I’m sorry you have such a low opinion of scientists. As a group, they are my heroes- at least the ones with integrity that can’t be bribed to interpret data in a manner favorable to corporations. I believe those types are a small minority, but always available for hire because they aren’t particularly successful in the realm of legitimate science.
Most scientific discoveries start with an idea and then a great deal of research which takes time to create genuine clarity from and involves a certain amount of controversy and even angry arguments along the way. Sometimes consensus changes as new research sheds more light.
Just as climate is about long term trends, scientific knowledge is a long term journey. Some things eventually become almost certain and I believe you are arguing against one of them.
But that is why we cannot discuss climate change on this forum- it has become a political issue.
I don’t have low opinions of scientists, my husband has a PhD in research with over 50+ patents. However like I said before, they can be wrong depends on what input they feed.
Actually what I’m against is people using any thread to discuss political issues since the politics forum has been shutting down.
There’s nothing about winters getting colder in a given locale that doesn’t comport with the idea of climate changing. That’s the whole point of the matter of the jet stream. There are warm air masses and cold air masses at all times moving about in our atmosphere. Their interactions are what generate our weather patterns. The long term trends of these patterns are what we call climate. So it’s entirely likely that significant warming in one region would be associated with noticeable cooling in another.
As I understand it, during the Pleistocene, ice sheets were confined to N America and W. Europe. All of Siberia was ice free, with a humid and mild temperate climate. It was chock a block full of mammoths who had a literal field day munching all of that grass. Now it’s dry with the coldest winters on Earth short of Antartica. Why? Changes in the patterns of movement of warm and cold air masses.
Winters are getting warmer in S. CA and I seriously doubt there are neighborhoods in that area that somehow have local weather unaffected by that. It is nothing I’ve ever heard of. Certainly some regions are not affected or less affected by global warming but I don’t think the variability occurs from neighborhood to neighborhood, do you?
Here in Alaska the consensus of both scientists and lay people is that winters have not been what they used to be for quite some time now.
I do reserve a chunk of my efforts and space to try borderline stuff, and currently have a fairly large and dead lapins cherry tree to prove it. Still, the bulk of my orchard is for the ridiculously hardy stuff. I get the allure of getting that fruit that should not grow here to do so but I also love the stuff that is just well suited to our harsh environment. I have seen snow falling on flowering trees and bushes and I know that they are going to be fine and the insects will be out pollinating in the mid 40’s F, because they are just as hardy as everything else around here.
Weather data isn’t too hard to come by and doesn’t require state residency. Can you find any that supports your recollections? That would be so much more convincing than sharing memories. Memories are not reliable. Mine, yours anyone’s.
I tried to find some fairly complete southern CA NOAA weather station datasets to run the USDA zone calculation for, and sadly many of them are spotty, with entire years missing here and there, or months at a time. One exception was Long Beach Airport, which has not missed so much as a single day since they started recording daily minimum temperature in 1949. Using that, here is the “average annual low” calculation from 1978 (30 years after 1949) to present:
Based on that, the USDA zone moved from 10a to 10b sometime in the early 2000s.
Leah,
I am in MA, too. Almost all my fruit trees in ground are rated zone 5 or higher. I am in zone 6a now (when I started many moons ago, it was zone 5a).
One fruit I want to plant in ground but can’t is non-astringent persimmons. If I would be be able to plant those NA persimmons in my backyard 15 years from now, I’d be happy.
Average low is important to chill hours, but wine growers are more concerned with overall averages. Brix in CA wines has been on the rise with average temps and some say it has been detrimental to the quality of the crop. Excessive heat inland may be why midsummer peaches often go from being luscious to grainy crap with fruit getting literally cooked on the trees. Wine cultivation has pushed stonefruit production further inland in the last few decades, I believe.
I suppose that what is bad for CA wine grape growers is good for those in Washington and Oregon, but I’m no expert on wine.
I hope this still vibes with the intent of your OP, but I’m looking at other factors more than my USDA zone.
I’m in the Great Lakes region, and we haven’t had a polar vortex sit on us for a few years, but I lost several Z5 holly bushes in the last one. I might risk it with a rosemary that I can cover or replace, but a dead fruit tree would break my heart.
However, our growing season has increased by roughly 2 weeks in 40 years. I might get a fig harvest most years, or I can try out new types of sweet potato, or melons! We’re also getting more precipitation overall, and more volume per event. So most of my planning has been towards containing and slowing the water so that it can be used, instead of overloading the storm sewers.
I am really tempted to try northern pecans, though. They say zone 5, maybe better, and they wouldn’t mind occasional wet feet.
I wonder if N. pecans are ever very productive. I tried a couple in NY and crops were tiny and nuts small. The owner of the land sold it after the trees had been growing for maybe 22 years and the buyer never hired me to manage the extensive orchard I had installed there.
Absolutely, I’ve planted many more figs and Asian persimmons in the last 6 years. It used to be more challenging to grow them here, but winters have been less harsh. That doesn’t mean any will do here. I still select hardier selections that don’t ripen too late to maximize success.
There weren’t too many folks growing either around here 12 years when I planted my first ones. Many noticeable specimens have popped up in the mean time to the point where they’ve started becoming a common sight around my neighborhood with me playing no part in directly convincing anyone to plant them.
That’s not to say them won’t be heavily damaged by a colder than usual winter, but those have become less frequent.
For grapes, dry farming is better, they develop complex flavor when the grape roots have to dig deeper. It has not hurt wine ratings at all. In fact I don’t buy wines in the wet year.
.
