Global Warming in the Garden

Is global warming wreaking havoc on gardeners' planting schemes?  Will climate zones have to be redrawn?  Should gardeners tear up their old gardening books because their advice is no longer useful?  Simon Busch weighs in on the pages of the Financial Times--and quotes our very own charming and witty Michele Owens.

Boon, though, or bane? The fertile gardening blogging scene reflects this dilemma of how to react to climate change. Should you don a hairshirt and bemoan mankind’s meddling with the seasons? Or, in the words of one blogger, Michele Owens, on Gardenrant.com, join the “fiddling-while-Rome-burns camp”? She describes “delighting in every moment of [the] peculiarly warm winter and making bold plans regarding magnolias and sweet cherries”. “Hey, you cynical and self-serving auto and power industries,” she adds, “we . . . gardeners owe you one!”

Personally, I think all this talk about how global warming will change the way we garden is premature and overwrought.  Mind you, I'm not one of those global warming skeptics.  I'm convinced.  I just think that gardening is inherently risky.  Just when you think you've got the perennial border all sorted out, along comes the worst drought in twenty years. As soon as you coax a tropical vine into blooming, the hardest freeze on record will hit.

Floods, high winds, horrifying bug infestations--show me a gardener who has not experienced some weather-related calamity! If we can't blame the weather for the state of our gardens, who do we blame?  Ourselves? Never.

And for god's sake, let's not tear up old gardening books.  Send them to me if you can't bear to look at them anymore.

Again, it's not that I don't think global warming is real.  It's just that our time and energy could be better spent making real changes to reverse the effects of climate change, not redrawing hardiness zone maps or lamenting the fact that our tulips aren't blooming on schedule. They never bloomed on
schedule anyway.

Comments

[Ed Bruske]

On the theory that gardeners are citizens first, and have inherent interest in the health of the planet, I think they should be looking at every possible way they can minimize their contribution to global warming. They can start by putting power tools in moth balls, abstaining from chemical fertilizers and pesticides, develope a preference for products made locally, rejecting plastics and, yes, replacing incandescent bulbs with flourescents. You could also vote for people who give a shit.

[Jeff Gillman]

I'm right there with you. The way I see it changes are going to be minor enough that it's not actually going to mean much. Sure, average temps will change a little, but I never see average temps where I am in Minnesota. Shoot, a couple weeks ago we saw a few days at 70-80 degrees and last week we saw fourteen degrees for a few nights -- totally annihilating the few plants that I tried to start early!

Carbon dioxide is a fickle beast. Most people are worried about it because of its impact on global warming. I'm worried about it because as it increases in our atmosphere some plants will love it, and some plants won't. Not all plants are encouraged by high CO2 to the same extent.

[Michele Owens]

Ed's right--and voting may be the most important part, given the scale of the problem.

But I really am schizophrenic on this subject, as I said last week.

I think global warming is going to be bad, bad, bad. I mean, consider how much a shift of just a few degrees affects your outlook. Or how different the world feels when you've had just a little too much rain or an unexpected drought. Now multiply that, and then think how the plants feel about it.

Even subtle shifts in the weather patterns can throw a monkey wrench into an ecosystem. It's hard to imagine my part of the world without sugar maples, but they may very well retreat to Quebec in short order.

On the other hand, I AM a gardener, and so am jealously obsessed with the lush things those lazy-ass gardeners in Zone 6 and 7 can grow and I can't. So, I may cry over my lost sugar maples, but I'll do it into a homegrown peach cobbler while surrounded by fields of zantedeschia aethiopica. And they may very well be crocodile tears.

[Jon Beard]

I guess by now you know that I am convinced that human caused global warming is the biggest and crookedest con in the history of the world.

I have thought and studied this probably way too much. As a matter of fact I have been thinking a lot about what would it would be like if we applied the same science to building airplanes as the IPCC does to its study of global warming. I thought what if the UN created a panel to design air planes. Hmm....

