Climate change is rough here in Austin TX because it's getting hotter, but we're also getting more extreme spikes in freezing temperatures. There's a whole slew of plants and trees that can't survive here because of how cold it gets for only a couple days a year. It's not uncommon to lose something like a Palm tree due to one cold day out of the entire year.

I'm in Canada and spring is starting earlier and earlier every year but we will still get blasts of (what used to be normal for that time of year) frost/snow/freezing rain. The problem is with the warm weather, fruit trees will start to bud early and when the cold comes at night it kills all the buds and that's it, no fruit. Last year apple orchards all over lost their crops to this. The instability is what's going to cause chaos in the world.

Spring seems like it comes later and later to my eye. When I started farming in Canada we would have the ground prepped in mid-April and were really to start planting May 1st.

In the last 5-10 years we struggle to even get on the ground until mid-May. This year is no exception. May 13th already and we have only half of a field planted so far.

Where are you farming?

Have you heard about the damage done to grape and stone fruit crops in BC? It has been happening consistently enough that I expect some vineyards not to exist in the next decade.

Even where I am it’s considered a temperate climate and a friend’s grape crops were almost totally destroyed from a snap freeze in late February. He said it wasn’t that uncommon for the freezes to happen when he started, but what changed is how early the vines start budding, like you mentioned.

Late-starting crops can bypass this problem, but my understanding is that they often need irrigation because they grow into the tail of summer. That’s not really viable here either, as water’s gradually diminishing from our extended drought.

I'm not out west so I haven't heard about it happening there too.

BC wine industry in some areas purportedly had a crop loss of something like 90% by some estimates. With a 3 year turn around to re-establish the plants, and a very smoke tainted 2021, their industry is certainly in a trouble spot. Let's see if they have enough reserves to sell to get them past this disaster.

not just smoke tainted, a small bit of Kelowna (the heart of BC wine country) straight up burned down last year

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mcdougall-cr...

the whole area is actually surprisingly dry in terms of rain due to being in the rain shadow of the mountain. the lakes nearby make it tolerable, but even a small shift in climate patterns will turn the area into a near-desert.

Also in Austin. We have almost all native species, so no maintenance in theory but it's getting harder. We're focusing on drought resistance. I can do my best to cover the ones in danger of freezing on those few days, but harder to water everything constantly.

Also in Austin. We should have a HN meetup or something.

Might want to narrow the interests a bit or I'll get caught in a conversation about Elixir or something. I used to be a part of the Austin Hardware Startup meetup before it got enshittified but I've wanted to start something up again.

I'm also in Austin and laughing a bit at these results. It seems like the dataset cuts off after 2020 while trying to illustrate that winters haven't gotten that cold lately.

And yet just after that in 2021 we had temps drop to 0°F or slightly negative. In each of the past 2 winters we've also had temps drop lower than anything shown on this graph :)

Maybe we should start calling it climate instability instead of climate change.

"Climate change" is already watered down from "global warming", because people were nitpicking that it wasn't always warmer everywhere. Things like the late cold snaps people mention in this thread. But: on average, it's warmer almost everywhere.

Does instability sound more watered down than change? IMO instability is more obviously bad.

Agreed.

Human factor here: Sometimes, change can be a good thing. You don't hear that instability can sometimes be a good thing.

"Global warming" is what you get when you let the scientists pick the name. "Climate change" is better but you can still get the sense that it's lacking in a solid PR person to figure this out. I'd have thought that, by now, any of the hundreds of corporations attaching themselves to Sustainability, Inc. would've solved this particular naming problem for us.

The term "climate change" usage had a PR person behind it. Republican strategist Frank Luntz pushed for politicians to use the term instead of "Global warming" has it sounds less severe.

The term is often misattributed to Luntz, but it existed before him.

Apocalypse is only 3 syllables.

"Hysteria" is 4.

In which dialect is that the case? It is certainly not one I have ever encountered.

‘pocalypse I guess.

It's pronounced "fuck fuck fuck."

If climate stability has changed I like it being called climate change.

It just sounds a little dry. I think environmentalists have done a good job drilling the fact that it is a bad thing into us, but in the face of it “climate change” sounds like a sort of generic and neutral process. Global warming was a little better (I think? Or maybe I just grew up knowing it was a bad thing).

