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Japan's cherry blossom 'earliest peak since records began'
- wodenokoto 6y agoThe updated headline “Japan's cherry blossom 'earliest peak since 1409'” does not match the article headline nor the article content. The previous headline on HN “Japan's cherry blossom 'earliest peak since 812'” matches both article headline and content. Until this year, the earliest peak was in 1409, but this year is not only the earliest peak since then, but the earliest peak ever recorded since 812.
- soperj 6y agoSo previous record was in the 1400s, and was one day different. If this is directly tied to climate change then what was the cause then?
- antasvara 6y agoI like to think of this from a statistical perspective, where climate change makes the mean peak bloom come earlier in the year. However, there are lots of external factors that can affect peak bloom date as well. If you look at the graph in the linked article, you'd see that there's a wide variety of different peak dates even in the 1400's but that the overall trend is towards earlier in the year as we get closer to present day.
- soperj 6y agoThere's been 2 peaks in March since the year 2000, and one was on the very last day of March. This is clearly an anomaly. If the article was about mean peak bloom then I wouldn't really have anything to say about it.
- aeturnum 6y agoClimate does fluctuate and there is randomness. When you look at the tend you can see how the line has recently taken a dramatic turn. The takeaway is that we've seen these conditions once in the last 1200 years, but based on recent data we expect things to continue to get hotter. As I saw someone say: don't think of this as the hottest year on record, think of this as the coolest year for the rest of your life.
- scaladev 6y ago>think of this as the coolest year for the rest of your life As someone who had to suffer through −40-45°C winters all my life, I can live with that. I don't know if it's due to climate change, but this winter was pretty tame. Only a few −40°C days in total, not three to four weeks as it always had been previously.
- klyrs 6y agoIn urban northern Canada, this sounds pretty great. Rural parts are facing a significant challenge, because ice roads are freezing later, and thawing earlier.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoWhat do the ice-road places normally do in the summer? Freezing later and thawing earlier implies that freezing and thawing were expected anyway.
- klyrs 6y agoIn the summer, the only way to get deliveries is by air. In the winter, shipping is relatively cheap because of the ice roads. Folks try to minimize those costs by not shipping in the summer, only shipping in the winter. If the winter is shorter, these delivery opportunities are reduced. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1863922243701 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1863922243701
- cloverich 6y agohaha yes living north could become more tolerable. But don’t forget that also means the more centrally located people will all be moving that direction soon.
- smiley1437 6y agoAssuming you are not just trolling, random fluctuations are expected to create the occasional outlier. The difference is the steep trend in the past 150 years.
- Alupis 6y agoOK, but do we have more data points for these cherry blossoms, or just the one the article is pointing out? How do we know this isn't another random fluctuation for cherry blossoms? Could it be global warming? Sure, but we need to be careful with our confirmation bias.
- sueders101 6y ago>do we have more data points for these cherry blossoms Yes, the article includes a nice graphic showing the "peak bloom day of the year". It shows that average peak bloom date has been getting steadily earlier in recent history.
- throwaway5752 6y agoObviously. It will continue to break that record for the rest of the century. We have unchecked global warming. For example, this article about it from just 4 years ago shows an obvious trend: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/04/07/japans-cherry-blossoms-are-emerging-increasingly-early https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/04/07/japans-c.... This year's peak is just below the bottom of the chart (March 26) in the Economist article. The Osaka University chart in the linked BBC article shows just how abrupt and accelerating the trend is in the last 150 or so years, and real changes in the last 10. We are all in real trouble. edit: whoever you are can brigade and flag my posts, but it won't change anything.
- aceon48 6y agoLol ok so there was global warming in 812 for the early bloom or what? Some things just cycle.
- aphextron 6y ago>"Some things just cycle." What are local maxima?
- wtallis 6y agoThe article makes it clear that 812 is merely the extent of the historical record-keeping, not that 812 had a remarkably early peak. The article also includes a graph that illustrates no obvious cyclical behavior over that time span.
