Spring comes earlier every year in Dallas. Our Mexican plums used to blossom in March and April; for the past three years, we’ve had blossoms well before spring even comes. Last year we had a cold snap that took the young fruit out, after a premature blossoming.
It’s a sign of creeping global warming. Every year I marvel at Al Gore’s powers to convince our Mexican plum to blossom early, part of the “global warming conspiracy” so many fear.
That is, this is a symptom of global warming that cannot be faked, that is from observation, and not from models.
With flowers on fruit trees come hopes of a bountiful harvest. Dreading the underlying meaning of such an early blossom does not change our hopes, nor the birds’ hopes, for a good plum harvest.
- Early springs force many other plants to blossom early; a photo essay on Dallas’s unusual stand of dogwoods at Dogwood Canyon Audubon Center
- The $7 million dogwood blossom, an earlier post on the same Dogwood Canyon
- Early Warning Signs of Global Warming: Spring Comes Earlier, Union of Concerned Scientists site
- Spring starting earlier in U.S. National Parks, study finds, Science Daily, October 6, 2016
- Spring will come three weeks early in U.S. thanks to climate change, Zoe Schlanger, Newsweek, October 13, 2015
- Spring coming earlier, study says, John Roach, National Geographic, January 21, 2009
- Plants refuse to listen to climate change skeptics, Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, March 22, 2008
- My original Tweet with this photo