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Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

smithsonianmag.com

41–50 of 64 posts

Re: Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

#41
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if we allow sealioning to take over - global climate change is in the realm of accepted science, its 100% on people claiming the opposite to prove their claims at this point.

You're not necessarily arguing directly against the other person, you're also playing the room. Every time you talk to someone who denies climate change is another chance to convince them and everyone who is reading of what you believe. So in my opinion it's best to cite your own evidence regardless of how accepted your beliefs are by an establishment, rather than just saying the other side has the burden of proof. W…

Feel free to - but asking people to show their evidence for generally accepted stuff is a great way for trolls to waste your time with useless questions - literally why the term sealioning was invented.

If you want to bring up new evidence and arguments that are not settled then go for it, but asking everyone to post their pedigree to talk about evolution or climate change is just catering to an american audience who is purposefully putting their fingers in their ears - we have no reason to cater to willfully ignorant people.

Re: Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

#42
post #13

The Economist published a remarkable chart last year that shows 1200 years of cherry blossom data: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/04/07/japans-c...

This is an interesting figure. Naturally, the sharp decline in the last 100 years or so captures one's attention, and would fit in with globally rising temperatures. However, one other thing differentiates the older and newer epochs: The variance is much larger for older data. On the one hand it could be that increased variance is due to natural phenomenon (cooler weather?) or random error of less reliable measuremen…

It looks like the confidence interval is larger in earlier years because there are fewer data points.

Whats interesting to me is how big the spread is until the 1900s where not only is the blossom date trend increasing, but the individual blossom dates are grouping much closer together as well. I wonder if this is an error in measurement or if there is natural explanation for this variance reduction in the last 100 years.

Re: Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

#43
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I live on the West coast and I cannot remember the fall foliage ever being as spectacular as it has been this year. I was just wondering the other day why it was so much better than ever before.

Do you mean West Coast USA? I'm in Oregon and I'll say that fall foliage has been nice the last few days, but we also didn't get much rain this summer, and the last few winters have been lacking in moisture as well. My parents tell me it used to rain and snow quite a lot more than it has been these last few decades.

You can see it on TV if you are a scifi fan. Look at the x-files, Outer Limits, and early Stargate episodes filmed in 1990s Vancouver. Vancouver's wet climate gave them a very specific tone that became an industry standard. 1990's scifi was generally dark, as opposed to the more colorful productions filmed in California (Trek) or Australia (farscape). But today Vancouver suffers droughts every summer. The Flash is a colourful production. The foggy grey backdrop is now a blue sky. Rainfall numbers might not be very different, but the perpetual cloud that coloured scifi for a generation is gone.

Re: Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

#44

There's a similar phenomenon in play in the US. Foliage is not as beautiful this fall because of all the rain that we got this summer: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/10/23/fall-f...

Thanks for that link. It didn’t make the rounds here in the Midwest since it features East and West coasts as it’s subjects, but we’ve had an incredibly wet and warm summer as well, and here too the fall foliage has been a disappointment.

The trees that held out the longest without turning are coloring minimally ok, but the earlier foliage was non-existent. This coincides with the last month of summer featuring no rain after an incredibly wet start and middle.

Re: Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

#45
This has happened before in my hometown (Livermore CA) with our beautiful cherry trees. One year about 8-10 years ago we had a few very warm weeks in January and the blossoms were out by Valentines Day - quite pretty, but probably not ideal for the tree’s reproductive cycle...

Re: Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

#47
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean West Coast USA? I'm in Oregon and I'll say that fall foliage has been nice the last few days, but we also didn't get much rain this summer, and the last few winters have been lacking in moisture as well. My parents tell me it used to rain and snow quite a lot more than it has been these last few decades.

You can see it on TV if you are a scifi fan. Look at the x-files, Outer Limits, and early Stargate episodes filmed in 1990s Vancouver. Vancouver's wet climate gave them a very specific tone that became an industry standard. 1990's scifi was generally dark, as opposed to the more colorful productions filmed in California (Trek) or Australia (farscape). But today Vancouver suffers droughts every summer. The Flash is a…

So you're saying that Seacouver doesn't exist anymore?

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seacouver)

Re: Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

#48
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see it on TV if you are a scifi fan. Look at the x-files, Outer Limits, and early Stargate episodes filmed in 1990s Vancouver. Vancouver's wet climate gave them a very specific tone that became an industry standard. 1990's scifi was generally dark, as opposed to the more colorful productions filmed in California (Trek) or Australia (farscape). But today Vancouver suffers droughts every summer. The Flash is a…

So you're saying that Seacouver doesn't exist anymore? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seacouver )

The real joke of 'seacouver' is the an old adage for filming TV in Canada: Film in Vancouver, but never admit so in the script. If you want to tap the US market (who doesn't?) then the story cannot ever be set outside the US. The few shows that did (The Crow series etc) died quick deaths. X-Men went out on a limb by repeatedly saying Wolverine lived in Canada (Rouge finds him there). That was a risk. Everyone assumed they would have put him in Alaska. X-Files set a short arc on a train heading to Vancouver, but even there the bad guys were Japanese. None of the main story could ever happen in Canada.

Sell also Scrubs, filmed in LA but set in "San Frangeles" although never admitted in the script. They wanted to avoid the LA/SF/NY trend of mentioning place names and expecting the whole world to know what you are talking about. For the longest time I thought scrubs was set in Florida.

Re: Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

#49
post #13

The Economist published a remarkable chart last year that shows 1200 years of cherry blossom data: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/04/07/japans-c...

Note that is for the cherry blossoms of Kyoto. So I'd say that the graph means next to nothing in terms of global or even national climate trends. This is about a very small city-dominated local climate. Any variation from a norm could have more to do with the heating/cooling of buildings and local traffic rather than global warming. The trend towards the use of glass in new buildings could have as much an impact as…

I can't speak for how it affects the data, but note that Kyoto city (京都市, the administrative area to which this data seems to apply) is about two-thirds mountains and small rural towns.

See the satellite image here (there should be a red border around Kyoto city): https://goo.gl/maps/FZZbj7UFi4m

Re: Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

#50
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it has happened before. And it's not widespread.

I’m assuming you’re trying to claim this is not related to global warming (“ it has happened before”). Global warming is a large scale and long term problem, and the first thing you would expect is an increase in frequency of previously uncommon events - take warm weather: historically there may have been a few year where the temp got to X degrees, from an average of Y degrees. But now the average Temperature has inc…

These [1] are the ice core data from the past ~400k years. Not only has the temperature gotten substantially hotter before, but this cycle of rising and lowering global temperatures has been happening before humans even existed. And these are not small temperature deviations. The range between the lows and the highs is around 9 degrees celsius.

I don't entirely understand why people are so averse to these data. Do people think they're just fake or something? This does not mean that humanity is not contributing to the current warming trend. But the data show beyond any doubt that warming cycles do, and would happen, even if humanity did not exist.

There were not periods where 'over a few years we saw a bit of warming' - there have been centuries of major warming that increased the ambient temperature of the Earth by ~9 degrees celcius. The most recent warmining cycle, before the one we're currently in, lasted some 20,000 years.

[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Ice_Age_...

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