- 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.
- 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-...
- 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.
- If you go back a few million, that's also climate. We're still in an ice age. https://www.climate.gov/media/16817
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- The trees are unambiguously blooming earlier because of climate change.
- 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...
- 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.
- >> then the actions we are taking to slow the change would likely be ineffective too.
Many countries are taking steps which are mitigated by many developing countries who rely on cheap energy to grow and build out of their third world status.
So yes, on the one hand a lot of countries are doing something but will it ever be enough to counter other countries continuing to pollute at unprecedented levels? I don't know.
- Look at the climate record, what leads you to believe this isn’t natural and we should have a chance to “reverse” it.
- In this very thread, two posts up, the direct parent of the comment you're replying to, I gave you a link to a visualization of the climate record and asked you to look at it, and pointed out that the sudden and unprecedented rapid rate of change since the Industrial Revolution is precisely what leads us to believe this isn't natural.
You responded by insisting (without evidence) that "the climate record over the looooong term simply is not that accurate". And now here you are telling someone else to "look at the climate record", the climate record that shows precisely what they're saying, the very same climate record you cast dispersions on moments ago, hoping to somehow trick them into not believing their own lying eyes. You're not operating in good faith.
- I have, and the dramatic change correlating with the rise of human release of co2 makes it highly improbable that it is natural. But as I said: If it somehow is natural we're far more screwed so we better hope it isn't, because if it is natural the cost and resource impact to protect us against the effects would be far more brutal.
- It's almost certainly caused by man as all of the evidence suggests that it is. But if it's not, that's a much more serious problem since if it's some unknown natural phenomena we probably can't do anything to stop or slow it from happening and we don't know how hot it will get or how quickly. Maybe humans have triggered a yet to be discovered tipping point and there's no stopping it.
Some reports are already saying that global warming is progressing faster than predicted... maybe we're on an exponential slope to higher temperatures and don't know it yet.
- 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.”
- "the experts"
You mean those who have dedicated their careers to learning the science and studying the various evidence and using that as a base of reference?
Who would you cite otherwise?
Those providing the alternate view to "the experts" all seem to be seriously lacking in any related qualifications. Politicians, radio personalities, fossil fuel industry lobbyists, marketers, advertising executives. They're all pundits, they're not experts, they literally don't know what they're talking about.
If you believe everything, or even most things, those various groups tell you, well, I'm not sure how to help.
- > Most of “proof” is based on consensus and groupthink dictated by “the experts.”
Ah of course, because the 'experts' are tainted by 'groupthink' any 'rebuttal' made by armchair internet warriors must therefore be absolutely true.
- If anyone were to share a link, you'd doubtless say it isn't thorough enough.
Can you give any thorough scientific evidence as to why we should consider this unprecedentedly fast change normal?
- > To clarify: I agree 100% that the climate is changing. It always have [sic].
Did anything I said imply that I didn't recognize that? There's no need for you to clarify, I was very clear myself that I was responding to your lack of understanding about the nature of the changing climate.
The XKCD comic I already linked shows you the climate record for the past 22000 years; you can see with your own eyes that the rate of change since we began burning hydrocarbons on an industrial scale, particularly since the year 2000, has been precipitous and looks like nothing that's happened in the entire history of humanity as depicted. Maybe you missed it - it's a little subtle - but the comic already lists its sources on the side. At a high level, they determine the climate record by examining things like tree rings and ice cores; if you're curious, those sources are happy to explain their methodology in detail. Beyond that, do you have a specific reason for casting doubt on those sources?
So let's see - going back to my comment, I pointed out the climate appears to be warming up faster than ever before; I (well, XKCD) has given you sources for that. You yourself acknowledged that there was a correlation between the warming climate and the Industrial Revolution, but I suppose we need a source for the correlated rise in carbon dioxide. Here's a graph from climate.gov using data from NOAA, ETHZ, Our World In Data, and the Global Carbon Project. If you visit each of those sources (which are linked to from the graph) you can then drill down and how they themselves synthesized it (as we know, that's how science works).
https://www.climate.gov/media/12990
Finally, I guess I asserted that carbon dioxide traps heat. Here's a paper from 1856, where a simple experiment demonstrates the effect:
https://www.risorsa-acqua.it/PDF/eunicefoote.pdf
So at this point we have evidence of a phenomenon (the planet suddenly warming much faster than before, per the XKCD visualization and its sources) and we have a demonstrable mechanism (the warming effect of carbon dioxide, per Eunice Foote's experiments circa the mid-19th century) matching our data (the increase in carbon dioxide, per NOAA and ETHZ and Our World In Data and the Global Carbon Project) that solidly explains it. That looks like science to me. Further skepticism without any contradictory evidence and you're just getting into poor epistemology frankly, and I'll just have to start throwing around metascientific ideas like Occam's razor and Russell's teapot and post-critical logic. You keep demanding more "science", but what does that actually look like to you? You look at the entire scientific community (who you scare quote as "the experts") and their body of work and mindlessly dismiss it for not being "scientific" enough. It's a rhetorical feint, not genuine intellectual curiosity.
