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There have been 3 updates to the zones in the past 50 years. Some of the updates are due to better accuracy after years of collecting data, but the 800-pound go
by taylodl 2y ago
There have been 3 updates to the zones in the past 50 years. Some of the updates are due to better accuracy after years of collecting data, but the 800-pound gorilla in the room is climate change. Where I live, winters are 4.5 degrees warmer. It has definitely affected my gardening.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago> Where I live, winters are 4.5 degrees warmer. 4.5 degrees warmer since when? And where?
- angry_moose 2y agoThe map has an explanation: About this data The 2012 USDA hardiness zones were calculated using the average lowest winter temperature for the observation period of 1976-2005. The new zones are calculated using the years 1991-2020. These two observation windows overlap. Colors show the difference between the two 30-year averages for each place on the map. My area is 3.8F warmer using this method.
- playingalong 2y agoFWIW they likely mean Fahrenheit. I.e. 2.5 Celsius.
- taylodl 2y agoYes, I did. 4.5 degrees Celsius would be a newsworthy increase in winter temperatures! :)
- voisin 2y agoWhere I am at, in the Canadian Rockies, the daily temperature this winter was routinely 7-9 degrees Celsius above average (1970-2020) according to my iOS Weather app. They introduced this feature last year and I have been checking it nearly every day. Other than a cold snap in January (that killed my bees!) the weather was warmer every single day.
- taylodl 2y agoYou're hitting on another issue we gardeners are noticing - overall the temps are warmer, causing things to bud early, but there are still cold snaps. The cold snaps aren't any colder than they should be for the time of year, the problem is the inter-snap days are a lot warmer. This increased variance in temperature is actually worse than the average temperature getting warmer.
- angry_moose 2y agoSame here. The longstanding "rule" for my area is "no planting before Mother's Day!" For the last 8 years or so, ~April 20th has been very safe. I usually pick the first weekend after ~April 15th, which doesn't have an overnight low under 38 on the 10 day forecast. Haven't had an issue yet. Thankfully some of the stores are starting to break the "rule", because for a long time it was impossible to even get plants before Mother's Day.
- jvm___ 2y ago"No mow May" to save the bees/over-wintering insects - is now almost impossible as you'll have more than a foot high of regular lawn grass before June 1.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoI already have foot-high grass in places. Ask me if I care :-)
- MikeTheGreat 2y agoGenuine question: how does not mowing your lawn helps bees / insects? I'm guessing that the lawn itself is incidental, and by not mowing you're letting flowers (including dandelions and clover?) grow? Also, I'm gonna be up front about my ulterior motive: I hardly mow my lawn anyways and would love to have another reason to justify / rationalize what I'm already doing :) But still - genuine question.
- angry_moose 2y agoMany insects lay their eggs in the grass which hatch in early spring. By mowing early you may be destroying all of these eggs before they hatch. There's debate about how effective it is, but that's the theory at least.
- jvm___ 2y agoAlso any sort of wildflowers let the bees eat an easy first meal before everything blooms.
- georgeburdell 2y agoSame. Blueberries, which require a certain number of chill hours, are perhaps the most affected
- Salgat 2y agoClimate change is rough here in Austin TX because it's getting hotter, but we're also getting more extreme spikes in freezing temperatures. There's a whole slew of plants and trees that can't survive here because of how cold it gets for only a couple days a year. It's not uncommon to lose something like a Palm tree due to one cold day out of the entire year.
- bee_rider 2y agoMaybe we should start calling it climate instability instead of climate change.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoIf the reliable granular data is 100 years or so, and the core samples are known to be lacking granular indication… how a you prove that the spikes and dips are atypical?
- lesuorac 2y agoEh, try like 300 years at least; you can get data from 1662 to now easy from NOAA. Governments love to collect data about mundane things; you could probably get a larger archive from a country that existed prior to 1781. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoYea, I’m not sure we can rely on 1 degree of reliable resolution for when people believe in unicorns, dragons, a geocentric universe theory, and when the Celsius scale was not when water freezes at zero and boils at 100.
- lesuorac 2y agoSo you don't trust data from 2024; got it.
- llambda 2y ago> but the 800-pound gorilla in the room is climate change. Where I live, winters are 4.5 degrees warmer. The George W. Bush administration (e.g. via Frank Luntz) advocated for the term "climate change" because Republican strategists wanted to leverage perceived uncertainty about global warming as much as possible.[0] This is a PR effort that seems to have largely succeeded (both in adoption and its goals) and it's unfortunate that when we are literally talking about warming we adopt a term that is less precise; you are talking about global warming here. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.c...
- Spivak 2y agoThis is an odd telling of history because the term climate change was also pushed by the scientific community as a more precise alternative because people didn't grasp how global warming could make some places colder with larger temperature swings in both directions. It's conflating two things, Luntz and Republicans at the time did want to push a narrative of uncertainty surrounding greenhouse gas emissions and they wanted to switch terminology in a pro-environmental move because of the existing connotations surrounding global warming and "environmentalists" made it hard to get any Republican support.
- ryandrake 2y agoYou're not going to gain support/understanding for something, from people who have made up their minds, simply by changing the name of the thing. The same people who were sending chain E-mails in the 90s that said "How could it be Global Warming if it's so cold outside! LOL" are now posting Facebook memes that say "Duh, Climate has always been Changing!" Any new name someone gives it will be equally ridiculed, because its opponents don't care what it's called.
- nozzlegear 2y agoI was surprised to learn that the average in my town had only gone up 1 degree since the last update. I expected a bigger jump like yours, purely based on vibes.
- abdullahkhalids 2y agoMany of the impacts of climate change have to do with increased variance rather than with shifted average. For example, every +0C day in the winter leads to snow melt. The total amount of snow collected per winter depends highly on the number of +0C days in the winter. Your average temperature might only go from -11C to -10C, but if there are 20 additional +0C days, you might end up with a lot less snow cover.
- billyjmc 2y agoAnd a reduction in snow cover means a drop in albedo, which raises the average temperate…
- vondur 2y agoWeird, in my area in SoCal winters have become cooler. Summers are definitely warmer.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- timr 2y agoThis update is based on a dataset change that shifts the observation period by 15 years. Buried within a footnote that nobody will ever read: > The 2012 USDA hardiness zones were calculated using the average lowest winter temperature for the observation period of 1976-2005. The new zones are calculated using the years 1991-2020. These two observation windows overlap. Colors show the difference between the two 30-year averages for each place on the map. So while climate change may or may not be the explanation for broader trends in the map, you cannot rule out noise for any particular location, especially given that the methodology uses the lowest winter temperatures in that window as the basis for the zone. That's a fundamentally noisy metric. For example, this drops the blizzard of 1978 -- one of the largest ever in US history -- from the dataset. It's hard to know how that affects the zones without careful inspection, but major weather events like that can easily affect simple outlier analysis. You can see this in the dot plots for Raleigh (the default), which had two outliers in the winters around 1995, and then an otherwise flat series of data. What was the prior dataset? We don't know. Just look at the two default examples: https://imgur.com/a/oZjQ36Y https://imgur.com/a/oZjQ36Y It would only take a small number of cold or warm winters to shift those means in either direction. I don't want to overemphasize a silly little article about plants, but IMO, the fact that NPR buried this information while hyper-focusing on specific locations is just another failure of basic journalism. Telling people that an arbitrarily defined metric has been changed is meaningless, unless you tell people the specific change that was made. It should be the first or second thing they tell you, not buried in a hidden footnote.