No one is mentioning calendars, and that calendars haven't been consistent enough for 1200 years to make the claim being made in the article. Here are a couple of articles I found that show that the claim of knowing that this year's cherry blossom is "one day earlier" than one in the 1400s is pretty difficult, if not impossible, to substantiate.
I think it's not as hard as it initially seems. Lunar calendars are based on the shape of the moon, and we can compute past phases of the moon with sufficient accuracy. So, if the record said "cherry blossoms peaked at the tenth day of the second month, year X", then the only remaining question is when the "second month" started.
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 ...
Please see my other comment. I did further research and the problem comes because of drift. The lunar calendar would drift away from astronomical events, and this was a known problem, so they would occasionally add a 13th month to a year, but it wasn't done systematically. Also, there have been several attempts among scholars to create conversion tables for dates, and each of them have errors, sometimes up to 4 weeks. So which table did the researchers use? We don't know. And all of the conversion tables have errors, which brings me to my original point: making a claim that "this year is the earliest day of blossoming since the 800s in Japan" is scientifically unverifiable, because we cannot link historical calendar dates to current gregorian dates accurately before 1863, when Japan converted to the gregorian calendar.
We do not need a generalized date mapping function to verify the claim, we only need to verify specific events/dates, and even for those we only need to verify a single inequality.
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.
I have done more research on the Japanese calendar, and it's as I suspected: claiming to know the accuracy of a historical calendar down to the day is impossible, because the traditional calendar was primarily lunar based, but they had to add an extra month to the year occasionally because the year would start to drift away from the seasons, but this wasn't done in a consistent, systematic manner.
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.
That’s only going to provide an off by exactly one lunar month adjustment to the dates rather than say a 4 day difference. As these dates are from the same period each year it’s very solid evidence when months where added to the calendar as being 2 months out of sync would be extremely noticeable.
Anyway, feel free to look for a valid possible earlier day.
I don't think what you are saying is accurate. If there is a different number of years between when they add leap months, that will alter how much the calendar has slipped by a decimal number of days.
You’re suggesting we know the offset aka full moon + N days, but not the month.
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.
The lunar day is 29.56... days long. Some months, they had 29 days. Some months, they had 30 days. But there's still that pesky .06 days that accumulates over time, pushing the calendar out of sync with the astronomical events. In our calendar, we add a leap day every four years to catch that "leakage". They would add a month occasionally, but they did it at random intervals, so sometimes the calendar would have drifted 5 days off the gregorian before they corrected it, and other times it was apparently up to 8 weeks drifted from gregorian time. So the amount of drift was not in lunar month chunks. It was in accumulated drifts of .06, that got corrected at random intervals.
It’s 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes on average but not every lunar month is identical. Normally lunar calendars alternate 29, 30, 29, 30 days evenly as that pattern is easy to see.
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.
Where did you find their process for recalculating the dates? The Japanese calendar was lunar and calculated locally until the 1600s in some areas, all the way up to the 1800s in other areas. How did the researchers line up the dates in the journals to astronomical data? How can they assume that when a Japanese journal said "first day of spring" that they actually meant the astronomical first day of spring, for example? I'd like to see the methodology the researchers used, but I didn't find anything in their paper about it.
Astronomical events like eclipses get recorded and can be extrapolated backwards to precisely line up historic calendars. Similarly, major events like huge earthquakes can be correlated between different historic calendars.
Eventually you go back far enough and this breaks down, but we are talking recent history here.
You're assuming the researchers used earthquakes or astronomical events to correlate their date calculations, but they make no such claim. They do not explain their methodology for converting the historical calendar dates into Gregorian dates at all. Why should we give them the benefit of the doubt? They've included their dataset, but they haven't included their methodology for determining the Gregorian dates, yet their whole claim is that the dates are getting earlier and earlier. The line trending down also correlates with Japan converting to the Gregorian calendar in 1868. Why isn't that mentioned in their paper? If their methodology for converting historical dates is faulty or poor, that methodology could also account for the line appearing to move down starting in the mid-1800s.
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?
These are hardly the first researches to want to correlate Japan’s dates with the Gregorian calendar. If you think the historic record is so wrong then feel free to do some original research and prove it, but don’t assume people are idiots.
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.
I feel the exact same way. They didn't share their methodology, and their claims hinge on the methodology they used for converting the dates. I'm not accusing them of anything. I'm asking to see their methodology. You are the one who is giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they did it correctly, which is antithetical to peer-reviewed science.
They didn’t need to do the correlation, other people have already done the leg work.
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.
By everything I've read, it should be included as a challenge, and they should be explicit about the method they used to determine the Gregorian dates, because it's not straightforward, nor is there even an agreed-upon method or table to use for conversion, yet their whole claim rests on the verifiability of the dates.
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.
If this is what they used, why didn't they say that? I'm not making a claim about what method they used. I'm saying that whatever method they used is prone to error and should be included in the methodology of the paper. What is wrong with being transparent about their methodology? And what is wrong with expecting that level of transparency in a scientific paper making a specific claim?