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard IPCC the UN airline on its inaugural flight of a completely new and innovative airplane named the Global Warmer. This plane is a marvel of innovation and a result of twenty years of meetings and discussions. It has been adopted by a distinguished panel of experts that meet every winter in Hawaii.

The design has been extensively modeled and revised over decades. The consensus is that it will revolutionize air travel for the next 100 years. This flight will prove to deniers that a plane can be built on extensive models and consensus and does not require the obsolete methods of calculation and test to prove its airworthiness. Our pilot today does not have a license, however, he has read and lectured about flying for thirty years. Here is the Oscar winner and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient, your pilot for today’s flight from New York to San Francisco (or maybe Chicago if things don't go as well as planned), Albert E. Gore!

[Claire Splan]

In a society where people are increasingly disconnected from nature, gardeners are one of the few groups that are connected and are therefore in a position to see even small changes unfold. Consequently, I think we have a responsibility to play the part--very loudly--of the canary in the coal mine.

I expect that the weather in Alameda, CA, where I garden, will continue to be pretty enviable--right up to the point where the rising sea levels put my house and garden under water. Redrawing hardiness zone maps? Are you kidding? We're going to be redrawing maps--period!

[JLB]

I don't need convincing on the subject of global warming either - but I do believe that it's way too easy for us humans to view time from our little micro-blips of existence. Seasons and cycles are so much broader than our lifetimes, it seems a little suspect to analyze such a long-term projection as global warming on the scale of one or two rather unusual winters.

You said, "I just think that gardening is inherently risky."

Point well taken. There are just so many variables!

[Susan Harris]

Good point, Claire. The effect on gardening is the least of it.

[william]

Here in Wales, UK there have been definite trends over at least the past 20 years, the summers are getting hotter - this coming one is supposed to break all records - with the ensuing droughts - and the wet extremely windy relatively mild winters.In the village where I live records have been kept of temperatures every day since 1989 - you can 'see' the results on http://www.mygarden.me.uk/climatechange.htm
Overall there has been an increase of 0.94°C at a highly significant level statistically.If it continues to rise at this rate in 12 years time temperature will have risen in this area by almost 2°C. So, it does not take a genius to work out what this really means whether you think this is just part of weather cycles or (what I believe in) Global Warming. The warnings are here now!

[Christopher C in Hawaii]

Whether it is human caused or due to increased solar activity and planetary alignment, retreating glaciers, melting ice caps and liquifying permafrost tell us the planet is warming. In the swirling soup bowl of our atmosphere and oceans, settling in to a new temperature equilibrium is not going to be a linear process.

Many plants have very specific temperature ranges and water cycles at which they will grow and flourish. As the environment changes so will the health, vigor and location of where plants flourish. Plants which capture the energy of the sun are the basis of all other life forms on the planet. In the oceans its the phytoplanktons doing the same thing.

As much as some are oblivious to it, human beings are inescapably connected to the biosphere and the natural world. It does not matter if Global Warming is human caused or a natural function of solar activity. If the plant based food chain crumbles or declines the species at the top of the chain are going to feel it.

Just to be on the safe side I am headed to higher, cooler ground while the gettin is good.

[Jon Beard]

William,

I believe in Global Warming. I recycle. I drive a car that gets 30 MPG. I have changed out all the lightbulbs in my house to flourescents. Well I like to say its because I am a responsible citizen of the Earth, but perhaps I'm just cheap. I don't do it to prevent global Warming.

