Global Warming: The Silence of the Plants Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit THE SILENCE OF THE PLANTS: Testifying to Warmer Winters Some people want to debate what's called the "signal" on global warming -- the very noisy record of warming trends which to the vast majority of working scientists indicate that global warming, probably in part due to human- caused changes, is already going on and that the human-induced contributing effects absolutely must be mitigated early. Because the data are noisy -- for instance, the recent dramatic ice melts on the Antarctic Peninsula are accompanied by cooling in some regions of the Antarctic interior -- those who would rather wait until the Smoky Mountains are a coastal range before they're 'sure' enough about the trends to begin the costly job of working to address them point to the noise and say "nothing is happening -- nothing that you could take us to court over, that is!" Many island nations beg to differ; large land areas are being submerged regularly in Micronesia, for instance, and the trend is getting worse and more widespread. Plant blooming is one way to get a handle on the reality of trends. Some plants use temperature as their signal to start blooming (rather than day length, the other commonly used cue). Forty-seven years of data collected in the UK by a father and son team are a tremendously valuable study here; unlike arguments around satellite measurements or ice thickness measurements -- both of which use tools that have changed over the years -- plant blooming is measured by seeing the blooms and noting the date on a calendar, and is much less easy to criticize methodologically for having changed over time, particularly when one of the people doing the study has patiently been doing it for nearly fifty years. And, from those plants that do use temperature to start blooming, it's rather clear that Great Britain, at least, is warming. The average onset of blooming in these 385 plant species has advanced substantially in the last ten years compared with the forty years before. 385 species is a very rich group of data; these researchers have tracked air temperature and find that it, too, is warming. One plant that formerly started blooming in March is now blooming in January. As the US legal system has shown again and again, what you get out of court is what you can pay for in court, of course. Asking that legally binding evidence of global warming be presented -- and particularly, that it be proof to the US criminal standard, "proof beyond reasonable doubt" -- before any change in behavior occurs is a deliberate and calculated corporate stall. Many US citizens, sadly, are lulled into buying it as it sounds "fair" to them: it invokes principles they understand, the legal system, legal proof, etc. to justify itself and hence it "sounds" reasonable. Many of those buying this legalistic line of reasoning from corporate and political sources in the US were outraged, of course, when it turned out that OJ Simpson could afford better lawyers than they felt he should have been able to; has it not occurred to them that corporations can afford not only better lawyers than that, but great and subtle public relations departments as well? Well, the plants are subtler yet, and the testimony provided by their blooming is some of the strongest out there. We ignore it, or let ourselves be led away from it, at our peril. AP via The New York Times - May 30, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Climate--Flowers.html Warming Climate Causes Earlier Bloom by the Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) -- Rising temperatures are causing plants to burst into bloom weeks earlier in the spring, according to British researchers who say the finding is strong evidence that global warming is changing biology. A father and son research team warns that the changing thermal climate may drive some common flowering plants to extinction while permitting plants that now live only in gardens to leap from cultivation and become pesky weeds in the wild. In a study appearing in the journal Science, the researchers report that the first flowering in the spring of 385 species of British plants has advanced from 4 1/2 days to 55 days in a decade, when comparing the flowering date of the species over the previous four decades. ``These data reveal the strongest biological signal yet of climatic change,'' wrote Alastair H. Fitter of the University of York and his father, R.S.R. Fitter, a naturalist and author from Cambridge, England, in the study to be published Friday. Starting 47 years ago, the senior Fitter recorded the first flowering date of plants in south-central England. In the new study, the researchers compared the changes in first flowering date with temperature trends in the same area over four decades. Alastair Fitter said that the mean temperatures for January, February and March -- critical months for spring flowering plants -- has warmed in the study area by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1960s. ``Some predictions of climate warming are 4 to 5 degrees Celsius (7.2 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit), which would mean that these effects are only the beginning of a major shift,'' he said. For 16 percent of the species studied, the first flowering date in the 1990s shifted by an average of 15 days. The greatest change was for a plant called the white dead nettle. From 1954 to 1990, its average first flowering date was March 18. From 1991 to 2000, the plant's first flowering data was around Jan. 23, a shift of 55 days. Sun spurge, a plant found both in the United States and the United Kingdom, shifted its first flowering date by about 32 days, the researchers found. Alastair Fitter said in a telephone interview that the study supports the notion that flowering plants will be the early indicators of a warming climate. ``Plants will respond (first) by flowering earlier,'' said Fitter. ``The next (thing) they will do will be to migrate, and I guess we will see that very soon.'' Fitter said an expected effect of the climate change is that some cultivated plants will turn into weeds, while some wild plants will go extinct. He said there are about 2,000 wild plants in England and about 20,000 species cultivated in gardens. ``The 20,000 species are just waiting. The environment is not suitable for them to go into the wild, but as the climate changes, it can become suitable and some of them will just hop out of the garden,'' said Fitter. ``All of a sudden, we'll have a whole new set of weeds.'' Fitter said some plants time their flowering based not on temperature but on the length of daily light and dark cycles. As a result, some plants that once flowered at separate times are now flowering together. ``Because one is changing and the other one isn't, the natural communities are being disrupted,'' he said. ``You will get plants disappearing because they now are being forced to compete with things they aren't able to compete with. One could go extinct as a result.'' The lengthening of the warm growing season also is affecting some plants that depend on a certain number of cool days for their dormancy. Some of these plants are first blooming much later in the season. ``It may be that winter starts so late that their whole time clock is reset and that's why they run late the following year,'' said Fitter. Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford University climatologist and environmental biologist, said the Fitter research ``is completely consistent with other studies that show climate change is not a theoretical construct, but is actually happening.'' ``This is precisely what you would expect in a climatic warming trend,'' said Schneider. ``Warming is going on and nature does respond.'' Schneider said it is less certain how much of the warming is caused by a natural, global climatic cycle, and how much is caused by humans. Many scientists believe that the planet is being warmed by an increase in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases coming from industry or from the burning of fossil fuels. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytenv-05.31.02-18:26:58-24202