To be honest with you, I haven't even seen An Inconvenient Truth myself. Have you? Does Al Gore just come on-screen and assert things, or does he give explanations for you to ignore? Sources for you to ignore?
If my tone is short, it's because it's both frustrating and amusing to be treated with such airs of intellectual condescension when at this point the evidence and consensus for anthropogenic climate change is so strong. When everyone who's devoted their life to understanding something says you're wrong - even if you think you may actually be right! - it'd probably be better to argue from a position of humility, because the odds are very good that you are in fact wrong. As Carl Sagan said: they laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
A few years ago I was walking through Queen's Park in Toronto and saw a Flat Earther accost people with the same sort of arrogance. Most laypeople walking through the park on a sunny weekend afternoon, it turns out, couldn't tell you off the top of their head about how we know that the Earth is round; whereas Flat Earthers performing a stunt are more than prepared to tell you why they know that the Earth really is flat. And I guess there's something valuable about court jesters making people aware of how much common sense they take for granted, but that doesn't make them any less worthy of ridicule.
- Apparently humans can't survive outside of an ice age, then. Maybe we shouldn't end it prematurely.
- Have we ever actually tried?
- 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.
- Yes. You can try right now, in the Sahara desert
- 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.
- 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.
- A steamy, stuffy jungle without airconditiong might be a more appropriate example.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- Okay? Let's keep it that way then I suppose.
- I'd trust such data a lot more, from any other source.
- 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.
- It's about trust anyway.
- > 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- (And prop 13, and a lack of will to build new housing) for additional reasons housing is expensive in CA
- Weather can be due to climate, and time series are composed of anecdotes.
- > 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.
- Key words: can be
Longer time series are indeed composed of many samples/anecdotes.
- 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.
- The single visible data point is interesting, as an illustration
Seriously…
- 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?
- Looks like this has been true since about 1960.
- 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?
- If you liked that you might find tbe lost of oldest companies interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
It was sad when I checked some time ago how many ancient Japanese companies have closed in tbe last 50 years.
- Interesting that the top 5 is all Japanese companies. Any reason why this is? They didn’t experience the dark ages like Europe did (just a very wild guess) ?
- The times had a little story relevant to this recently:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/climate/japan-cherry-blos...
- You mean like the Egyptians keeping records on the constellations?
- Yes exactly. Like the Mayan observatory that could only have been built after tracking celestial events over many years:
- Japan did the same with tsunami records.
- And the world changes away from oil- all it takes is two wars. With one third to come, because the world kept regions economically afloat with energy subsidies for oil, which can not be stable without that.
And with that global warming, we have a nice little buffer against events that could cause a rapid cool down. Exterior caused like asteroid strikes and interior caused like regional nuclear exchanges. And nobody asked us, nobody consulted us, nobody explained anything to us and we land incredibly well with local minimum hell. The Delusional people deluding themselves about human nature can even continue to delude themselves further.
Its a disaster, but of all the worlds and all the disaster, its the best disaster.
- 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.
- This title is not true, they are blooming earlier than the earliest average.
The nature of an average is that it smooths out peaks.
- Trees often bloom based on the surrounding climate and conidtions. Warmer bursts in early spring lead to early blossoms.
- 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 :(
- All across the northern US. We didn't have a single leaf on the trees until the last few weeks here in the northeast.
- It's been a very warm and early spring here in Michigan.
- So it's a reformatted version of: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/date-of-the-peak-cherry-t...
- 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.
- Good lock with that denial it's surely must be due to anything but the super obvious thing that science is warning us about and all data points to.
- this ^^^^ not to mention modern fertilizers
- Now this is climate science I can get behind.
- 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).
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- Really disappointing first parse of the comments.
My average comment quality is pretty terrible, but these are on par.
- Many factors in this. Heat islands from urbanization in Kyoto, different species bred for earlier blooming, etc.
- 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.
- Im sure you're aware that the record of global average temperature is also influenced by urbanization as well as "data adjustments".
- > influenced by urbanization
Urban heat islands, which are 1-7 degrees warmer [1].
[1] https://www.rff.org/publications/explainers/urban-heat-islan...
- I'm sure that is the reason antarctic sea ice is melting from below: https://nypost.com/2026/04/28/science/rising-oceanic-heat-is...
/s
- Is the "etc" here "because of human greenhouse emissions, the earth is rapidly warming"?
- 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.
- > The signal is local to one species
- lo heat, why doth thou radiate? from your islands; blooming species differently...
- Global warming or global climate change? No mainstream media is talking about it now.
- 1200 years ago Kyoto was a small village. Not it is 3 million city with lots of concrete and asphalt. Cities are usually hot spots unlike small villages.
So what have changed?
- same goes for famous Prague weather station Klementinum, now in concrete heat island obviously with higher average temperatures, they use to show long term trends
these comparisons are meaningless, you really need weather station in middle of nowhere (in nature away from people) for hundreds of years to get accurate readings for comparison
335 points by momentmaker 16 hours ago | 97 comments
