Well, the way things have been the last few years, it doesn’t seem surprising. Climate change has indeed already hit New England pretty hard:
Average winter temperatures in New England have risen 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970.
Lakes in northern New England are thawing eight days earlier than they did in 1970.
There are 15 to 25 fewer days when snow is on the ground in New England, compared with 1970.
Lilacs bloom four to five days earlier than they did in 1965.
This, of course, is very bad news for winter tourism, at the very least. We learn these facts in reference to Ed Markey’s trip up to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, taking some congresscritters with him. I’m actually glad that global-warming-denyin’ old cuss James Sensenbrenner is with him, and talking to actual scientists:
“When talking about global warming, there is a lot to think about locally, but if we act, we must do so globally,” Sensenbrenner said. He said there have been other warming and cooling periods in the last century and asked Wake if the warming could be natural, rather than man-made.
Wake said that was unlikely. The warming trend in New England began around 1970s, the same time that temperatures started rising worldwide. A consensus of scientists attributes that global increase to emissions of heat-trapping gases from power plants and cars.
Good for Sensenbrenner for asking questions. Maybe he’ll come around.
I’ve lived nearly half a century in New England, and until the late 90’s, the leaves would start to turn in the 3rd or 4th week of August. We’d get a couple of cold nights and the softer woods would just flame out – birches, maples, etc would go orange and yellow by the beginning of September.
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Watch for it this year – it won’t even begin until the 2nd week of September, and it seems to be getting later every year.
Using our own lifetimes as yardsticks for climate analysis doesn’t seem to be a very accurate measure. A bit better data (but still a drop in the bucket) is available here.
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Forget carbon — look at annual average wind speed!
That’ll help a little bit. Every little bit counts, and we’ve got to try to do more and more “little bits.”
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Then, click on the image below, and sign in, and report those CF bulbs to the counter:
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Now the politicians will flock to biofuel. It looks as if some very important people think it can make money. Lookey Here
with other information on the professor’s website As I read the average temperature chart it seems that the average temperature rose less than 2 degrees from 1900 to 2000 from 43.9 degrees to 45.7 degrees. It has risen 1.4 degrees in the past 30 years. It seems to me that the professor’s work has been grossly overstated in the article.
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It is weather and climate. It either has to go up or down. Everyone is freaking out about a warmer world, what would happen if we were in a cooling trend? 18,000 years ago New England was a mile under the ice. Not good if you want to attract venture capital. The overall warming trend since that time has served us well.
We are no longer under a mile of ice. Continued warming therefore presents a different set of possibilities, like, say, flooding. You think that’ll be a problem?
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Average winter temperature, Joe.
the average winter temperature statistic. It is misleading to cite that stat and not refer back to the overall numbers. The fact is that the situation is not as dire as some would make it seem.
Globally, temperatures have been rising since the early 1800s. There have been some periods in which global temperatures leveled off or were even reduced, but those can be explained by, for example, volcanic activity or sulfate aerosols that were injected into the atmosphere primarily from power plants 1945-75, but the increase has been pretty much inexorable since 1975.
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The idea that 18,000 years ago New England was a mile under the ice is relevant to whether the MA seacoast might be inundated by seawater is pretty much misplaced. Increases in temperatures in the New England region won’t cause a rise in sea level, because there is no permanent snow and ice. Increase in temperature where the permanent snow and ice has been–the North Pole, Greenland, Alaska, Antarctica, even Switzerland–can.