Climate Instability sounds sort of clearly bad (I think most people consider instability bad).

If we're workshopping this for you: "climate change" has alliteration and is only 3 syllables compared to "instability" which has a mouthful of 5 syllables.

Alliteration has to do with sounds, not letters.

Someone else suggested Climate Crisis which is actually alliterative and also sounds bad rather than neutral like “change.”

Seems like you are really interested in marketing.

It’s just the way the conversation happened to flow. I think everyone has an opinion on names.

For solutions I’m in favor of really aggressive carbon taxes and sanctions/secondary sanctions against that don’t implement them. But that’s the sort of thing better left to regulators and diplomats.

I seem to be getting lots of downvotes on what I thought was a pretty mundane and off the cuff post. Maybe there’s some history I’m not aware of.

My thought process was: Climate change is mostly bad, but it sounds like a sort of neutral, or even natural process. Environmentalists have done a good job pointing out that it is bad, but the name isn’t doing them any favors. Instability seems to be one of the major side effects and instability is very obviously bad.

I guess I’m curious if there’s a “pro-fixing the problem” argument against “climate instability.” By default I’m going to assume that I’m mostly being downvoted by climate deniers. But I’d be happy to be educated otherwise, if there’s a real argument against calling it instability.

I've written similar comments in other forums and have gotten a similar response. To me, global warming is on average true, but doesn't encompass the full range of negative local impacts.

Climate change feels euphemistic compared to climate instability. Like, all things change, so it's chill, right? I like "instability" because it feels like the time of chaos and contempt that the scientific consensus tells us we're facing.

But... then I realize I'm wordsmithing a problem. While rhetoric is important and all, I think many of our current issues get over-talked and under-actioned. I don't know that the wording is significant relative to other barriers to bringing about change.

I think you are right.

I don’t love “climate change” because it sounds too euphemistic, IMO. But the wording isn’t the biggest problem anyway. A

nd it has solid associations at this point.

You are being downvoted because making spurious complaints about nomenclature is a classic denialist tactic.

L is for learning, lol.

Edit: I have no idea why someone would flag your post. IMO people are going haywire with the moderation request functionality in this thread.

Hey I don’t think you’re a bad person, just that that point didn’t land.

Me, I’ll take my L too. I wasn’t really contributing to the conversation.

If the reliable granular data is 100 years or so, and the core samples are known to be lacking granular indication… how a you prove that the spikes and dips are atypical?

I don’t really care to prove it, I was going off that Texan’s report of their personal experiences.

If they look atypical for the last 100 years or so, and also look atypical from the less "granular", even-longer-term samples... then how do you prove that they're typical?

Eh, try like 300 years at least; you can get data from 1662 to now easy from NOAA. Governments love to collect data about mundane things; you could probably get a larger archive from a country that existed prior to 1781.

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets

Yea, I’m not sure we can rely on 1 degree of reliable resolution for when people believe in unicorns, dragons, a geocentric universe theory, and when the Celsius scale was not when water freezes at zero and boils at 100.

I don’t doubt that those records lacked quality due to inconsistent measuring equipment, standards, and practices. It has nothing to do with the beliefs of people at the time, though.

This was a time period in which scientists actually improved these technologies and practices, and we stand on the shoulders of that progress. They were doing the best they could with what they had.

Geocentrism was also well on the way out 300 years ago.

My point is mostly that people in the past did some great work, and having weird beliefs didn’t diminish that. People in the future will think we were similarly clueless for all kinds of reasons. You just do the best you can with the information and environment you’ve got.

One could use the same argument to include forest fire data prior to 1960, or to include heat/drought data prior to 1979, but climate alarmists do not want to do that because it destroys their narrative.

If you read what I said again, you should notice that I’m not saying the data from 300 years ago should necessarily be used. I’m saying that the reason not to use it has nothing to do with people believing in dragons or unicorns.

The part about measurements is fair (they weren’t standardized at the time), but the rest is irrelevant. The decision of whether or not to use data should be on the basis of its scientific rigour and veracity, not the scientist’s beliefs.

So you don't trust data from 2024; got it.

Does it matter if they're typical or not when plants no longer grow where they use to?

I now say "climate crisis".

That seems even better, it has all the negative connotations I wanted, while remaining punchy and alliterative.

I’m not sure why this is so downvoted.

