Extraordinarily warm tempratures
This post is not very economic oriented except indirectly, but I felt a need to mark the extraordinary temperatures of high and some low 100 year records. Lifted and edited for readability in blog format from an e-mail newsletter sent by reader rjs come examples and links for both record setting high temperatures and consecutive days of high temperatures this March.
I watched in March my daylilies at 6″ plus preceding peones, real azaleas flowering the same time as mongolian azaleas, and trees flowering a month early simultaneous to blue squill. rjs provides links. Dr. Masters website would not allow links to specific posts for me, so go to March archives for material.
…Meteorologist Dr Jeff Masters of the popular wunderblog, writing from Michigan, probably expressed it best; “this March started with 12 days of April weather, followed by 10 days of June and July weather, with 9 days of May weather predicted to round out the month”.
One example is Holland, Michigan was planning a tulip festival for May, but saw their blooms last week. Of course, it wasnt just Michigan as temperatures in the 80s were reached in every border state from North Dakota to Maine, as well as from Manitoba to Nova Scotia in Canada. 2023 record-breaking high temperatures were set in the US, while a low was breached only 58 times…
there are a handful of links immediately below which will lead you to all the details, but the highlights include 4 locations (one ea in NH, MI & 2 in MN) where the overnight low in a location eclipsed the previous daytime record high (in locations with 100 years of records), and several locations where the previous record high temperature for the date was exceeded by more than 30°F. Several locations in the US and Canada also experienced record high temperatures for April, ten record high days in a row at International Falls, MN, the most consecutive records ever set anywhere, (and many cities where a new record was set 9 days in a row, including chicago, when observing 7 consecutive record temps at a location is a once in a meteorological blue moon experience… )
While most everyone experiencing this heat wave probably perferred it to the normal frigid and windy march in this part of the country, there are a few caveats; first, fruit crops are at least a month ahead of schedule over most of the area noted, and damaging frosts are still likely into May.
Secondly, a lot of the western areas that would normally have a snow cover are already starting to dry out, raising the potential for drought during the planting season,
Lastly, anecdotal reports from the region indicated that with the entire winter being mild, the ground did not freeze deeply, so the normal winter kill of damaging insects didnt occur; so we can expect a bad year for plant pests and ticks, & the mosquitoes are already flying…
We’re also loosing the ability to produce maple syrup.
thanx for the cite, dan; i dont often write about the weather, figuring everyone talks about it anyway… we were actually quite lucky that this occurred in march rather than midsummer; Michael Lemonick, who blogs at climate central, did a “what if” on that point; note that he’s writing from new jersey, which you can see from the map dan posted above, wasnt even at the heart of the departure from normal:
What if July Beats Heat Records the Way March Just Did? – Last month I wrote about how global warming might not be so bad after all. Not for me, anyway. Sure, sea level is rising, threatening millions of Americans and many more millions of people around the world. But February, which normally alternates between cold and bitterly cold in Princeton, N.J., where Climate Central is headquartered, was unusually mild. Call me selfish, but I kind of liked it. I didn’t realize at the time that March would be even warmer, and I really liked that. The average high here in central New Jersey is 50°F in March, but this month we went over 60° no fewer than 15 times. We topped 70° eight times. We hit 78° twice, and once we got all the way up to 79° — fully 29° above normal. All of that was really nice. But then I began thinking about summer . . . and thinking about how it gets kind of hot. The average high for July, the hottest month, is 85°, and of course there are plenty of days that get hotter than that. Then I thought: what would it be like around here if this coming July resembled the month just ending in term of beating the average. And I began to sweat. If July temperatures beat the averages by the same amount March temperatures did, we should see 15 or 16 days above 95°. Eight of those would top 105°. And we’d have two days at 113° and one at 114°. For comparison, the all-time high ever recorded in New Jersey is 110°.
Are there no plant people among us? I thought my examples of growing patterns devastating!
Hmmm…a one degree rise in the night time temperatures for rice crops is a severe stress. Already happening over the last few years.
rjs
climate change is not about your personal comfort.
coberly,
http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1061119129
And it was hot in Europe last year, very cold this year. No one is talking personal comfort.
dan
ecology is definitely relevant to ‘economics.’
we had snow here on the first day of Spring. fairly unusual for western Oregon. but i didn’t abandon my irrational faith in global warming.
the “debate” about global warming, which i only know a little about, second hand, reminds me of the “debate” about Social Security, which I think i know a lot about. And they both tell me that “debate” in this country is conducted entirely in a fantasy-land of political opinions without benefit of real knowledge or actual thought.
apparently there is nothing you and i can do about it but sit back and watch.
I’m going long bermuda shorts in my portfolio!
my ancestors got out of Africa and followed the glaciers north. it was good for them.
your descendants may find Africa following them. I hope they like the climate. They could give up wearing clothes and learn to love the Tsetse fly. But I suspect those who have money will air condition themselves right up to the last minute.
We are having touble slowing down the growth in the greenhouses so that stuff in not ready too soon. Of course, if this weather pattern holds up, then too soon is relative. Soon usually being anytime prior to Memorial Weekend as a frost was always possible.
Looking around this week, I may actually have to cut the grass! Unlike some, cutting grass is just one more thing on my list and I don’t need that list to get one thing more this soon.
coberly, im in the NE Ohio snow-belt, where 5 months of winter & a 3 foot snow pack in early march is not uncommon…so if this be climate change, i can live with it…
dan, having bees, i’m pretty attuned to the normal time of the flower bloom on deciduous trees that most dont notice; my sugar maples normally bloom around may 5th; this year the flowers opened the last week of march…
dan
rjs was.
rjs
no. you can’t. if you can’t deal with snow, go back to Africa.
(please note, that is supposed to be joke. sort of.)
rjs
how are your bees doing? i’ve been hearing alarming stories. and the honey bee population around here has fallen off enormously.
my bees are strong this year, with the early spring…they’ll likely swarm if i dont split them myself…i’m waiting to hear of reports from elsewhere to see if others in the east are seeing the same…
lost a colony last year for the first time to what appeared to be symtoms of ‘colony collapse’…but i had much more severe losses in the late nineties from varroa mites, from which i never recovered…
rjs
thanks. i very much wish you good luck with the bees.
I’m hopeful that a secondary benefit of “global warming” will be that the NYC metro area will become a temperate zone. Something like northern Virginia would do nicely. I’m truly tired of NY winters and shoveling snow. The heavy duty snow blower I bought two years ago is a big help, but I’m limited as to where the damn stuff can be blown to. And then the growing season will be elongated. I’ve got a huge magnolia which has already bloomed and lost most of those blossoms now. They did last about a week which is longer than usual. The April rains usually hit just after the first bloom and knock all the flowers off the branches. I could learn to enjoy Virginia like weather. No, I’m not moving to Florida. A warmer NYC would be much better appreciated.
But Jack
you’d be so much cuter with a Southern accent.
But I ought to warn you. Folks in the North used to be sure it was the climate that caused Southerners to be, well, Southerners.
That’s deep south only, including and particularly in the Florida panhandle. Too much sun beating down relentlessly on the noggin has made their brains melt. Brains melt is the colloquial description of the adverse effect of heat on the myelinated coating of the axonal extensions of the nerve cells. Result? Slowed transmission of synaptic excitation resulting in thought malfunction and recognizable by elongation (due to slowed transmission) of verbal expression, ie the drawl.
That’s why I’m hoping for Virginia like weather. We should have allowed the south to secede back when, but the northern cotten merchants would have none of that. Black slaves with no place to escape to would likely have eventually revolted and taken over the deep south having many generations of better adaptation to too much sun and heat. That would have resulted in Mitch McConnell being a house servant at this time rather than an obstructionist in the Senate.
That’s what I tried to tell Lincoln. But he just sits there on that marble chair and don’t say nutthin.
And sure Virginia is better than Florida, but have you noticed they speak with a bit of a drawl even there.
I used to live in Florida and California. Now I live in a cold state whose name I shall not reveal on accounta we don’t wanna attract newcomers. Cold is better.