Japan's cherry blossom 'earliest peak since records began'
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20070402230356/http://www2.gol.c...
it's not difficult to recalculate the dates. it's been done for most other anniversaries for historical events.
Isn't the Japanese calendar Lunisolar and borrowed from China? (from the wikipedia link you posted above)
Eventually you go back far enough and this breaks down, but we are talking recent history here.
They should be transparent about it and they weren't, and a lot of people here seem to be willing to just trust them and their methodology, but I can't figure out what's scientific or transparent about that. Isn't peer review supposed to catch and correct these types of issues before publication? And if not, shouldn't they be transparent enough in sharing their methodology that the concerns raised by amateur idiots like myself would be easily addressed, or at least accounted for?
Anyway, you have clearly already decided the issue in your own mind and are looking to justify it. So, no I am not going to waste my time providing evidence you can look up if you’re willing to consider the possibility you’re wrong then dare to do it yourself.
You’re effectively complaining they didn’t show their work when using dates from the Roman etc calendar. Historians really care about getting dates correct and have done extensive work to line up each historical calendar where possible.
This is the paper. It did describe the challenges of inferring the full-bloom date from old literary work. But the calendar conversion is not one of the challenges.
This is a list of material and conversion tables composed by the National Diet Library on the old calendars. There are clearly well-established method and researches about this. This would be the most basic problem for anyone studying history in Japan. It may be not straightforward (for you), but it certainly would be too generic and elementary for other historians to read in a paper like this.
Since the paper doesn’t say this, I assume you’re one of the researchers or associated with them? Do you mind sharing some details about how it’s taken into consideration?
here's one of them : https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00484-009-0272-x
The historical Japanese calendar suffered from drift away from seasonal events because the months had either 29 or 30 days in them, but the actual lunar calendar is 29.53... days long. This was a known problem, and they would occasionally add a 13th month to the year to compensate, but this was only done when either the Emperor died, or when the Emperor said to do it (usually to commemorate some significant battle). Both of those situations means that the leap months were not added in a systematic way, so trying to back-calculate dates has errors. Several attempts have been made over the last 75 years by scholars to create conversion tables for this, but they all have errors and can be inaccurate up to 4 weeks.
I found a tool that attempts to back-convert Japanese dates into Gregorian dates. The tool is called NengoCalc. There's a page (in German) here http://www.yukikurete.de/nengo_chronology.htm that talks about the challenges of the historical Japanese calendar. Here's a quote from the google-translate version of that page:
"In Japan, the Gregorian calendar was introduced in the early Meiji period. The following applies: ５ 明治 12 月 3 日 corresponds to 1.1.1873. Before that, the bound lunar calendar from China was used. With this the new moon falls on the first of the month. There are months with 29/30 days. From time to time intercalendar months were added, which were named after the previous month. In the case of Japan, it is particularly difficult because this did not happen regularly and therefore there was no continuous time base and consequently no continuous year counting.
Instead, you have the system of annual currencies, era names, 年号. These can be changed at any time, e.g. September 1615: 慶 長 20 年 -> 元 和 １ 年. The first currency of the year was 大化 (645). Because of the lunar calendar, the annual currency year can have a time difference of 4-8 weeks to the Gregorian calendar, so you need appropriate tables for conversion. So it can be that at the end of an annual currency year in the Gregorian calendar you are already in the following year. At this point it should also be pointed out that in Japanese materials this fact is often not taken into account and simply incorrect information is given. Since 1868 there has only been one currency per reign. If the annual currency changes, the year is named after the new currency. In addition, this is also used as a posthumous name for the emperor."
The tool NengoCalc, uses three different tables that have been developed for converting the dates and shows the discrepancies between those tables, and tries to use the "most correct" one, but verifying the dates is impossible.
All of this is to say that making claims about "this is happening on the earliest day ever" is a good headline, but scientifically unverifiable because there's no way to tie the dates in Japanese historical records to an astronomical calendar.
Anyway, feel free to look for a valid possible earlier day.
Every calendar has specific days with full moons because that’s a physical event that takes place regularly. It doesn’t matter when you’re adding a lunar month, those full moons will always fall on the same days, thus full moon + 7 days for example can only ever be 7 days from one of those full moons on any calendar.