I think instability sells it better to someone who is not sure if they believe in climate change because they can personally see it (worsening hurricanes, worsening cold snaps, hotter days).

I was actually so confused that I broke the golden rule of upvote/downvote systems and asked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40344698

I think the responses were reasonable. I’m still convinced Climate Change is not a very good name, somebody suggested Climate Crisis which just sounds better in every way. But anyway, the name is not the most pressing part of the whole thing.

Just call it "climate"

Crazy how these days even the native Texan palm tree is in trouble.

Record breaking heat last summer killed off a lot of cactus in Arizona.

Too hot for some planes to fly:

* https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/20/533662790...

* https://www.azfamily.com/2023/07/20/how-extreme-heat-can-imp...

Air is no longer dense enough:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_altitude

* https://skybrary.aero/articles/density-altitude

* PDF: https://www.faasafety.gov/files/events/NM/NM07/2023/NM071202...

Yep, was thinking the same thing. Climate change is also (at least partially) responsible for instability in the polar vortexes that shoot south more often now. Between Winter Storm Uri in Feb 2021 and "icemageddon" in Feb 2023 we lost a ton of plants and trees. We have a retaining wall in the back of our property and had a couple giant, cascading rosemary bushes that completely covered the wall - they were so pretty and always smelled amazing. I still get sad thinking about how Uri took those beauties out...

Things like this make me want to install some kind of heaters near my most prized plants. The power cost would be pretty high, and they wouldn't be sufficient to make it through the winter or anything, but they might allow us to weather a night or two of freezing temperatures in the early spring.

You can do this with soil heating cables and plant frost covers.

Our problem during winter storm Uri is that the Texas electrical grid almost failed and we had to power for nearly a week in subfreezing temps.

Yeah... Ok, my average temperature increased by %4.x percent, but my variance increased by quite a bit more than that. The assumptions underlying the growing zone approximation were never great ones, but I find the whole idea largely irrelevant now. Cold snaps a good ten degrees below normal have now repeatedly killed established natives (as in you could find them in local wildlife preserves). And the long dry spells averaging what used to be the yearly high, now kill plants adapted to live in actual deserts. Is it wrong that part of me is fascinated to see what comes next?

> my average temperature increased by %4.x percent

Can you do that with temperatures not in kelvin (with true zero)?

you can do what you want but it doesn't make it meaningful

It's not more meaningful in Kelvin. 1 to 4 is a 300% increase and so is 200 to 800. So hearing 300% tells you absolutely nothing, without the added context of "from the previous average temperature of the region".

My point is that a 4% increase in numbers on a scale where zero does not equate tot he total absence is not actually 4% hotter.

Yes, it is. Percentages don't mean anything in temperature unless it is Kelvin where 0 is truly 0.

1 to 4 degrees Celsius is not a 300% increase in anything but the integer representing temp. Try that in Fahrenheit or with a negative value.

Edit: I think I initially missed your point that percentages are kind of silly to use anyway.

> Percentages don’t mean anything in temperature unless it is Kelvin where 0 is truly 0.

Well, technically any absolute scale: Kelvin is the most common, but Rankine has the same feature. (It just uses Fahrenheit-sized degrees instead of Celsius-sized.)

I wondered if there might be others but left it up to you to correct me. :)

How long might it be until certain plants capable of surviving these swings in temperature evolve?

Quicker for plants that reproduce very rapidly, like garden weeds. Very slow for plants that takes a long time to reproduce, like shrubs and trees.

And then how long until we have cultivars of those species that viably contribute to human nutrition?

I was surprised to learn that the average in my town had only gone up 1 degree since the last update. I expected a bigger jump like yours, purely based on vibes.

Many of the impacts of climate change have to do with increased variance rather than with shifted average.

For example, every +0C day in the winter leads to snow melt. The total amount of snow collected per winter depends highly on the number of +0C days in the winter. Your average temperature might only go from -11C to -10C, but if there are 20 additional +0C days, you might end up with a lot less snow cover.

And a reduction in snow cover means a drop in albedo, which raises the average temperate…

> but the 800-pound gorilla in the room is climate change. Where I live, winters are 4.5 degrees warmer.