Last December we were told that this is the warmest winter in recorded history. We then plunged into single didgit (Farenheit) temperatures and it is almost mid-April and it is in the twenties every night and in the forties (If we're lucky) during the day. It is the coldest Spring in history. The Earth is warming, HOORAY! I far prefer this to cooling. The cause is the question. I prefer to accept that the fluctuations in solar activity documented over thousands of years that correspond with temperature changes on earth are responsible. Others want to believe in models, theories and concensus that cannot be proven with tests, calculations and are at odds with historical data. This is their right. When they want to shut down coal plants that produce 52% of the power in the US at rates 25-30% lower than average, I object. When they want to set up crooked carbon offset programs similar to the energy trading scam of Enron, I object. When they want to do all this on the bases of a UN panel using everchanging components and results, I object. When they try to enact laws that will drive industry out of my country and send it to nations with a terible history of polluting, I object. When they institute policies that will put people out of work based on ill-conceived theories, I object. When people confuse global warming with human caused global warming I am exasperated. Believe what you want William, your entitled to your opinion, please don't expect me to believe it and don't try to ram it down my throat.

[Christopher C in Hawaii]

Jon, what good is a job if there is no food to buy? You can't eat coal.

[william]

John - I do apologise if I appear to ram Global Warming, due to us, down your throat. It is not my intention - it is a very complicated situation and I concede you may well be right - but I hope you will agree with me, even if we might disagree on some points, the good news is that people are thinking and becoming more responsible - as you say, recycling, saving energy,driving more effecient cars. I certainly agree with you about this crazy carbon offsetting and you might be suprised about my views on coal power stations - I do agree with you.

[Jon Beard]

Christopher, the whole thing whether human caused or natural cycles is overblown. The rise in temperatures over 100 years has been 0.7 degrees. This is an unalterable fact. The temperature during the Medieval Warming period was 3.0 degrees higher by comparison. During this period the there was a renaissance when farming and culture flourished. Starving in Europe was eliminated. The glaciers did not melt. The seas did not rise 20 feet. the polar bears did not die. Why do you think you will have a problem getting food? It is an irrational fear. I have spent nearly 40 years in and associated with engineering and engineers. It is a great responsibility to know that if you make an error it may maim or kill someone. I cannot imagine going into a room full of 12-15 engineers and explaining that we have modeled this design and come to a consensus that it will hold together. The facts are not there to support human caused global warming.

Let me ask you:
Where are you going to get your electricity if they shut down coal plants, windmills? 2% of current usage in Texas, which is the leading producer of windmill power in the US.
Why are we putting 10% ethanol in our gas when it gets poorer mileage and pollutes more? It has raised corn and meat prices, but I don't see the advantage other than to the farm lobby. i know its renewable, but there is ample energy in Alaska (60,000 acres in a park the size of No. Carolina that is visited by 200 people a year seems to be not much of a sacrifice of frozen tundra) Shale oil, tar sands, offshore resources, coal; there is more power in the US than we could burn up in 500 years. Too dirty for you; how about nuclear. Break out the padded suits and climb over the barbed wire. NO NUKES. The French can do it and we can have hundreds of subs, aircraft carriers and other ships run on nuclear power for over fifty years, but somehow we can't build a safe land-based plant. For crying out loud we cannot even put in windmills if some politician can see them 3/4 of an inch high on the horizon.

[Jon Beard]

William,
Sorry, you just happened to be there to take the brunt.
I have no problem with your concerns, I just find no reason to believe it is human caused and really can see no cause for alarm.
It is interesting to note that Al Gore's carbon offset company is run by Peter S. Knight who ran a company called Molten Metals here in MA. This company went bankrut after it could show no results or chance success after being awarded $33,000,000 of Department Of Energy Grants. When it was clear that there were going to no more grants Knight and hid friends cashed in before the news was made public. They sold millions of shares before the stock collapsed. He was summoned to congressional committees four times related to this. Janet Reno declined to investigate. This is the head of Gore's company that stands to make tens of millions of dollars, if the legislature that we must act on now before the tipping point occurs or we will all be doomed. I don't know about you, but I have reached my tipping point with all the hype and corruption involved.

Wiiliam, I shouldn't have unloaded on you like that, but, well, you were there.

Jon

[Jon Beard]

PS Knight was Al Gore's campaign manager and Bill Clinton's before that.