Years are more complicated but in 864, Japan adopted one of the Chinese calendars in which a year was defined as 365.2446 which is quite close to the actual 365.2425 days and thus worked fine for long periods.
However, the 44 minutes adjustment needs a leap day every ~2.6 years or it obviously drifts out of sync. Adding a full month is pointless because it doesn’t change the offset.
Each lunar month is 29 or 30 days long, so if we miscalculate the month then the error will be also 29/30 days, back or forth. However, the graph in the article shows that almost all dates fall in (modern calendar) April.
So, if the blossoms peaked at 4/20 and we miscalculate by one month, we'll arrive at 3/21 or 3/22, which is too early to be likely. Ditto in the other direction. So, even in the worst case, we can safely assume that most of the dates shown are correct (or maybe one day off, due to disagreement over when the new moon started).
In addition, if they were meticulous enough to record cherry blossoms, I'd assume that the Japanese Imperial court would have written how many months were in each year ...
OTOH, looking at the data, events are dispersed over more than a month (range 124 - 86 = 38 days), so it is possible an earlier date was pushed later, where it fits better - one cannot reliably deduce month from year + day of month.
Have you thought of composing your thoughts in this thread into article and posting it on Medium/somewhere?
I would be happy to give it a proofread if you write it up. Contact details in DM.
I don't understand why so many people are dismissing the calendar issue and just assuming that "it's accounted for" or "it's not relevant" or "it's trivial" or "it's just noise". Where's the transparency? They've shared their dataset, but not the method used to determine the dates? That looks like a huge oversight and so many people here seem to be accepting the premise of the claim and giving the benefit of the doubt to the researchers. What's scientific about that?
The fires and floods are not the problem, they are the symptom.
We are on the brink of major collapse of several ecosystems. It’s diminishing and disingenuous to compare that to fears of nuclear winter from a prior generation.
I would absolutely be in favor of paying for those refugees care with my tax dollars, especially if they were paying taxes, too, which is exactly what the US should be doing with any and all immigrants. We need cooperation, and we need accountability. This planet is a collective responsibility of ours. It’s not one country’s problem.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50952253
More time at the beach out of necessity, less energy spent on heating because everything was on fire, no crops to bother farming!
But the climate was never stable. I don't understand why there is this inherent want of people to keep the climate as it is. There can be huge ecologic events (e.g. volcanic eruption, meteor impact, ...) that could impact the climate much more and much quicker than what human produced carbon emissions can achieve right now.
Isn't it a better idea to learn to adapt to climate change as opposed to trying to constrain the climate within some range we currently regard as ideal?
And just for clarity: I am not saying we should do nothing with regards to CO2 emissions. But I do feel we are very impractical at the moment due to the unwillingness to use nuclear energy, which seems the most practical source of CO2 free energy to me.
But at the same time it might be a good idea to be more prepared for climate changes and invest in building higher and stronger dikes in areas with huge populations, better systems to drain excess rainwater from cities and the like.
But re adapting to changing climate, the issue is we can’t adapt to something like the predicated changes, a significant chunk of the earth would become unlivable. Mass migration and food supply changes abound. unless by adapt you mean “mass death” which historically had been how we’ve (life) adapted. But if you are against your family dying, younn b probably want to figure out this climate thing ;)
But what most gardeners today are culturing is not so much Prunus jamasakura as Prunus serrulata, that are complex hybrids from several cherry species.
This mean that any comparison with USA data would be useless for example.
When an hybrid or lots of hybrids arose, contamination and eventually replacement of the pure species is expected. In a few centures the species change or even are replaced by the hybrids. (For example, finding a wild pure-blood japanese Chaenomeles currently is mission impossible). So my first question would be, how they managed that problem?
Are they registering a mix of several hybrids, that moves the average up or down because some in particular are trendy or forgotten?
Could be that and explanation to the final part of the curve?
A similar plot could made us conclude (wrongly) that the corn is getting much bigger in the last 1000 years "by climate change", instead because people selected more modern varieties of corn.
Just an neutral opinion.