- throwaway5752 6y agoI'm sorry that you don't understand means, statistical distributions, or standard deviations. Your "gotcha" is a self-own in that regard. Or, by all means show some evidence that the evidence in the linked article (Osaka U publication) is tied to any cycle. I am willing to just look at it with my own lying eyes and see an abrupt trend that begins in the mid-nineteenth century. That visual evidence in addition to the mountains and mountains of data, theory, research and proof behind global warming that agrees with what is plainly obvious are convincing to me.
- ecf 6y agoAt first I thought there was a typo and the article meant 1812. But no. They really mean 812. As someone in their late 20s, I don’t see how the future of Earth in another half-century is anything but bleak.
- the-dude 6y agoPlease, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon. When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain. Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole. I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
- haltingproblem 6y agoGood points. Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the 1970s for the 80s, updated to the 90s then the 2000s and so on and so forth. Galactic gloom and doom is probably written into our genes which is why it makes its way into almost every western religion. Armageddon. We need to balance our natural proclivity for gloom and doom with plausible scenarios like pandemics, asteroid strikes, obesity epidemic, population declines instead of fantasy one that never come to pass or ones we have no control over.
- the-dude 6y agoIn the 70s we would all freeze to death due to a new ice age. Thanks for the heads-up.
- titzer 6y agoNo scientist ever seriously suggested this. At most they pointed out that a new ice age was coming...on schedule. In a couple thousand years.
- haltingproblem 6y ago
- mrb 6y agoIt's interesting that in the chart we even see an expected peak around 1600-1700 that correspond to the Little Ice Age period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age (colder weather = late cherry blossom season)
- shakezula 6y agoWhich seems to shore up the hypothesis here a little bit more. The Little Ice Age is a really interesting phenomenon to me in terms of climate study. We really take the stability of our climate for granted. I'm sure future generations will not have that luxury.
- tasogare 6y agoMore time to the beach, less energy spent on heating, easier crops farming, embrace the decline.
- jagger27 6y agoDon’t forget to also embrace the more frequent and devastating forest fires, droughts, floods, and extreme weather!
- i_haz_rabies 6y agonot to mention worsening air quality, ocean acidification, rising ocean levels, and massive loss of biodiversity!!
- pmiller2 6y agoNot to mention the collapse of global civilization!
- nemo44x 6y agoI do wonder for some of these disasters, like forest fires and floods, if they’re caused in large part by humans settling in more places. Not caused by the people settling and developing those areas but by virtue of settling places where these things happen and thus becoming a disaster because people are there.
- Brendinooo 6y agoIf you didn't read the article, the headline could be misunderstood: records have been kept since 812, and the previous record was in 1409. As an aside, it's pretty incredible to have 1200 years of data for this.
- titzer 6y agoHeadline could as well be read "Earliest peak since records began in 812".
- spoonjim 6y agoEveryone knows that all “world records” are only since record keeping began. The difference is that in the US that means about 200 years while in Japan it means more than a thousand.
- blondie9x 6y agoSo many world records involving the climate have been broken in recent years. Is there still hope left for our planet? I was in the ocean a few months back and the water was calm, the sound of the waves was peaceful. The beach was beautiful. But there was a problem beneath the surface. Plastic everywhere. Pieces of it broken down throughout the water and when I exited the water it was all throughout the sand as well. I walked up the entire beach and plastic was everywhere. Throughout such refined sand. I hit a low that day. Sometimes I lose hope, I'm just not sure we will be able to right our course towards sustainability and minimalism in time to avert climate disaster and this sixth mass extinction in the anthropocence. I just hope one day when I'm old I will not lose the sakura blossom festivals altogether and that posterity will still be able to enjoy the tranquility of a new spring.
- scarmig 6y agoNot quite. Oftentimes we use proxies for historical data. For instance, you might look at the composition of annually stratified sediments to get a sense of climactic and environmental conditions. This gets us approximate but reasonable estimates of e.g. the temperature, but can't really be said to represent a "record." Even for cherry blossoms, they put off pollen, so you could probably do something similar. It'd be tricky to get a fine enough resolution (I'd be impressed if you could even get estimates as specific as month-level). Though the millenium of data would be awesome for verifying the proxy.