I have to admit, the passive-aggressive ad hominem attacks caught me by surprise, but my request for transparency with regard to the methodology they employed when converting their dates stands.
"After that, Japan calculated its calendar using various Chinese calendar procedures" also from the wikipedia article. This is all just illustrating my point further.
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?
They only state that they took the dates from old records and converted them to Gregorian dates. They do not say what method they used to convert the dates, and as noted here http://www.yukikurete.de/nengo_chronology.htm, old historical Japanese dates are not reliable and cannot be considered astronomically accurate. This whole paper is written assuming the dates in old records correspond to the Gregorian calendar, and that's simply not the case.
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 am not associated with the research group. I tend to think that a group of paleo-climatology professors would remember that their country used to having different calendars.
Shouldn't a scientific paper making a specific scientific claim explain their methodology? Why should the audience presume that the method used to calculate the dates matches the implied trend? The calendar issue undermines their entire claim, and we're just supposed to give them the benefit of the doubt and trust that whatever they did was correct? Where's the scientific objectivism in that?
Is it possible that the timekeeping accuracy may explain the tightening of the distribution towards today? There’s a definite trend towards earlier blossoming, but you can also see that variability is decreasing.
your point is moot. The BBC article itself makes a clear statement that the claimed phenomenon is post 1800. (I cant say the same about the clickbait title of course) Presumably the drift would be so small that even without jesuit and chinese reform the effect would not be wiped out by noise.
If they used shoddy methods for converting the dates prior to Japan converting to the Gregorian calendar in 1863, then it's absolutely relevant to their claim and could undermine their normalized trendline. If the dates are consistently 1-2 weeks off because they used a poor method for converting historical Japanese calendar dates to Gregorian dates, the line they drew normalizing their data would change significantly, and the BBC wouldn't have an article worthy of a headline.
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?
It's interesting that in the chart we even see an expected peak around 1600-1700 that correspond to the Little Ice Age period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age (colder weather = late cherry blossom season)
Which seems to shore up the hypothesis here a little bit more. The Little Ice Age is a really interesting phenomenon to me in terms of climate study. We really take the stability of our climate for granted. I'm sure future generations will not have that luxury.
> We really take the stability of our climate for granted. I'm sure future generations will not have that luxury.
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.
Two thoughts. One strong agree on nuclear, though generally being against nuclear probably also entails not understanding the magnitude of our co2 issues (eg unless you want to reduce quality of life drastically, nuclear now).
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 ;)
It's not just that we can't adapt either - it's the time scales we're working with. We might not have time to adapt before literally millions of people are displaced or even die.
I do wonder for some of these disasters, like forest fires and floods, if they’re caused in large part by humans settling in more places. Not caused by the people settling and developing those areas but by virtue of settling places where these things happen and thus becoming a disaster because people are there.
Forest fires and floods are a tiny, tiny sliver of the problem. Collapse of oceanic fisheries, decimation of the Amazon, and the melting of the ice caps are orders of magnitude more damaging and pressing matters.
The fires and floods are not the problem, they are the symptom.
I’m not the person this was directed at, but i wanted to chime in anyway.
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.
Don't be sarcastic.[0] Beyond that, it's a bit hyberbolic to assert hundreds of millions of any sort of migrants. (Climate change seems to be this generation's nuclear winter.)
> (Climate change seems to be this generation's nuclear winter.)
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.
They talk about a wild prunus Prunus jamasakura. I didn't knew the species, seems okay
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.
They got around this problem by not considering the hybrids, but Prunus jamasakura. Here is what they wrote in one of the source papers on how they inferred the species of the trees in the historical record(1).
"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"
This ignores the fact that temperature has a known strong effect on flowering time [1]. It’s the obvious and evidence-based reason for the phenomenon, so there isn’t any basis to invent some other reason to do with hybrid genetics. Especially since there is no evidence for your hybrid hypothesis whatsoever.
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].
> 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.
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.
Actually a really good point. This is just a correlation with an imprecise causal link, even if global warming is clearly the most likely factor.
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.
> Could be that and explanation to the final part of the curve?
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.
For whatever reason, fruit trees are really ascetically pleasing. I suspect because humans have been selectively breeding them for so long. Interesting bark, flowers, leaves, and colourful tasty fruit. I think they are remarkable achievements of human innovation. Cherry blossom trees no longer produce edible size cherries just flowers. But I noticed how much longer cherry blossoms last on the West coast, which I believe is due to longer cooler summers.
I once read an excerpt of a Portuguese priest's report about his travel to Japan in Edo period - there was a remark about how exquisitely beautiful Japanese gardens are, and how much the Japanese care about them. Then he says no garden had any fruit trees, because the Japanese considered such trees utterly unworthy of their attention.
Like European lawns, apparently these gardens had to flaunt total lack of practical benefit, like peacocks' feathers.
> considered such trees utterly unworthy of their attention.