Direct observations of the warming over centuries are direct proof of climate change, in addition to proof in ice cores, tree rings, and sedimentary deposit patterns (among others) of prior rates of change being much more gradual.
Surely this conclusion would only make sense if we believed that relevant climatic changes were occurring over the same time frame as the changes in size.
In the case of the cherry trees, the shift in the full-flowering date corresponds very well with the shift in the local temperature record (also provided at [0]), lending credence to that being the explanatory factor. Other factors are, of course, possibly relevant, but I don't think that the link is as weakly founded as your counter-example suggests.
In principle yes of course, but 1) there's an obvious mechanism which gives you a clear prior and 2) this is not the first time people have looked at this type of data and the results are consistent across species and locales [1].
Makes looking for "alternative explanations" look like motivated reasoning to me.
You might have a point if you actually had particular insight on how the species and cultivars used in Japan changed over time.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenology for a starting point.
There is also no reason for corn getting bigger when climate change happens so a ‘similar plot’ would not make us conclude anything of the sort. This is therefore a terrible analogy. In fact the evidence is that climate change will reduce corn yield [2].
[1] https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-0...
[2] https://exhibits.stanford.edu/data/feature/corn-and-climate-...
"First, we determined the species of the most common cherry tree at Kyoto during the historical period. In the modern phenological observations by the Japan Meteo- rological Agency, Prunus yedoensis (Japanese common name, Somei–Yoshino) is considered representative of all cherry trees, and its full-flowering dates are observed by most meteorological stations in Japan, except those in Hokkaido District and the Ryukyu Islands. However, P. yedoensis is an ornamental tree developed in the mid- dle of the 19th century, and it did not exist before that. Many descriptions in old documents suggest that a native species, Prunus jamasakura (Japanese common name, Yamazakura), was grown in Kyoto and its suburbs, and it was planted also in the ground of the imperial palace from ancient times. Therefore, P. jamasakura was the most common species of cherry tree in Kyoto until the middle of 19th century"
1. https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.1594
Like European lawns, apparently these gardens had to flaunt total lack of practical benefit, like peacocks' feathers.
That doesn't read like wanting to flaunt lack of practical benefit. Might it not be more about fruit trees and non-fruit trees requiring different forms of attention? Like having to clean up after possibly-sticky, rotting fruit, etc. You can't rake fruit like you would with leaves. If anything, non-fruit trees seem more practical.
Makes me wonder if that'd be the case with Japanese hornets as well. I might be inclined to think twice about fruit trees for less.
If the article was about mean peak bloom then I wouldn't really have anything to say about it.
The takeaway is that we've seen these conditions once in the last 1200 years, but based on recent data we expect things to continue to get hotter. As I saw someone say: don't think of this as the hottest year on record, think of this as the coolest year for the rest of your life.
As someone who had to suffer through −40-45°C winters all my life, I can live with that. I don't know if it's due to climate change, but this winter was pretty tame. Only a few −40°C days in total, not three to four weeks as it always had been previously.
The difference is the steep trend in the past 150 years.
Could it be global warming? Sure, but we need to be careful with our confirmation bias.
Yes, the article includes a nice graphic showing the "peak bloom day of the year". It shows that average peak bloom date has been getting steadily earlier in recent history.
In other words, maybe all the water pouring into our boat was caused by something other than than the gaping hole in our hull, but the primary focus is likely going to be patching that hole before investigating possible alternative causes when a very ready explanation is right in front of us.
I don't imagine the early records had every city in the country. Maybe the main two cities. Sample variance would increase over time.
Also what us the age of these trees given the history of Hiroshima.
The source paper states urbanisation in the title, but its not mentioned in the BBC article.
Also the trend reversal happened around 1800 which is well before most people talk about the human effects of industry.
Do all these trees bloom in unison? The scattered data seems to suggest there is variance between individual trees?
If there is variance, then how is decided what the start of spring is and at what point the tree as a collective species blooms?
For normalization, they measure the "peak" bloom, the day with the most trees in blossom at once.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210330/p2a/00m/0sc/02...
For example, this article about it from just 4 years ago shows an obvious trend: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/04/07/japans-c.... This year's peak is just below the bottom of the chart (March 26) in the Economist article. The Osaka University chart in the linked BBC article shows just how abrupt and accelerating the trend is in the last 150 or so years, and real changes in the last 10.
