By Paul Homewood
A year ago, the Guardian was panicking about spring arriving early in Greenland:
Spring is arriving ever earlier in the northern hemisphere. One sedge species in Greenland is springing to growth 26 days earlier than it did a decade ago. And in the US, spring arrived 22 days early this year in Washington DC.
The most dramatic changes are observed in the high Arctic, the fastest-warming place on the planet, according to a study in Biology Letters. As the polar sea ice retreats, the growing season gets ever longer and arrives earlier.
The pattern is not consistent: grey willow sticks to its original timetable, and dwarf birch growth has advanced about five days earlier for each decade. But the sedge, almost four weeks ahead of its timetable in a decade, holds the record, according to a study that observed one plot at a field site in west Greenland, 150 miles inland, for 12 years.
“When we started studying this, I never would have imagined we’d be talking about a 26-day per decade rate of advance,” says Eric Post, a polar ecologist at the University of California, Davis, department of wildlife, fish and conservation biology, who has been studying the Arctic for 27 years. “That’s almost an entire growing season. That’s an eye-opening rate of change.”
Apparently it never occurred to either the Guardian or the junk scientists who wrote the paper that springs were actually warmer than now in the 1930s in SW Greenland:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/vinthers-sw-greenland-temperature-series/
Which is about par for the course for the lot of them!
The Guardian was also worried about the early spring in Washington DC.
No doubt they’ll breath a lot easier after this year’s atrociously cold start to spring there:
