I agree that the Wapo map is somewhat off. It pays to understand what your local climate zone actually is. We went from 6A-ish to 7A-ish already in the last 20 years, but there is quite a bit of difference locally due to elevation changes and water. I go more by Sunset zones than USDA zones. Either way, I expect more heat and variability is going to be the problem for me. I don’t expect that chill hours will be too different, and all the calculations keep USDA zones the same where it would make a difference to me- across lower Pennsylvania, Maryland and upper Virginia. I plant assuming colder than I expect at points in winter and hotter than I want in summer. Hoping zone pushing colder area bushes can be ok for under semi-permanent shade cloth, trees I expect more southern varieties will work. Humidity kills everything anyway around here.
As someone with a meteorology degree, I’d like to make the not-always-obvious point that weather and climate are two different things. The weather at any particular moment does not prove nor disprove climate change. So often in the media we see bias with extreme weather events being tied to climate change. The planet has always had extreme weather. I don’t believe that is changing. It’s the means that we’re worried about.
I think the planet (as a whole) has definitely warmed over the last 30 year normal period, but the debate is how much of that is anthropogenic. CO2 is an abundant tropospheric greenhouse gas and we know that’s been climbing steadily for quite awhile based on the Mauna Loa keeling curve. We’ve seen arctic sea ice areal extent and volume steadily decrease over the last couple of decades. We’ve seen permafrost lost in parts of the Canadian prairies. Despite changes in instrumentation over time and sometimes poor siting conditions at the official airport stations, the ice loss variables remain consistent.
Obviously the warmth is not necessarily even across the globe. Different regions have seen different extents of warming at different times of the year. As previously mentioned by another poster, the upper midwest has had some cooling. But overall across the globe, there’s definitely a warming trend. Will that reverse at some point? Maybe. The 60s-80s were a relatively cold period.
The brunt of the warming in the eastern US has been with the overnight mins. We’ve been cloudier, wetter, and more humid which limits the amount of radiational cooling possible at night. Areas further west that have seen more sustained drought periods may have some different climatic trends.
Whatever your stance on climate change is, I think we can all agree that cleaning up the planet, reducing emissions, and finding more renewable and efficient resources going forward is a positive. You won’t get growing zone predictions from me though. 
Such radical Marxist organizations as the Department of Defense and the US Navy disagree with your summary of the facts on the ground, er, water?
The US Navy is purportedly doing some pretty intense strategic planning around the realities of an open and navigable Arctic Ocean.
There’s actually an interesting analog between weather/climate dichotomy and the effects of sea level rise. It’s hard to conceive of dynamic systems, so the tendency is to focus on individual data points or trends in a data set. Real dynamic systems behave in mind boggling ways, because their machinations are many and interrelated. In the case of sea level rise, many of the worst potential effects are due to the dynamics, namely tides. Water doesn’t just seek a level and stay there, it flows, and its dynamics reverberate through the whole system. My parents have a house in Ft. Myers, Florida, nearly 10 miles inland from the Gulf. During Hurricane Ian, they had nearly 3 ft. of storm surge in and around their house. Was it seawater pushed in from the wind, tidal water brought in by the normal functioning of the tides across the earth’s surface, rainwater from the 18 some inches of rain that fell directly on them, or flooding from the Calloosahatchee River jumping its banks. In a word, Yes.
It is worth reading and understanding the effect the sun has on our weather. Note in particular the “little ice age” roughly corresponding with the sun’s activity.
Ice sheet loss is the best indicator of sea level rise. Look at the readily available data on how much ice the earth has lost in the last 50 years. All current indicators are that nearly 90% of the current ice cover on earth will be gone within the next 80 years. That ice locks up enough water to cause sea level to rise over 3 feet worldwide. New Orleans is already below sea level. Guess what it will look like with daily tides going 3 feet higher than today.
It will also be difficult to garden and grow trees in the Pacific Northwest if Mt Ranier erupts.
The difference between a Ranier eruption and the sea levels increasing significantly is that it is an absolute certainty that Ranier will eventually erupt, while it is merely a fantasy that sea levels will rise enough to disrupt anything.
It says the same thing for Seattle (that it was 9a then 8b), but I made my own chart using the data direct from NOAA and it looks very different. I feel like maybe wapo did a bad job visualizing the data accurately. Here’s mine for Seattle based on data from 1948 to end of 2022, with the 30-year average starting in 1977. You can see it’s almost 8a (i.e. cold 8b) at the beginning, crossed to 9a in 2013:
looking at all the numbers is maddening. of course, the IPCC science says we will all be about 1 to 2C warmer within ten years. that’s a shift in lowest temps but-
more importantly, the seasons and the weather are becoming less predictable. with more energy (warmth) in the atmosphere and oceans, in the water cycle, it’s going to be harder to find things that survive. late cold snaps, early freezes, heat waves and drought/flood cycles are getting more common. so relying on the usual seasonal knowledge is getting riskier. they call it “weather weirding” and I know we’ve all seen it in some way, it’s not going to calm and go back to normal for any extended period now. just how we’ve decided to manage the climate and I don’t like to discuss possible solutions to it, that’s the political part.
I plant for the zone, but I consider our local weirdness and climate more than that, even.
