
Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall? - akeck
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-are-japans-cherry-blossom-trees-blooming-fall-180970590/?no-ist
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malingo
The Economist published a remarkable chart last year that shows 1200 years of
cherry blossom data: [https://www.economist.com/graphic-
detail/2017/04/07/japans-c...](https://www.economist.com/graphic-
detail/2017/04/07/japans-cherry-blossoms-are-emerging-increasingly-early)

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sandworm101
Note that is for the cherry blossoms of Kyoto. So I'd say that the graph means
next to nothing in terms of global or even national climate trends. This is
about a very small city-dominated local climate. Any variation from a norm
could have more to do with the heating/cooling of buildings and local traffic
rather than global warming. The trend towards the use of glass in new
buildings could have as much an impact as global carbon.

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jpatokal
Despite the down votes this is a perfectly valid point. In the last 100 years
Kyoto has turned from a quiet backwater into a city of over 1 million,
liberally slathered in concrete like every other Japanese city. This will have
an impact on the local climate, above and beyond global warming as a whole.

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asynchronous13
The population of Kyoto has been over 1 million since 1932.

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edflsafoiewq
It was also hardly a backwater... The Fall of Edo was only 150 years ago and
before that Kyoto was the seat of the Emperor.

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sandworm101
Not a political or historical backwater, but also not the booming metropolis
that was Tokyo. It was a backwater in terms of urbanization and urban heat
island impacts.

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AznHisoka
There's a similar phenomenon in play in the US. Foliage is not as beautiful
this fall because of all the rain that we got this summer:
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/10/23/fall-f...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/10/23/fall-
foliage-disappointing-east-but-west-best/1730956002/)

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irrational
Interesting. I live on the West coast and I cannot remember the fall foliage
ever being as spectacular as it has been this year. I was just wondering the
other day why it was so much better than ever before.

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dgzl
Do you mean West Coast USA? I'm in Oregon and I'll say that fall foliage has
been nice the last few days, but we also didn't get much rain this summer, and
the last few winters have been lacking in moisture as well. My parents tell me
it used to rain and snow quite a lot more than it has been these last few
decades.

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sandworm101
You can see it on TV if you are a scifi fan. Look at the x-files, Outer
Limits, and early Stargate episodes filmed in 1990s Vancouver. Vancouver's wet
climate gave them a very specific tone that became an industry standard.
1990's scifi was generally dark, as opposed to the more colorful productions
filmed in California (Trek) or Australia (farscape). But today Vancouver
suffers droughts every summer. The Flash is a colourful production. The foggy
grey backdrop is now a blue sky. Rainfall numbers might not be very different,
but the perpetual cloud that coloured scifi for a generation is gone.

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wahern
So you're saying that Seacouver doesn't exist anymore?

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seacouver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seacouver))

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sandworm101
The real joke of 'seacouver' is the an old adage for filming TV in Canada:
Film in Vancouver, but never admit so in the script. If you want to tap the US
market (who doesn't?) then the story cannot ever be set outside the US. The
few shows that did (The Crow series etc) died quick deaths. X-Men went out on
a limb by repeatedly saying Wolverine lived in Canada (Rouge finds him there).
That was a risk. Everyone assumed they would have put him in Alaska. X-Files
set a short arc on a train heading to Vancouver, but even there the bad guys
were Japanese. None of the main story could ever happen in Canada.

Sell also Scrubs, filmed in LA but set in "San Frangeles" although never
admitted in the script. They wanted to avoid the LA/SF/NY trend of mentioning
place names and expecting the whole world to know what you are talking about.
For the longest time I thought scrubs was set in Florida.

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caiobegotti
Similarly (and as an anecdote), I have seen cherry blossom trees blooming in
the wrong weeks of the year where I live in southern Brazil. I live across a
garden-ish square with dozens of them right across the street. The city is
sprayed with
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handroanthus_albus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handroanthus_albus)
too — as I have one in my front yard — and every year I notice the blooming
season shifting a bit, to the point that we are now in late October and the
yellow blooming is either quite late AND timid or even inexistent because the
tree decided to flip the bird (pun intended) to the weather changes.

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darkmarmot
My plum trees here in Tennessee are now blooming as well :(

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djrogers
This has happened before in my hometown (Livermore CA) with our beautiful
cherry trees. One year about 8-10 years ago we had a few very warm weeks in
January and the blossoms were out by Valentines Day - quite pretty, but
probably not ideal for the tree’s reproductive cycle...

