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January seems a strange
time for a flower bed report, but I have had several conversations
lately concerning unseasonal activity in area flower beds.
My forsythia
bloomed before Christmas, my friend
Shelly
had daffodils growing for her “day before the day before New Year’s
party,” and Judy Wolfram, author of “Waste Not, Want Not” told me last
week that her flowering quince was in bloom.
In
Washington
D.C.,
there’s concern over the budding cherry trees, and in
New York,
sap is running and dogs are shedding their winter coats. At my house,
crocus have sprouted, and my lupine is up showing opened tender little
leaves. My lilac is budding, and I’m betting that many of my other
flower bulbs are just rotting in the soggy ground.
The ski
industry is taking the hardest hit in 25 years. In northeast states,
black bears aren’t hibernating. Geese no longer fly south for the
winter.
Both the Farmer’s
Almanac and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration predicted
that December, January and February would be, on average, two degrees
warmer than the 30-year average. One contributing factor to this warmth
(and the snowstorms in the West) is El Nino, and oscillation of the
ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical
Pacific Ocean.
El Nino is a factor for weather, but the climate, which has been warming
for the past 50 years, is affected by global warming. Weather and
climate are two different things.
Most likely,
our current warm, wet weather has been brought on by El Nino, and is,
for now, a temporary condition. It has been predicted that global
warming could raise the average temperature as much as three degrees
within the next 50 years.
And then, all this
freakish flower behavior will be normal.
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