We are all in real trouble.
edit: whoever you are can brigade and flag my posts, but it won't change anything.
What are local maxima?
Some things cycle, and some things trend. Look up the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and tell us: is that cycling or is it trending upwards? Look up the temperature in the past 100 years and tell us: is that cycling or trending upwards?
Judging based on your "lol ok", you may not be here to advance the dialogue.
As an aside, it's pretty incredible to have 1200 years of data for this.
Even for cherry blossoms, they put off pollen, so you could probably do something similar. It'd be tricky to get a fine enough resolution (I'd be impressed if you could even get estimates as specific as month-level). Though the millenium of data would be awesome for verifying the proxy.
> Cores are drilled with hand augers (for shallow holes) or powered drills; they can reach depths of over 3.2 km, and contain ice up to 800,000 years old.
> The physical properties of the ice and of material trapped in it can be used to reconstruct the climate over the age range of the core. The proportions of different oxygen and hydrogen isotopes provide information about ancient temperatures, and the air trapped in tiny bubbles can be analysed to determine the level of atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core (edited for SI units preference)
> In January 2006, after falling on difficult times, it became a subsidiary of the Takamatsu Construction Group.
The oldest one that still operates independently appears to be still from Japan, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishiyama_Onsen_Keiunkan
To me that reads like 1409 had an even earlier blossoming, and still holds the record, whereas what's actually reported is this is a new earliest since records began. Granted, it's not much difference between 26th and 27th, (and the peak must surely be at least a little bit subjective?) but if we're disambiguating, why not 'earliest peak since records began, in 812' or similar. At least that's consistent with what's being reported.
Until this year, the earliest peak was in 1409, but this year is not only the earliest peak since then, but the earliest peak ever recorded since 812.
As someone in their late 20s, I don’t see how the future of Earth in another half-century is anything but bleak.
When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain.
Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the 1970s for the 80s, updated to the 90s then the 2000s and so on and so forth.
Galactic gloom and doom is probably written into our genes which is why it makes its way into almost every western religion. Armageddon. We need to balance our natural proclivity for gloom and doom with plausible scenarios like pandemics, asteroid strikes, obesity epidemic, population declines instead of fantasy one that never come to pass or ones we have no control over.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003358...
This didn't happen at any significant scale; I mean there were (correct) concerns about geopolitical forces leading to things like the mid 80s ethiopian faminei impact but no concern about wide spread starvation.
There was concern about mass starvation in the earlier part of the century, and it was pretty well founded. This changed due the "green revolution" and massive increase in food production.
What this shows is that predictive models can be made obsolete by new technology.
Unfortunately, a lot of people take the wrong lesson from that. The assumption that new technology will arrive in time to address a well predicted problem is dangerously irrational.
That isn't even close to the GP's argument. The steelman is every generation encounters existential problems that get exaggerated to apocalyptic proportions but that history is also a very long story of those existential problems being dealt with in one way or another. (And in the voice of GP "I lived through one such cycle")
The black-pilled people would counter that civilization today has an unprecedented number of ways in which to destroy itself and so that destruction is inevitable.
The counter to the black pill is that it's missing historical information which shows humanity has been successfully walking this tightrope for far longer than anyone thinks.
And then leaders of superpowers talked to each other, signed treaties, and decided not to start a nuclear war, because nobody likes dying.
> When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain.
So nations signed treaties and laws to limit sulfur and NOx emission, which worked.
> Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
Yep, treaties and laws. No more CFC, no more ozone hole.
> I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
OK I'll grant you that this was overblown a bit.
OP wasn't saying that they weren't real issues. In fact they were all serious! I think he was saying there's nothing good about falling into a nihilist hole. Living together on Earth is hard and takes cooperation. There's plenty of room for the innovators but no room for the defeatist.
> Academic analysis of the peer-reviewed studies published at that time shows that most papers examining aspects of climate during the 1970s were either neutral or showed a warming trend.