[william]

Jon, I could not agree with you more - there is a lot of dirty politics in all this - what a shame when we just have one planet to share and hopefully enjoy!
Regards,
William

[Claire Splan]

Before this conversation gets completely hijacked by the naysayers, can we just point out that the majority of the science community worldwide has concluded that the global warming that is currently taking place is caused by humans? And, not insignificantly, the IPCC reports are being watered down by several governmental influences who want to play down the science, not ginned up to look worse than it is.

And Jon, isn't there a meeting of the Flat Earth Society that you should be hurrying off to now?

[Jon Beard]

Claire,

the majority of scientists and I agree that there is global warming. The majority of scientists and I agree that humans may have some small influence. The majority of scientists and I agree the affects are minimal. The majority of scientists and I agree that there is no way to quantify the human impact. There are some politically oriented scientists and just plain politicians that are trying to scare people with overblown hype and see this as a way to gain political power. There are people who are corrupt and intend to make money or gain political power qwith scare tactics.

There are also other people that do not take the time or do not have the capability to understand. These people usually cover up their shortcomings or ignorance by calling names.

[Pam]

Wow! Your assuredness still amazes me, especially regarding your insight into what scientists think - especially considering that the majority of the scientists that I know (either personally or through peer-reviewed scientific literature) believe that global warming is being enhanced by human activities, and that the main debate lies in the kinetics of the process. And to think that I thought I was a scientist that was not politically-oriented...who knew?? But to risk become one of those scientists that covers up their ignorance by calling names, I'll think that I will make a nice martini, and sit out on my deck in the unusually cool air, and ponder where I will plant my 'Ruby Moon' purple hyacinth bean seeds this year - and perhaps I'll also ponder what is in the thousands of peer-reviewed publications related to global warming that my students read each year in my class, because those articles couldn't possibly contain DATA. Cheers!

PS Claire: Perhaps you and I could chip in and get Jon a membership in the Flat Earth Society?

[Ellis Hollow]

I'm not going to go through the debate again. I've blogged about what global warming will mean to Northeast gardeners and farmer here: http://www.remarc.com/craig/?p=34

What can gardners do? Well one implication of climate change is that we need to figure out which varieties work best where as the climate shifts. (Shameless plug alert.) We're building a database to help with that at the Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners Website: http://www.cce.cornell.edu/veg/

Come rate and view varieties that work well (or not so well) for you. We could use a couple thousand more observations so that we can get a good dataset that will help gardeners figure out which varieties will work best in their gardens.

[Ellis Hollow]

I'm not going to go through the debate again. I've blogged about what global warming will mean to Northeast gardeners and farmer here: http://www.remarc.com/craig/?p=34

What can gardners do? Well one implication of climate change is that we need to figure out which varieties work best where as the climate shifts. (Shameless plug alert.) We're building a database to help with that at the Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners Website: http://www.cce.cornell.edu/veg/

Come rate and view varieties that work well (or not so well) for you. We could use a couple thousand more observations so that we can get a good dataset that will help gardeners figure out which varieties will work best in their gardens.

[Jon Beard]

Well, Claire since you are so up on what scientists have said and the science involved maybe you could answer some questions that I have on the IPCC report. I have read the report (it is only 18 pages long) and some things trouble me.
First; why do they insist on showing a chart representing C02 and other greenhouse gases using radiative forcing which deceptively shows an exponential rate of increase. This is done only for the data for the last ten years with previous data shown without "radiative forcing" This seems to be intentionally misleading.

C02 is listed as a long lasting greenhouse gas. In middle school we used to set up fish tanks in which the plants and animals lived in a little balanced ecosystem. The animals gave off C02 and the plants used up the C02 and put 02 back into the water. The fish ate the plants and everything balanced out. Has this changed?

The C02 is listed as being 25% higher than historical records. As C02 represents 4% of the total greenhouse gases, I calculate that this is a 1% increase. The increase of methane is listed in the report as being 240% higher in the same period. This is mentioned and never discussed again. Wouldn't this be significant?

