{"id":670,"date":"2009-04-11T11:22:14","date_gmt":"2009-04-11T16:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/archives\/2009\/04\/breaking-the-silence-about-spring\/"},"modified":"2009-06-22T09:50:22","modified_gmt":"2009-06-22T14:50:22","slug":"breaking-the-silence-about-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/archives\/2009\/04\/breaking-the-silence-about-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking the silence about Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring — in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the USDA have kept show that those same lilacs are blooming as much as two weeks earlier than they did in 1965. April has, in a very real sense, become May. This is one of the interesting facts that you\u2019ll read about in Amy Seidl\u2019s book, Early Spring<\/i><\/a>, a hot-off-the-press essay about the impacts of climate change on the world immediately around us \u2013 the forest, the birds, the butterflies in our backyards.
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\nThe brilliant title of Seidl\u2019s book was one of the reasons that it caught my attention. The other was that I have realized I need to better educate myself about the impact of climate change on everyday life. I\u2019ve been dismissive of the idea that the average person can really detect the impacts of recent warming on, for example, the timing of the apple-blossom season, but I\u2019ve been taken to task by several of RealClimate\u2019s readers for this. If you are paying attention, they have argued, the changes are actually rather obvious.<\/p>\n

Of course, Amy Seidl is not the average person. Rather, she\u2019s a trained ecologist with a Ph.D. (as well as an avid gardener) and she\u2019s clearly paying extremely close attention. Her book is the first one I have read that effectively brings home the tangible impacts that global warming will have \u2013 is having \u2013 on our everyday lives. \u201cWe are increasingly familiar,\u201d she writes, of images of melting glaciers, \u201cbut how do we give them relevance in our lives? From my window I see no glaciers.\u201d She answers her own question with a series of vignettes, some from her own experiences, many more from her extensive research (well referenced throughout the book).<\/p>\n

Cardinals, robins and cowbirds are all arriving earlier in Vermont than they did a century ago. Kingfishes, fox sparrows and towhees are not. Why the difference? The answer, as Seidl explains, is that the former group has the ability to respond ecologically to the changes, because these birds cue their arrival to temperature. The latter, it appears, respond more directly to temporal cues, that won\u2019t change even as climate does. It\u2019s obvious from this example that the make up of bird life in Vermont \u2013 the species distribution \u2013 will change over time. This may not necessarily be a bad thing of course. On the other hand, it turns out that the robins are the most important host for West Nile virus; the early bird gets the worm, so to speak, and passes it along to humans.<\/p>\n

Maple seedlings need about 100 days of below-freezing weather. As this becomes rarer, fewer maples will populate the forests. This, Seidl explains, is why species-range models predict the decline and eventual loss of sugar maple (at least in New England) in the future. But, she notes, the models don\u2019t take into account the full complexity of the system, such as the impact of competition among different species. So we don\u2019t really know what will happen, or how fast. What we do know is that maple-sugar farmers have noticed \u2013 and documented \u2013 an earlier maple sugaring season over the last few decades.<\/p>\n

There are many other examples in Early Spring<\/i> both of clear climate-related changes (such as the early arrival of robins), and of less clear-cut changes (the maple sugaring season). Seidl doesn\u2019t make the common mistake of assuming that the more ambiguous examples are necessarily due to climate change. For example, she quotes a maple-sugarer who points out that technological changes have allowed them to tap maples earlier, and hence that the timing of sugaring is a weak measure of climate change. The point though, is that even rather minor changes are, after all, being noticed. And if much larger changes do occur, as predicted, they will most certainly have impacts we can\u2019t ignore, even if we don\u2019t live in the Arctic or in Bangladesh. In other words, Seidl tells us, listen to the farmers and gardeners, and the observations of regular people: they are meaningful.<\/p>\n

The soberness of Seidl\u2019s approach to the subject of climate change impacts contrasts starkly with that of many books before it. It couldn\u2019t be further, for example, from Mark Lynas\u2019s book, Six Degrees<\/i>, which is a truly alarming read. In my comments on Six Degrees<\/i><\/a>, I said that it wasn\u2019t an alarmist book. I stand by that characterization, because \u2013 and this is what I liked about it \u2013 it doesn\u2019t go beyond what is in the scientific literature. However, while Lynas\u2019s book is a straightforward reading of the scientific literature, it is a somewhat uncritical one, and hence tends to emphasize what might<\/i> happen in the future over what will<\/i> happen; this is a point that many readers of my review seem to have missed. Seidl\u2019s book, on the other hand, is focused on the more certain \u2013 and often less dramatic — things, and on the impacts we are likely to see in our own lifetimes.<\/p>\n

The calm demeanor of Seidl\u2019s book, and the very personal nature of it, could lead one to think that it is primarily just a philosophical reflection on the climate change story. Indeed, Bill McKibben, in his introduction to Early Spring<\/i>, says that in the face of changes we may not be able to prevent, \u201cone of our tasks is simply to bear witness\u201d. Certainly, the book is partly that. But Seidl\u2019s voice, like Rachel Carson\u2019s before her, has the authentic and authoritative voice of a scientist, made all the more compelling for being very much rooted in the author\u2019s own story and experiences. And she doesn\u2019t pull punches when she has something definitive to say: \u201cOne thing is clear:\u201d she writes, \u201cwe will not be able to manage the climate\u201d.<\/p>\n

Early Spring<\/i> has the potential to be immensely influential, a real turning point in the popular appreciation of climate change impacts among laypersons and scientists alike. Read it.<\/p>\n

———-
\nNote that we review books on a fairly ad hoc basis. For earlier reviews of other books, see here.<\/p>\n

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Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring — in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the USDA have kept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,35,28],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-climate-science","7":"category-communicating-climate","8":"category-reviews","9":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}