I'm too young to have read anything about Global Cooling during the 1970s, but I can confidently say that, by 2021, I've seen way more "Ha ha scientists warned about Global Cooling in 1970s which makes the theory of Global Warming invalid!" than actual "Scientist So-and-so warned that the Earth is Cooling." It's basically historical revisionism for selling an agenda.
"Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect."
i.e. even in the 70s scientist were worried about warming because they saw concerning data.
people getting concerned out about nonsense in the press has been with us since there was a press (cf 80s satanic panic) ... but that doesn't mean people being concerned about something in the press is nonsense.
Well, actually the Russians ran out of money.
Take a step further back. As Thomas Sowell says, economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods that have competing uses. In a free economy, money is how we organize that. But even if we had infinite money, that wouldn't give us more of anything else. It would just mean that everything cost infinite dollars to buy.
The problem that the Soviet Union had was that their economy couldn't produce enough to supply their military competition with the US. "Ran out of money" is one way of describing that, but the literal number of rubles in circulation is not at all the issue.
As a pithy summary of what happened to the USSR, that's not bad. As a summary of nuclear non-proliferation it's ahistorical.
That said, just because some people take hysteria to the extreme doesn’t mean the threats aren’t real. The nuclear annihilation one in particular came down to a handful of people steering the ship blind and somehow not running into the rocks while their first mates were screaming at them to turn the other way.
I vividly remember my teacher in High School asking the students to raise their hands if they thought there would be a nuclear war with the USSR in their lifetime, and I was the only kid in my class who didn't think there would be.
I imagine that there would be a similar response now, if you asked a bunch of kids if civilization was going to collapse due to global warming in their lifetime.
Doesn't mean that global warming isn't a problem, just like nuclear war wasn't a problem; it just means that people have a hard time evaluating risk and likelihood.
They only have to be right once, sure, but the entire fabric of existence is working against 'them' to make sure it will never happen.
That's not off the table at all, it's just not talked about much anymore.
To take your argument seriously, past performance does not predict future results. The fact that we've avoided disaster in the last 80 years does not mean we will be so lucky with climate change. It's certainly not a reason to ignore the risks - the ozone hole situation improved because the nations of Earth took united and conclusive action to halt it by banning CFCs.
That was a significant risk at one point.
> When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain.
Eh? Who told you that?
> Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
That was a serious, but ultimately very tractable problem, with an expensive but feasible solution, which was taken.
> I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
See answer two.
Global warming is most similar to number three, but the solutions are far, far more expensive, and may have been left too late.
Ultimately "something bad nearly happened, but it was averted" doesn't form a great basis to assume that the next very bad thing will also be averted.
Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
In all of those cases they were massive problems that took massive efforts to fix. Have you heard of SO2 scrubbers? The Clean Air Act? The Montreal Protocol? The bunch of dead liquidators in Chernobyl?
For that matter you missed tetraethyl lead gasoline additives, dioxins, asbestos, and cigarettes. There are too many massive problems and too frequently there are greedy (evil?) people fighting to keep the status quo.
What's different is that global warming has been blunted by icecap melting, ocean warming, and ocean thermal expansion. We've used up our budget, and it will get abruptly worse. The sheer quantity of energy is beyond any prior problem humanity has ever created and you can't bargain with thermodynamics. Now it's our turn to deal with a problem, like previous generations did in the examples you mentioned.
Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet. We can purposefully manipulate our environment for our purposes. Our adaptability will help us going forward.
Things are really speeding up! Half of all CO2 emissions by humans have been since...1990. https://ieep.eu/news/more-than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-sin...
Global emissions are higher than they were in 1990, and higher than the average over these last 30 years. And still increasing.
Exponential growth in smart people working on solutions for example. 1 year ago no one assumed that we would have 4 working vaccines already deployed to millions of people.
If there's a silver lining it's that on time scales of tens of millennia we might have avoided descending into another glacial period - which would be disaster for the northern hemisphere, erase Russia and Canada, and wipe out a sizable or even majority share of current crop production. It's tough to say if that would even matter to humans so far into the future, but maybe it's a small consolation.
The next ten generations or so are going to have some incredible challenges to overcome.
"questioning everything" is to forego basic levels of knowledge upon which higher levels of understanding must be built.