A Later Peak Cherry Blossom Date – Is DC’s Global Warming Indicator Broken?

by Adam Sandberg on March 8, 2013

in Blog, Features

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There’s an ongoing quest to find signs of global warming in every aspect of everyday life. Over the last few years a rather unique kind of local indicator for GW has emerged, namely the predicted peak cherry blossom bloom of Washington DC’s Tidal Basin.

The peak cherry blossom bloom period has been used frequently as a GW indicator for the last three years. In line with GW claims, the predictions for peak blooms were moved ahead in both 2010 and 2011; in 2010, the revised predicted peak dates were April 1 to April 4; in 2011, they were even earlier– March 29 to April 3.  In 2012, the predictions of a peak between March 20 and March 23 were regarded as a first-class sign of GW, with DC’s cherry blossoms being called a “Global Warming Canary” by the Huffington Post. It seemed that the hugely popular cherry blossom festival was in danger of becoming a winter, rather than a spring, event.  As stated in a 2012 Washington Post article “Could cherry blossoms one day be blooming in winter?” there is a future possibility of “a blooming period in February instead of March, and a peak bloom in early March, instead of early April”.

So what are the predictions for this year’s cherry blossom? The National Park Service has announced that the peak bloom for Washington’s Global Warming Canary will be March 26 to March 30 — about one week later than last year. Although the actual bloom dates will be determined by the weather in the coming weeks, this year’s prediction of a later peak period does not fit into the alarming predictions of earlier years, or the notion that the shift towards earlier dates will continue.

Given the decades-long nature of climate trends, later peak blooms in a single year don’t prove anything either way about GW.  But that was just as true of the 2010 to 2012 cherry blossom seasons, and yet those dates triggered quite a bit of GW alarmist commentary.  This year’s prediction hasn’t.  Press coverage of GW “evidence” apparently omits incidents that run counter to alarmism.  Perhaps that’s not a surprise, but it’s not a healthy sign for public understanding.

And no matter when the blossoms appear this year, let’s all enjoy them—even the GW alarmists among us.

Blackfriday April 3, 2013 at 12:27 am

Thanks for finally writing about >A Later Peak Cherry Blossom Date – Is DC’s Global Warming Indicator Broken?
<Liked it!

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