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Kyoto cherry blossoms now bloom earlier than at any point in 1,200 years
- binarymax 6mo agoWe 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.
- lysace 6mo agoAnecdotes 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.
- BobbyJo 6mo agoWeather can be due to climate, and time series are composed of anecdotes.
- lysace 6mo agoKey words: can be Longer time series are indeed composed of many samples/anecdotes.
- tshaddox 6mo ago> 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.
- billfor 6mo agoIf you go back a few million, that's also climate. We're still in an ice age. https://www.climate.gov/media/16817 https://www.climate.gov/media/16817
- b112 6mo agoI'd trust such data a lot more, from any other source.
- t0bia_s 6mo agoIt's about trust anyway.
- b112 6mo agoWeird 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.
- altcognito 6mo agoLonger 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.
- sandworm101 6mo agoClimate 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 6mo agoThe 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 6mo agoThe single visible data point is interesting, as an illustration Seriously…
- edbaskerville 6mo agoInterestingly, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens%27s_theorem
- dylan604 6mo agoWe 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 6mo agoThat 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 6mo ago(And prop 13, and a lack of will to build new housing) for additional reasons housing is expensive in CA
- timr 6mo ago> 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 6mo agoBut 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 6mo agoSure, 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.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6mo agoCould 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-earth-super-el-nino-extreme-weather https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/23/down-to-...
- cf100clunk 6mo agoSee also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811668
- lysace 6mo agoSo it's a reformatted version of: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/date-of-the-peak-cherry-tree-blossom-in-kyoto https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/date-of-the-peak-cherry-t...
- Sparkyte 6mo agoTrees often bloom based on the surrounding climate and conidtions. Warmer bursts in early spring lead to early blossoms.
- carabiner 6mo agoMany factors in this. Heat islands from urbanization in Kyoto, different species bred for earlier blooming, etc.
- nharada 6mo agoIs the "etc" here "because of human greenhouse emissions, the earth is rapidly warming"?
- henry2023 6mo agoIf 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.
- Psillisp 6mo agolo heat, why doth thou radiate? from your islands; blooming species differently...
- otherme123 6mo agoIf 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.
- sintaxi 6mo agoIm sure you're aware that the record of global average temperature is also influenced by urbanization as well as "data adjustments".
- nomel 6mo ago> influenced by urbanization Urban heat islands, which are 1-7 degrees warmer [1]. [1] https://www.rff.org/publications/explainers/urban-heat-islands-101 https://www.rff.org/publications/explainers/urban-heat-islan...
- andrewstuart 6mo ago[flagged]
- LightBug1 6mo agoReally disappointing first parse of the comments. My average comment quality is pretty terrible, but these are on par.
- yeah879846 6mo agoNow this is climate science I can get behind.
- ndisn 6mo ago[flagged]
- childofhedgehog 6mo agoI 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.
- morkalork 6mo agoA 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?
- ljf 6mo agoIf you liked that you might find tbe lost of oldest companies interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies 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.
- stingraycharles 6mo agoInteresting 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) ?
- SenHeng 6mo agoSmall, mountainous, resource-poor island at the far end of the world meant few were interested in conquering it. That meant Japan had the luxury of maintaining their culture unhindered for a very long period of time. The Japanese royal family is the longest continuous royal bloodline on record. Oral records say its 2600 years old while archives exist from the 6th century.
- IIsi50MHz 6mo agoThere is long-standing tradition that if a company's "core competency" is retained, it remains the same company. And also of adults being adopted into a family (including when done as a means of producing a successor when there is no suitable heir). So, a family of weavers going back hundreds of years, now switching to carbon fibre production under the direction of an unrelated (adopted) heir can said in Japan to still be the same company if that carbon fiber is woven. But also, sometimes "core competency" is re-interpreted. Perhaps the original core competency was as dyers, which morphed into weaving at some point, and might eventuall change to "anything involving carbon fibre"…
- linuxftw 6mo agoIt'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.
- jpgvm 6mo agoDon'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).
- 1234letshaveatw 6mo agoMy 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 :(
- ramesh31 6mo agoAll across the northern US. We didn't have a single leaf on the trees until the last few weeks here in the northeast.
- radlad 6mo agoIt's been a very warm and early spring here in Michigan.
- 1234letshaveatw 6mo agoYou are kidding right? It has been terrible, temp below average and tons of rain
- radlad 6mo agoRain is warm, and a sign of spring. It's not snow or ice which is typical to see a bit for at least the first half of April. In southeast Michigan we've had unseasonably warm weather, the trees and flowers all bloomed early, and people are talking about mowing since weeks ago. Typically you wouldn't plant anything until at least Mother's Day. A few years ago we did "no mow May." The grass is taller now than it was at the end of May then. A quick Google says average L/H for Detroit is 40/50 in April. It's been significantly warmer than that with many days in the 60s and 70s. Are you from Michigan or did you move here recently? Or perhaps you live further North?
- 1234letshaveatw 6mo agoLifer. It’s been averaging 10 degrees colder than usual. Have you been here long?
- gla67890543 6mo agoGlobal warming or global climate change? No mainstream media is talking about it now.
- Havoc 6mo agoIt’s because things are going great, right? Right?
- layer8 6mo agoThe chart is pointing upwards! It’s the exponential growth we need!
- htrp 6mo ago>Latest peak ever May 4 year 1323 What would have happened to cause that late of a bloom?
- anigbrowl 6mo agoVolcanic eruption, most likely.
- ars 6mo agoThis title is not true, they are blooming earlier than the earliest average. The nature of an average is that it smooths out peaks.
- chewz 6mo ago1200 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?
- atoav 6mo agoSo the cherry blossom should correlate with the Groth of Kyoto's size? Hint: it does not.
- Markoff 6mo agosame 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
- sica07 6mo agoCherry trees all across Japan (not just Kyoto) are blooming earlier and earlier and this confirms that the trend cannot be explained by local urbanization alone c(https://gizmodo.com/japan-hasnt-seen-cherry-blossoms-this-early-in-1-200-ye-1846593409 https://gizmodo.com/japan-hasnt-seen-cherry-blossoms-this-ea...). However, Kyoto's transformation into a dense urban environment has for sure made the local signal worse.
- 21asdffdsa12 6mo agoAnd 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.
- globular-toast 6mo agoLooks like this has been true since about 1960.