- dukeofdoom 6y agoFor whatever reason, fruit trees are really ascetically pleasing. I suspect because humans have been selectively breeding them for so long. Interesting bark, flowers, leaves, and colourful tasty fruit. I think they are remarkable achievements of human innovation. Cherry blossom trees no longer produce edible size cherries just flowers. But I noticed how much longer cherry blossoms last on the West coast, which I believe is due to longer cooler summers.
- yongjik 6y agoI once read an excerpt of a Portuguese priest's report about his travel to Japan in Edo period - there was a remark about how exquisitely beautiful Japanese gardens are, and how much the Japanese care about them. Then he says no garden had any fruit trees, because the Japanese considered such trees utterly unworthy of their attention. Like European lawns, apparently these gardens had to flaunt total lack of practical benefit, like peacocks' feathers.
- jolmg 6y ago> considered such trees utterly unworthy of their attention. That doesn't read like wanting to flaunt lack of practical benefit. Might it not be more about fruit trees and non-fruit trees requiring different forms of attention? Like having to clean up after possibly-sticky, rotting fruit, etc. You can't rake fruit like you would with leaves. If anything, non-fruit trees seem more practical.
- yongjik 6y agoI'm paraphrasing from memory, but the priest made it clear that the Japanese considered fruit trees unworthy of their garden, not just "requiring different maintenance." (Well, of course, I don't know how fluent the priest's Japanese was, so there might be a game of telephone occurring here ...)
- ekianjo 6y agoFruit trees would also attract all sorts of animals and you probably don't want that if you manage a garden.
- pvaldes 6y agoThey talk about a wild prunus Prunus jamasakura. I didn't knew the species, seems okay But what most gardeners today are culturing is not so much Prunus jamasakura as Prunus serrulata, that are complex hybrids from several cherry species. This mean that any comparison with USA data would be useless for example. When an hybrid or lots of hybrids arose, contamination and eventually replacement of the pure species is expected. In a few centures the species change or even are replaced by the hybrids. (For example, finding a wild pure-blood japanese Chaenomeles currently is mission impossible). So my first question would be, how they managed that problem? Are they registering a mix of several hybrids, that moves the average up or down because some in particular are trendy or forgotten? Could be that and explanation to the final part of the curve? A similar plot could made us conclude (wrongly) that the corn is getting much bigger in the last 1000 years "by climate change", instead because people selected more modern varieties of corn. Just an neutral opinion.
- throwaway5752 6y agoActually a really good point. This is just a correlation with an imprecise causal link, even if global warming is clearly the most likely factor. Direct observations of the warming over centuries are direct proof of climate change, in addition to proof in ice cores, tree rings, and sedimentary deposit patterns (among others) of prior rates of change being much more gradual.
- onetimemanytime 6y agoIt could be a coincidence but honestly if we see too many of these records, it may, actually be a forest.
- mrow84 6y ago> A similar plot could made us conclude (wrongly) that the corn is getting much bigger in the last 1000 years "by climate change", instead because people selected more modern varieties of corn. Surely this conclusion would only make sense if we believed that relevant climatic changes were occurring over the same time frame as the changes in size. In the case of the cherry trees, the shift in the full-flowering date corresponds very well with the shift in the local temperature record (also provided at [0]), lending credence to that being the explanatory factor. Other factors are, of course, possibly relevant, but I don't think that the link is as weakly founded as your counter-example suggests. [0] http://atmenv.envi.osakafu-u.ac.jp/aono/kyophenotemp4/ http://atmenv.envi.osakafu-u.ac.jp/aono/kyophenotemp4/
- trynumber9 6y agoThat's awful. A longer growing season. Truly, we will never be able to accommodate such radical changes.
- godmode2019 6y agoI would like to see the cluster of locations they said Hiroshima was the location for the early bloom this season. I don't imagine the early records had every city in the country. Maybe the main two cities. Sample variance would increase over time. Also what us the age of these trees given the history of Hiroshima. The source paper states urbanisation in the title, but its not mentioned in the BBC article. Also the trend reversal happened around 1800 which is well before most people talk about the human effects of industry.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoI do not understand the data in this article. Do all these trees bloom in unison? The scattered data seems to suggest there is variance between individual trees? If there is variance, then how is decided what the start of spring is and at what point the tree as a collective species blooms?
