poetrychic

climate change is winning....as well as yet another distinct measure of global climate change ...it's unfortunate for us all

Climate Change Takes Bloom Off Wildflowers
By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer

Fewer flowers may grace the slopes of the Rocky Mountains as global warming's earlier springtimes make blooms more vulnerable, a new study suggests.

David Inouye of the University of Maryland used data gathered in the Rockies from 1973 to the present to see how earlier spring thaws were affecting three flowers common to the mountain range.

Larkspur (Delphinium barbeyi) has blue star-shaped, hooded blooms on thin stems that can grow anywhere from 3 feet to 6 feet tall. Aspen fleabane (Erigeron speciosus) has small, purple daisy-like flowers with yellow centers. Aspen sunflowers (Helianthella quinquenervis) have bright yellow flowers and grow in open, grassy areas.

All three species grow around an altitude of 9,500 feet, where winter snows can be as much as 8 feet deep. As Earth's climate has warmed in the past century, a combination of lower snowfall amounts and warmer springs has caused the snow to melt earlier. For many wildflowers, an earlier snowmelt spurs an earlier growing season.

Once the snow is gone, flowers form buds and get ready to bloom. But cold air masses can still move through the region at night, with frosts occurring as late as June.

The data indicates that frost events have increased in the past decade. From 1992 to 1998, an average of 36.1 percent of aspen sunflower buds were frosted. But from 1999 to 2000, that average was 73.9 percent.

These frosts don't kill the plants, but do make them unable to seed and reproduce. People may not notice the flowers' plight because all three species are perennials (a given plant survives to bloom year after year) and therefore long-lived. An individual sunflower can live to be up to 75 years old, Inouye said, “but we find that these perennials are not producing enough seeds to make the next generation of plants."

Other species, especially certain types of insects, depend on the flowers for food. Other bugs, in turn, eat those insects. So the loss of seeds and flowers could propagate through the food chain.

“What will replace these colorful flowers? We don’t know,” Inouye said. “But we know that many animals depend upon them, and so the outcome could be quite dramatic.”

Climate Change Takes Bloom Off Wildflowers | LiveScience

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"it was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation, yes we can!"

SPRINGFIELD

You should read what the guy who started the weather channel thinks about global warming. I have to agree, I'm starting to think it's a load of crap. Last year was one of the coldest years on record, this year is setting records already for low temps and record amounts of snowfall..........where is this global warming thing gonna happen again?? And when? Even the Arctic sea ice is back to it's "normal" levels. Granted, we know very little about what normal is, but we do know that it's been much warmer in the recent past, and much cooler. So where do we fall now? Who knows.
FOXNews.com - Weather Channel Founder: Sue Al Gore for Fraud - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News

he actually wants to sue Al Gore for fraud. Read what he has to say though, it's an interesting take on the "information" we've all heard about climate change.

poetrychic

i'll read it when i get home, but i didn't say global warming...i said climate change...wherein the climates around the world are undergoing dramatic and sometimes drastic changes, which include colder (or hotter) than usual temperatures, changes in percipitation amounts, changes in water temperatures, changes in polar ice, and yes, even changes in the amount of seeds and buds that are produced in mountain wildflowers...

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"it was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation, yes we can!"

BillCosby

I thought it was to a few years back........

Hard to deny it now days.......... Record summer heat........ Of the top ten hottest years 7 are in the last ten years (here) or so.............

Glaciers that are not a couple thousand but hundreds of thousands of years old are disappearing.......... Blame it on what you like...... They won't be around a lot longer to kick around.......

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror

Titanium Cat

The guy who started the weather channel is an idiot.

2007 tied for the second warmest year on record.

You are confusing weather with climate. Short term climate cycles overwhelmingly dominate the long term global warming signal. You need to average over about 15 years. This winter was very cold which is not unexpected because of a strong La Niña event which started in the fall of last year.

Well not really back to normal, it jumped back up to above where it was before last year, but there is a definite long term multi-decadal decline of arctic ice.

