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Spring Came Early Due to Climate Change
But Cool Down Expected in the East 2nd Week of March
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@phillipsnaturalworld
But Cool Down Expected in the East 2nd Week of March
After a mild winter across much of the United States, February brought abnormally high temperatures, especially east of the Rockies. Spring weather arrived more than three weeks earlier than usual in some places, and new research released Wednesday shows a strong link to climate change.
By the 2017 calendar, the first day of spring is March 20. But spring leaves arrived in mid-January in some parts of the South, and spread northward like a wave. The map above plots the date of “first leaf,” a temperature-based calculation of when vegetation that has been dormant starts to show signs of life. This year, with the exception of a few small areas, the wave has arrived much earlier than the 30-year average.
An early spring means more than just earlier blooms of fruit trees and decorative shrubs like azaleas. It can wreak havoc on schedules that farmers follow for planting and that tourism officials follow for events that are tied to a natural activity like trees blooming. Some plant species that bud early may be susceptible to a snap frost later, and early growth of grasses and other vegetation can disrupt some animals’ usual cycles of spring feeding and growth.
First leaf can vary greatly from year to year and location to location, but the general long-term trend is toward earlier springs.
The new research shows a strong link between global warming and the very warm February that helped to drive the extremely early spring this year. For the entire continental United States, February 2017 was the second warmest on record, and mean temperatures were especially high east of the Rockies: as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
The study, by scientists working as part of a group called World Weather Attribution, looked at the influence of climate change on the temperatures, using models of the atmosphere as it exists and of a hypothetical atmosphere with no greenhouse gas emissions and thus no human-driven climate change. They found that a warm February like the one just experienced is about four times more likely in the current climate than it would have been in 1900, before significant emissions began to change the climate.
We've Read:
Southeastern Australia has suffered through a series of brutal heat waves over the past two months, with temperatures reaching a scorching 113 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the state of New South Wales.
“It was nothing short of awful,” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney. “In Australia, we’re used to a little bit of heat. But this was at another level.”
So Dr. Perkins-Kirkpatrick, who studies climate extremes, did what comes naturally: She looked to see whether there was a link between the heat and human-driven climate change.
Cool, easy to use, climate change tool at the New York Times.
“It’s definitely spring when I go out to sample insects from the trees and these caterpillars fall on my head,” said Emily Meineke, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. She’s referring to cankerworms, or inchworms, which hatch in early spring and dangle from nearly invisible webs attached to trees.
The tiny inchworm can cause big problems when it greets the East Coast in the spring. When the hungry caterpillars are not controlled, they can damage an area’s trees. Charlotte, N.C., has struggled with such outbreaks for at least two decades, Ms. Meineke said.
“They are targeting those young, delicious leaves,” she said. “The tree needs those to photosynthesize in the springtime.”
After the inchworms have eaten all of the leaves on a tree, they use their webs to swing to the next one like tiny Tarzans. And when they’ve had their fill, the inchworms drop to the ground from their threads and spin their cocoons.
Bees buzzing, flowers blooming and birds singing are some telltale signs
that spring is upon us. But do you ever wonder what the season looks like from space?
This image from the Meteosat-9 satellite shows Earth on the vernal equinox, the official start of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. This year, that day fell on Sunday, March 20, as it did in this photograph taken in 2011.
The spring equinox is a point in Earth’s orbit where the sun shines directly above the Equator, creating nearly equal periods of daytime and nighttime across the globe.
“Only on the equinoxes do we get that exactly straight terminator,” said Greg Redfern, a solar system ambassador at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, referring to the line separating daylight from the darkness of night.
That line is continually shifting because Earth is tilted 23.5 degrees on its axis. “If the Earth didn’t have that tilt, we’d always have the straight-up-and-down terminator and we wouldn’t have seasons,” Mr. Redfern said.
You can see how the terminator shifts during all four seasons in this video from the Meteosat-9 satellite, which begins in September near the time of the fall equinox. As the Northern Hemisphere approaches winter, it leans away from the sun and receives less daylight — making the terminator appear slanted. After the spring equinox, the Northern Hemisphere gradually starts tilting toward the sun’s rays, making days longer and warmer.
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SNL Goes After Ivanka Trump Hard
and its hilarious because its true
Yet again this weekend, “Saturday Night Live” trotted out Alec Baldwin doing a Donald Trump impression for its cold open. And yet again, that wasn't even close to its harshest political sketch.
That distinction this week was reserved for “Complicit,” a faux Ivanka Trump perfume ad that is liable to really ruffle some feathers.
The basic idea is pretty clear: As an outspoken woman known to be very close to her father, she is complicit in the things Trump does — and for not doing something about them.
“She's Ivanka,” the narrator says. “And a woman like her deserves a fragrance all her own. A scent made just for her. Because she's beautiful. She's powerful. She's … Complicit.”
Shocker Alert:
Dar Adal Molested Quinn
F. Murray Abraham’s CIA honcho Dar Adal is an evil whirling schemer in the episode written by Ron Nyswaner and directed by Tucker Gates.
Adal does a whole lot of dastardly things in this episode, but nothing is creepier than the revelation that he had a sexual encounter with a young Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend). We learned some seasons ago that Adal found Quinn as a teenager in dire straits and trained him to become a crack CIA assassin. But only at the end of this episode did Quinn, visibly struggling with mental and emotional anguish, confront his one-time mentor about being a “f—-ing dirty old man.”
Adal’s response is nauseating. “We’re all beautiful when we’re young,” followed by: “Fair enough. … For the record, I never forced myself on anyone.”
Quinn Shows Off His English Accent
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