In the report only the last 100 years of "instrumental" data is used. Doesn't this ignore thousands of years of human history? Doesn't this conveniently take care of things like the Mideival warm Period and many other time periods that conflict with the model?

Why oh why do they still insist on including tree ring data in their report. The Hockey Stick calculations by Prof. Mann of UMASS has been debunked for at least ten years.

They list the temperature increase in the last 100 years as .56 to .92 degrees C (please tell me how such a range is is arrived at especially when only "instrument years" are listed) They also state that the temperature rise from 1850-1901 was .57 to .95 degrees C. The temperature rise given for 2001 to 2005 as .76 degrees C. They have almost a factor of two in the range of temperatures!!! I realize that the temperatures would have gone up and down in certain years, but WOW that surely is not tied down.

Some of the charts were confusing, especially the snow pack charts which started with negative values????

Also, when calculating ice packs and volumes they have a footnote that the continent of Antartica and Greenland were excluded. HUH? Haven't we had stations in Antartica for at least 60 years? Did the data from these two very large contributors to the ice pack somehow not fit the model?

If you go back through my comments you will see that I readily state that there may be some minimal human cause for global warming. There are thousands of scientists that believe that human influence on global warming is minimal. Very few scientists believe that there is cause for the draconian changes advised by the Kyoto Accords, Al gore or many politicians. The claim that this is settled science is false. A one degree temperature rise over the next 100 years (as long as the solar activity keeps up) is nothing to be alarmed about. I look forward to it. It is a far better thing than if the just as likely cooling was going on.

It took them 5 years to come up with this sloppy re-hashed report? Maybe they should hold the annual meetings in International Falls instead of Hawaii. Maybe then they could get some work done.

Enjoy your martini and you can get back to me with the answers when I see you at the Flat Earth Society meeting, don't take a wrong turn on the way there; you might run right off the edge.

Jon

[Jon Beard]

Craig, your missing out on all the fun.

Jon

[Ellis Hollow]

Jon: I don't think I'm going to convince you to change your mind. But if you were an avid vegetable gardener, I might convince you to rate and review vegetable varieties. That would be useful if the climate was warming or cooling or just hanging loose.

[Christopher C in Hawaii]

"The idea of a global or hemispheric "Medieval Warm Period" that was warmer than today however, has turned out to be incorrect." http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html

Jon I am a gardener. I do not have an irrational fear about getting food. If need be I can survive, like my very recent ancestors without electricity or an automobile.

After spending my morning micro managing by a few inches where drops of water fall from an irrigation system for a couple who have no clue how to shut the system down after me showing them a half dozen times, it is people like them who worry me. Absent money to have someone else Do It For Them, many people are not equipped to do well if things get ugly.

A warm winter and a frigid spring is nothing new. It does have consequences though. Trends have more consequences. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18024688/

The swirling soup of the oceans and atmosphere want as close to a temperature equilibrium as they can get. It don't matter what time of year it is supposed to be or what the sun is doing that day. If it is getting warm up north that former cold has to be dealt with some how.

"In middle school we used to set up fish tanks in which the plants and animals lived in a little balanced ecosystem. The animals gave off C02 and the plants used up the C02 and put 02 back into the water. The fish ate the plants and everything balanced out. Has this changed?"

No that hasn't changed. The problem is the fish got too smart and learned how to cheat death for a little longer. Their numbers grew exponetially and they starting eating up and chopping down all the plants. Then they started drilling in the gravel for more carbon to run water slides and wave machines for entertainment. This put more CO2 into the closed tank and there were not enough plants left to absorb it all. The water started to heat up and more of the plants died. The smart fish were able to cheat death for a bit longer, but their swelling numbers eventually overloaded the system and the equilibrium broke down. Then there was a massive die off of the smart fish in the closed tank.

How many dead fish did you have to flush down the toilet in Middle school?