What we do know is that radiative physics demands that adding CO2 and other greenhouse gases to our atmosphere must warm the planet. And we have pushed CO2 levels well above what they have been in the recent past (650,000 years).

Let him try to sue, it would be a laugh. How is Al Gore committing fraud, his company doesn't sell carbon credits, it buys them for its own operations.

Listen to him babble: [As you look at the atmosphere over the last 25 years, there's been perhaps a degree of warming, perhaps probably a whole lot less than that, and the last year has been so cold that that's been erased," he said.]

You don't "erase" decades of warming. February warmed from January by 0.14C, does that mean that much warming came back? No, again that is weather, not climate.

More babbling: [The compound carbon dioxide makes up only 38 out of every 100,000 particles in the atmosphere, he said. That's about twice as what there were in the atmosphere in the time we started burning fossil fuels, so it's gone up, but it's still a tiny compound," Coleman said. "So how can that tiny trace compound have such a significant effect on temperature?

"My position is it can't," he continued. "It doesn't, and the whole case for global warming is based on a fallacy."]

No idea where he gets almost twice what it was before we started burning fuels, it's gone from 280ppm to 384ppm which is a 37% increase.

Radiative forcing physics is almost 150 years old and the warming effect of CO2 has been demonstrated and tested in multiple laboratory experiments and then confirmed by quantum mechanics calculations. He doesn't understand physics.

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Duvidoo, without any evidence whatsoever to support it, suggests that a FDNY Fire Chief might be in on a conspiracy which murdered over 300 fellow firefighters and 2500 other people:

CosmicRocker

exactly.
"Global Warming" is a misnomer - it's more global extemes.

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I wanna just show you, what my politics are"

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So don't deny me baby, not while you're in my reach."

Politician - Cream

Titanium Cat

But in this case it is a warming trend that is causing the problem. What's happening is that the snow is melting earlier and the flowers start to bud earlier. But they are still subject to cold air masses at night which increases the number of times they frost. Previously they didn't start budding as early which avoided late spring frosts.

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Duvidoo, without any evidence whatsoever to support it, suggests that a FDNY Fire Chief might be in on a conspiracy which murdered over 300 fellow firefighters and 2500 other people:

SPRINGFIELD

Well that's the funny thing, in my (short) time on earth, it seems to me that spring has been "springing" earlier. And my father who is a biology teacher-has a set of pictures taken on april 10th 1915, and an identical set taken from the exact same location on April 10th 2005,6,and 7. BIG difference. Not conclusive evidence by any means, but a vivid visible example. Spring is happening earlier, at least in Iowa. But some of the things from that article make sense, if that "hockey stick" graph he referrs to is indeed flawed, all the data for global warming is compromised.

Titanium Cat

1915 is a very cold time to start at, it was just after the end of the 19th century's volcanic period.

He really doesn't know what he is talking about though. The original hockey stick was a 1998 analysis. Indeed the statistical methods it used were not ideal and there are other points involving some of the proxy series that are legitimate. However the National Academy of Sciences did a comprehensive review of temperature proxies including half a dozen later papers that produced similar results using updated statistical techniques and deemed their results as valid which supported the conclusions of the original hockey stick.

Regardless global warming theory is not based on temperature proxies. Almost all of the warming has occurred during times of instrument readings. The physics involved do not depend on them whatsoever and key estimations such as climate sensitivity are based on much longer periods of time (ice ages).

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Duvidoo, without any evidence whatsoever to support it, suggests that a FDNY Fire Chief might be in on a conspiracy which murdered over 300 fellow firefighters and 2500 other people:

The_Heretic

Okay, understand that most weathermen on the news aren't meteologiests. Those kind of weathermen could've just easily taken the job of sports reporter. Plus, the few REAL meteologists are told not to enter into any debate that the network producers might decide are "controversial" based on who among their audience writes or calls in complaints. Third, global waming isn't just about warmer weather. It's about wilder swings of extremes. But if you want hard core evidence just look at much more melting of the arctic iceflows occurs in the summers than is usual. That by itself is irrefutable proof.

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