This sounds really familiar. Here in South Texas our Summers are brutal and our Winters are the variable. It can be 80° in October and a few days later we have frost. Really bad Winters put us in the teens for multiple days.Very tough on trees. I know all I can do is try to keep them healthy and mineralized and give some protection to the subtropicals. I have trees/plants with varying cold tolerance and requirements so that I have some production regardless of weather conditions.
Negative double digit temperatures like some of you deal with would have me running South as soon as the roads were passable. D
There’s a really interesting brand of seaweed kimchi (“sea-chi”) in a region that was based on lobster fishing that then was no longer able to support folks - they planted seaweed, and it’s become big business.
Me, I love kimchi in any form. 
“Global weirding” is a term that makes sense to me. Things just keep getting weirder, and less predictable.
Sometimes it’s lovely - California blooming was a beautiful sight - and sometimes it’s awful.
Makes it hard to plan.
@castanea May I ask that you not turn this thread into a debate on climate change?
I’m not trying to start a debate on climate change, I’m focused on asking a fruit growing question, and don’t want my thread to get locked.
It sounds like this isn’t something you personally take into account when planning trees. I appreciate your sharing that!
@hobilus May I ask that you not turn this thread into a debate on climate change?
I don’t want it to stir up negative feelings, or get locked.
Thanks for understanding!
@BlueBerry May I ask that you not use this thread to debate climate change?
I’m just asking about fruit tree planning, and don’t want my thread to stir anything up.
Thank you!
yes exactly the problem. it’s not that it’s too hot- it’s that we can’t use the past to predict when it’ll get hot.
the extreme weather events in a lot of areas are frightening. we are high desert and accustomed to heat but the last few years we have had heat waves and domes that just sit for weeks, summer here used to max out around 100 for a few days, 90 for a few weeks- now it’s up to 110+ for over a week.
the suddenness of seasonal change is really taking a toll here the most I think. we never had long transitional seasons, but now it’s overnight, summer to winter and vice versa with no time for anything to get ready. late frost and early freeze, not at any predictable time.
common knowledge here is not to plant anything until mother’s day- but most people who still follow this instead of the yearly weirdness end up with all their annuals flowering during a time when it’s too hot for pollination to happen.
we are lucky in climate, we are better insulated than many people and regions (excluding wildfires outside of town) but it’s still onerous.
Remind me in 15 years.
Start a thread on climate change, then ask that climate change not be discussed.
Okay…
@smsmith I’m asking about fruit tree planning.
I’m not asking people to debate whether climate change is real. This isn’t the place for that - there are a lot of other websites where we can go to do that.
I value the civility and kindness on this site.
Yup. This past winter, many of my citrus plants got killed stone dead. My rosemary and other plants got the same. The texas growers report the same. The warmer winters mean that the plants never fully enter dormancy, so the inevitable cold front does horrific damage. I noticed a few years ago that very mild winter frosts did much more damage than expected for the same reason…
Here’s what started the climate change discussion:
“Are you taking into account warming when you plant trees?”
Recognize that? That’s your OP.
If you don’t want to discuss climate change, don’t post questions which are based upon climate change assumptions.
I presented my viewpoint. I have nothing further to say on the topic unless you once again direct a comment to me.
I think @IntrepidNewbie is hoping we could parse some of the thornier aspects and/or maintain a civil discourse, both noble goals in my view. Obviously, it’s the ultimate slippery slope. Maybe religion is worse. Maybe. There are definitely bandwagons at play. I make a habit of staying off of them, myself. I’m more the singer songwriter type, I guess.
For my part, I have no political horse in the race. There are those who feel that anthropogenic effects are not significant, and that is a valid position to hold. But asserting that the climate in fact isn’t changing, that the sea isn’t in fact rising is not, in my view, valid. Data itself should be apolitical, and it’s ubiquity across institutions like our military is evidence of its validity (the data that is, we needn’t extend this automatically to analysis of the data or policy based on that analysis)
It’s not really possible to discuss this subject without delving into the observable facts of the altered jet stream. We’ve all seen it, unless we haven’t been paying attention. Have these polar vortices always happened, and are certain areas prone to them, sure enough. But historically these would best have been described as outliers, now they seem to be the norm.
The actual warming is observable too. Changes in the mean are by definition apt to be slight. From a grower’s perspective, though, in my region we’ve for example gained 30 frost free days per season, an increase of nearly 25%. The cause of that change and what we might hope to do (or not) about these observable facts are far far into the rhubarb patch from acknowledging the phenomenon and digging into some of the particulars of how it seems to be playing out. Is it erroneous to extrapolate these trends into the future? Perhaps, I could see that as a reasoned statement (which doesn’t require agreeing with it). But to deny that the very thing we are seeing happen is happening? That is simply incorrect.
Sea level may seem a far cry from fruit growing, but it’s ocean currents after all that generate and direct weather patterns. My main reason for mentioning it is that it’s really in the dynamics of these systems that all of the important and interesting stuff lies. And that’s fundamentally the difference between weather and climate. Moving of the mean in itself may seem unimportant, except when one considers the way the energetics driving that increase cause potentially dramatic differences in the way that system behaves. That certainly is the case with a match and a pile of tinder. Things can chug along in a given pattern for a long time, but that doesn’t mean it will always be that way. To acknowledge some of this at its core should not be inflammatory or controversial.