The George W. Bush administration (e.g. via Frank Luntz) advocated for the term "climate change" because Republican strategists wanted to leverage perceived uncertainty about global warming as much as possible.[0]

This is a PR effort that seems to have largely succeeded (both in adoption and its goals) and it's unfortunate that when we are literally talking about warming we adopt a term that is less precise; you are talking about global warming here.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.c...

This is an odd telling of history because the term climate change was also pushed by the scientific community as a more precise alternative because people didn't grasp how global warming could make some places colder with larger temperature swings in both directions.

It's conflating two things, Luntz and Republicans at the time did want to push a narrative of uncertainty surrounding greenhouse gas emissions and they wanted to switch terminology in a pro-environmental move because of the existing connotations surrounding global warming and "environmentalists" made it hard to get any Republican support.

You're not going to gain support/understanding for something, from people who have made up their minds, simply by changing the name of the thing. The same people who were sending chain E-mails in the 90s that said "How could it be Global Warming if it's so cold outside! LOL" are now posting Facebook memes that say "Duh, Climate has always been Changing!" Any new name someone gives it will be equally ridiculed, because its opponents don't care what it's called.

Same here. The longstanding "rule" for my area is "no planting before Mother's Day!"

For the last 8 years or so, ~April 20th has been very safe. I usually pick the first weekend after ~April 15th, which doesn't have an overnight low under 38 on the 10 day forecast. Haven't had an issue yet.

Thankfully some of the stores are starting to break the "rule", because for a long time it was impossible to even get plants before Mother's Day.

"No mow May" to save the bees/over-wintering insects - is now almost impossible as you'll have more than a foot high of regular lawn grass before June 1.

Genuine question: how does not mowing your lawn helps bees / insects?

I'm guessing that the lawn itself is incidental, and by not mowing you're letting flowers (including dandelions and clover?) grow?

Also, I'm gonna be up front about my ulterior motive: I hardly mow my lawn anyways and would love to have another reason to justify / rationalize what I'm already doing :)

But still - genuine question.

Many insects lay their eggs in the grass which hatch in early spring. By mowing early you may be destroying all of these eggs before they hatch.

There's debate about how effective it is, but that's the theory at least.

Also any sort of wildflowers let the bees eat an easy first meal before everything blooms.

Impossible or inconvenient?

Irresponsible looking if you share 20ft of grass with a neighbour.

Meh. They could stop over-tending their yard.

The perfect lawn is a relatively new thing - blame Scott lawn and other lawn-care companies.

I agree on the class-ist vibes of a perfect lawn, it seems ugly and pointless. If you're going to put in the work, why not a beautiful native plants garden?

Impossible with my reel mower. Nearly impossible with my buddies electric mower. I think a good gas mower will get through it ok.

I already have foot-high grass in places. Ask me if I care :-)

We have that rule here near Santa Fe, NM.

This year, this year the day before Mother's Day saw a hailstorm that decimated much of our cold-weather early crops (arugula, peas, spinach etc.)

Same. Blueberries, which require a certain number of chill hours, are perhaps the most affected

> Where I live, winters are 4.5 degrees warmer.

4.5 degrees warmer since when? And where?

The map has an explanation:

About this data

The 2012 USDA hardiness zones were calculated using the average lowest winter temperature for the observation period of 1976-2005. The new zones are calculated using the years 1991-2020. These two observation windows overlap. Colors show the difference between the two 30-year averages for each place on the map.

My area is 3.8F warmer using this method.

FWIW they likely mean Fahrenheit. I.e. 2.5 Celsius.

Yes, I did. 4.5 degrees Celsius would be a newsworthy increase in winter temperatures! :)

Where I am at, in the Canadian Rockies, the daily temperature this winter was routinely 7-9 degrees Celsius above average (1970-2020) according to my iOS Weather app. They introduced this feature last year and I have been checking it nearly every day. Other than a cold snap in January (that killed my bees!) the weather was warmer every single day.

You're hitting on another issue we gardeners are noticing - overall the temps are warmer, causing things to bud early, but there are still cold snaps. The cold snaps aren't any colder than they should be for the time of year, the problem is the inter-snap days are a lot warmer. This increased variance in temperature is actually worse than the average temperature getting warmer.

Weird, in my area in SoCal winters have become cooler. Summers are definitely warmer.