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simonebrunozzi
TL;DR: Two typhoons followed by warm weather triggered them.

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dexterdog
And it has happened before.

And it's not widespread.

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olliej
I’m assuming you’re trying to claim this is not related to global warming (“
it has happened before”).

Global warming is a large scale and long term problem, and the first thing you
would expect is an increase in frequency of previously uncommon events - take
warm weather: historically there may have been a few year where the temp got
to X degrees, from an average of Y degrees. But now the average Temperature
has increased by a small amount. That shifts the entire normal curve of
temperatures up. So now instead of X degrees being the 99th percentile (say)
it becomes the 90th. The wonders of normal curves and statistics ensures that
as small changes accrue the current extremes will rapidly become more common -
a 1% increase in average temperature (random Number here) results in a
frequency shift of more than 1% for the extremes.

Then we get to the localized vs global issue. Global warming in an average
increase in temperature across the world. The world is big, and so there will
always be area that are substantially higher or lower temperature than other
places, but by virtue of the above statistics over time the high temperature
pockets will become larger and more common. The high temperature pockets and
the increased energy in the atmosphere increase movement of the atmosphere
around the globe - so yes you may also get occasional pockets of uncommon low
temperature. that is likely cause by uncommonly “high” temperatures in the
cold parts of the world pushing the higher than average cold air into new
locations. Over time the average temperature of the cold areas will become
“warm”.

Finally, many biological and physical behaviors are purely a function of very
specific temperatures. A lot of the biological behaviors (in plants
especially) are direct products of physical laws - gas and fluid expansion
being most common. Plenty of amphibians have gender determined entirely by
temperature - something like 23.4c being the exact cutoff. Water freezes/thaws
at exactly 0c - it doesn’t matter how small the difference is.

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briandear
And this is 100% correct. And, it has happened before. The world has had
warming and cooling cycles for as long as there has been earth. The idea that
all of this is a “new” thing isn’t supported by evidence.

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olliej
Seriously, it isn't we have ice cores, and direct records for the last 200
years that show that the periodic changes in planet temperature are nothing
like what has been happening for the last hundred years.

That said, I'm going to assume that based on your comment, you aren't actually
interested in science or anything beyond talking points provided by others.

If you were actually interested in the science of this you would be able to
provide studies that haven't been subsequently refuted, or been demonstrated
to not actually compensate for the measured effect of global warming.

Solar cycles have been demonstrated to not explain the current changes in
global temperature. The impact is not anywhere near fast enough to match
current the last hundred years of change.

Random variance doesn't explain it - models for global warming predict
increases in extremes of basically all events. Random variance is _random_ so
does not explain any changes with a measurable bias.

Conspiracy theories don't explain anything. 1) they're conspiracy theories,
not science; 2) they depend on everyone lying about the temperature over time,
except everyone agrees on what the temperatures are.

No hypothesis put forward, matches the core predictive ability of global
warming theory: global temperature is increasing, as a result of increased CO2
and other pollutants introduced into the atmosphere by human, and human driven
industries. This theory predicts increased global average temperature as long
as greenhouse emissions continue, it explains ocean acidification, and it
explains increased frequency "extreme" weather.

If you have some alternative hypothesis that matches prior atmospheric
behavior over the last 200 years, and can also explain the things that global
warming does, I'm all ears.

But I suspect you're just either a troll, or a talking point driven internet
commenter.

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y-c-o-m-b
Reading this is is like reading a batman comic, I picture comic bubbles with
"POW!" and "BOOM!" after each sentence.

I like how you explain things, very easy to understand. Thanks for the
insightful comments.

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xg15
TL;DR: The unusual bloom seems to be a direct consequence of the natural
disasters hitting Japan over the course of this year. "Direct" as in "typhoons
ripped off a lot of the cherry trees' leaves, but missing leaves are also a
biological signal that start the blooming process".

Unrelated to that, the _regular_ cherry blossom event has been happening
progressively earlier due to climate change. The typhoons and heatwave that
caused the irregular bloom were likely influenced by it as well.

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Tempest1981
I’m starting to give more thought to the term “natural disaster“.

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nnash
We have some ducks in our backyard, who aren't the same pairs I usually see
during the Spring. This group showed up a few weeks ago, and haven't left... I
imagine they're coming from somewhere in Canada far north, but it's unusual to
see them linger for so long. Seems like the current climate is confusing to
the animals and the trees.