- jfengel 6y agoThey all bloom within a few days to a week of each other. The variance is due to local conditions of sunlight, temperature, etc. The entire process is quite sharp: it goes from nothing to stunning blooms to empty in the space of a week or so. For normalization, they measure the "peak" bloom, the day with the most trees in blossom at once.
- minikites 6y agoIt astounds me how people who are otherwise intelligent and who understand the scientific method don't believe in anthropogenic climate change. It doesn't fill me with a lot of hope for the future, since we can't begin to work on this problem at the scale we need if so many of us don't think there even is a problem to begin with.
- godmode2019 6y ago'intelligent' people question everything. Lay people accept information without question.
- elif 6y agoIntelligence can better be described as finding the right middle, rather than adhere to either of your hyperbolic extremes. "questioning everything" is to forego basic levels of knowledge upon which higher levels of understanding must be built.
- triceratops 6y agoAnd yet the people who question climate change never question why so many people want to believe (and others to believe) it's not real.
- mistermann 6y agoI'm one such person, and I am rather fascinated with the topic of belief formation in general.
- loopz 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
- jariel 6y agoThe chart shows a trend over the last few centuries towards earlier blossoming, but it definitely precedes Co2 levels and actual temperature changes. Which is interesting.
- fomine3 6y agoAt the same time, higher CO2 level is reported. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210330/p2a/00m/0sc/023000c https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210330/p2a/00m/0sc/02...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- prometheus76 6y agoNo one is mentioning calendars, and that calendars haven't been consistent enough for 1200 years to make the claim being made in the article. Here are a couple of articles I found that show that the claim of knowing that this year's cherry blossom is "one day earlier" than one in the 1400s is pretty difficult, if not impossible, to substantiate. https://web.archive.org/web/20070402230356/http://www2.gol.com/users/stever/calendar.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20070402230356/http://www2.gol.c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar
- luming 6y agoit's taken into consideration. it's not difficult to recalculate the dates. it's been done for most other anniversaries for historical events.
- prometheus76 6y agoWhere did you find their process for recalculating the dates? The Japanese calendar was lunar and calculated locally until the 1600s in some areas, all the way up to the 1800s in other areas. How did the researchers line up the dates in the journals to astronomical data? How can they assume that when a Japanese journal said "first day of spring" that they actually meant the astronomical first day of spring, for example? I'd like to see the methodology the researchers used, but I didn't find anything in their paper about it.
- bgee 6y ago> The Japanese calendar was lunar and calculated locally until the 1600s in some areas Isn't the Japanese calendar Lunisolar and borrowed from China? (from the wikipedia link you posted above)
- prometheus76 6y ago"After that, Japan calculated its calendar using various Chinese calendar procedures" also from the wikipedia article. This is all just illustrating my point further.
- yourmom2 6y agoAwful lot of denialism on this thread, hackers...
- reddog 6y agoWhen a tree blossoms is due to its temperature and the amount of light its "seeing". Tree genetics is also a factor. Couldn't this early blooming trend be due to the huge increase in night illumination? I've certainly see tree's bloom time screwed up when they grow near/under strong night lighting.
- xnyan 6y agoEven among very smart people, there is a incredibly powerful desire to reject over one hundred years of data and analysis and grasp for something, anything at all, other than the horrible reality that the most likely cause of sudden changes in the cause and effect photosynthesis cycles of all plants on our world is most likely caused by human-emitted hydrocarbon molecules into our atmosphere. In other words, maybe all the water pouring into our boat was caused by something other than than the gaping hole in our hull, but the primary focus is likely going to be patching that hole before investigating possible alternative causes when a very ready explanation is right in front of us.
- reddog 6y agoSo, in other words, you don’t know either.
- cloverich 6y agoThe simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
- golemiprague 6y agoThe fact that there is a hole doesn't mean it was human made
- Proven 6y agoBecause Bitcoin! Late March is not too bad.