This update is based on a dataset change that shifts the observation period by 15 years. Buried within a footnote that nobody will ever read:

> The 2012 USDA hardiness zones were calculated using the average lowest winter temperature for the observation period of 1976-2005. The new zones are calculated using the years 1991-2020. These two observation windows overlap. Colors show the difference between the two 30-year averages for each place on the map.

So while climate change may or may not be the explanation for broader trends in the map, you cannot rule out noise for any particular location, especially given that the methodology uses the lowest winter temperatures in that window as the basis for the zone. That's a fundamentally noisy metric. For example, this drops the blizzard of 1978 -- one of the largest ever in US history -- from the dataset. It's hard to know how that affects the zones without careful inspection, but major weather events like that can easily affect simple outlier analysis. You can see this in the dot plots for Raleigh (the default), which had two outliers in the winters around 1995, and then an otherwise flat series of data. What was the prior dataset? We don't know. Just look at the two default examples:

https://imgur.com/a/oZjQ36Y

It would only take a small number of cold or warm winters to shift those means in either direction.

I don't want to overemphasize a silly little article about plants, but IMO, the fact that NPR buried this information while hyper-focusing on specific locations is just another failure of basic journalism. Telling people that an arbitrarily defined metric has been changed is meaningless, unless you tell people the specific change that was made. It should be the first or second thing they tell you, not buried in a hidden footnote.

Yeah, my location is supposedly 5 degrees warmer, but looking at the data, it’s obviously unchanged except for one outlier winter.

Were you somehow able to look at the dataset for the prior standard?

nope. I misunderstood the graph and retract my previous comment.

And by "buried" you mean "dedicated a whole screen to it at legible size"? I don't wanna go back and count, but as I was scrolling through the sequence on mobile, it's definitely in there, up front and clear. Maybe you had a different experience of the website?

I appreciate data skepticism, but your point about the 1978 blizzard doesn't really help, as blizzards and snow events in general are not generally associated with extreme cold events.

Also, the site tells you about the changes in whatever place you plugged in. I'm not clear on why you're calling this "hyper-focusing on specific locations". It's literally telling you what's going on in your neighborhood and gives good reasons to even then discount the new number.

By "buried", I mean: "hidden in a collapsed 'about this data' accordion, below the 'change in lowest winter temperature' color bar, in the fourth text box that appears on downward scrolling."

Unless you're seeing a wildly different website than I am, this is a strange definition of "up front and clear".

But just to belabor the point a bit, if I were a journalist covering this, my lede -- the very first paragraph of the story -- would be something like this:

"Recently, the USDA updated its plant hardiness map for the first time in 11 years. Among other changes, it based the definition of winter temperatures on data from 1991-2020, dropping data from 1976-1991 as part of the update. This resulted in a calculated increase in lowest winter temperatures in many locations across the United States."

Simple. Factual. Unbiased. Provides necessary context. It isn't that hard to be a good journalist here. I hesitate to speculate, but my suspicion is that this was buried because it weakens a narrative that the writers and editors were trying to achieve, by adding nuance.

I don't think you understand how much gardeners, the nursery industry, and farmers rely on this data. We know things aren't the way they used to be. That's why you're starting to see so many "green thumb" people getting more vocal about climate change. They have first-hand experience with what's going on that isn't easy to dismiss with a hand-wave.

I know HN loves pedantry, but this criticism is overblown to the point of being misleading.

Look at the Raleigh graph - there are a few outliers, but the average (the one number being reported) is right in that cluster of flat years. And that's what's apparently gone up 5°

There is always going to be information lost when you condense 30 years into 1 number, but you are "pushing a narrative" far more than they are

The point was that you don't know what data they dropped by shifting the data 15 years forward, and that it only takes a few such "outliers" to shift the mean in an otherwise flat dataset. Moreover, you wouldn't know how flat the trend in the data actually is from the article itself.

For Raleigh (new zone high 8a, almost 8b) there are three winters in the low end of the "previous" zone of 7b in the last 10 years. For St Louis (new zone 7a) there were two winters in zone 6b and one in 5b (!) in the time since 2013. There were an equal number of winters in the "old zone" of 6b and the "new zone" of 6a in the dataset shown. Even calling that an outlier is stretching the definition of the term! And I didn't cherry-pick these examples...these were the ones NPR chose to highlight.

This isn't "pedantic". It's a basic understanding of statistics and the methods being applied here.