[lysace]

The single visible data point is interesting, as an illustration

Seriously…

[edbaskerville]

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens%27s_theorem