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.
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the priest made it clear that the Japanese considered fruit trees unworthy of their garden, not just "requiring different maintenance." (Well, of course, I don't know how fluent the priest's Japanese was, so there might be a game of telephone occurring here ...)
Yes they do, they're sour cherries though so no one eats them. They litter the sidewalks where I live in the pacific north west, and the wasps are all over them come fall.
I like to think of this from a statistical perspective, where climate change makes the mean peak bloom come earlier in the year. However, there are lots of external factors that can affect peak bloom date as well. If you look at the graph in the linked article, you'd see that there's a wide variety of different peak dates even in the 1400's but that the overall trend is towards earlier in the year as we get closer to present day.
Climate does fluctuate and there is randomness. When you look at the tend you can see how the line has recently taken a dramatic turn.
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.
>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.
In urban northern Canada, this sounds pretty great. Rural parts are facing a significant challenge, because ice roads are freezing later, and thawing earlier.
In the summer, the only way to get deliveries is by air. In the winter, shipping is relatively cheap because of the ice roads. Folks try to minimize those costs by not shipping in the summer, only shipping in the winter. If the winter is shorter, these delivery opportunities are reduced.
haha yes living north could become more tolerable. But don’t forget that also means the more centrally located people will all be moving that direction soon.
OK, but do we have more data points for these cherry blossoms, or just the one the article is pointing out? How do we know this isn't another random fluctuation for cherry blossoms?
Could it be global warming? Sure, but we need to be careful with our confirmation bias.
>do we have more data points for these cherry blossoms
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.
When a tree blossoms is due to its temperature and the amount of light its "seeing". Tree genetics is also a factor. Couldn't this early blooming trend be due to the huge increase in night illumination? I've certainly see tree's bloom time screwed up when they grow near/under strong night lighting.
Even among very smart people, there is a incredibly powerful desire to reject over one hundred years of data and analysis and grasp for something, anything at all, other than the horrible reality that the most likely cause of sudden changes in the cause and effect photosynthesis cycles of all plants on our world is most likely caused by human-emitted hydrocarbon molecules into our atmosphere.
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.
They all bloom within a few days to a week of each other. The variance is due to local conditions of sunlight, temperature, etc. The entire process is quite sharp: it goes from nothing to stunning blooms to empty in the space of a week or so.
For normalization, they measure the "peak" bloom, the day with the most trees in blossom at once.
The chart shows a trend over the last few centuries towards earlier blossoming, but it definitely precedes Co2 levels and actual temperature changes. Which is interesting.
Obviously. It will continue to break that record for the rest of the century. We have unchecked global warming.
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.
The article makes it clear that 812 is merely the extent of the historical record-keeping, not that 812 had a remarkably early peak. The article also includes a graph that illustrates no obvious cyclical behavior over that time span.
Starting comments with "lol ok" isn't in keeping with HN guidelines, by the way.
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.
So to be clear (some responses imply this, but I figured it's worth calling out) - "since 812" is not saying 812 it was this early. It wasn't. This is the earliest -we've ever recorded-. And the records go back to 812.
Everyone knows that all “world records” are only since record keeping began. The difference is that in the US that means about 200 years while in Japan it means more than a thousand.
Not quite. Oftentimes we use proxies for historical data. For instance, you might look at the composition of annually stratified sediments to get a sense of climactic and environmental conditions. This gets us approximate but reasonable estimates of e.g. the temperature, but can't really be said to represent a "record."
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.
So many world records involving the climate have been broken in recent years. Is there still hope left for our planet? I was in the ocean a few months back and the water was calm, the sound of the waves was peaceful. The beach was beautiful. But there was a problem beneath the surface. Plastic everywhere. Pieces of it broken down throughout the water and when I exited the water it was all throughout the sand as well. I walked up the entire beach and plastic was everywhere. Throughout such refined sand. I hit a low that day. Sometimes I lose hope, I'm just not sure we will be able to right our course towards sustainability and minimalism in time to avert climate disaster and this sixth mass extinction in the anthropocence. I just hope one day when I'm old I will not lose the sakura blossom festivals altogether and that posterity will still be able to enjoy the tranquility of a new spring.
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.
The updated headline “Japan's cherry blossom 'earliest peak since 1409'” does not match the article headline nor the article content. The previous headline on HN “Japan's cherry blossom 'earliest peak since 812'” matches both article headline and content.
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.
More like half-millennia that we'll be dealing with the fallout from climate change. The next 50 years won't even be the fastest paced period of change. It's pretty bleak.
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.
Try to read the best models for the next 50 years by serious scientific groups like the IPCC. Try to ignore the denialist and alarmist reports that get to the front page of newspapers.
The future will be different, and we will have to adapt. But to see it as bleak is to embrace the pessimistic interpretation, which while sometimes accurate isn't always the best way to view things.
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.
I'm not an expert on this, but 'ran out of money' doesn't sound like a real explanation for the collapse of a government. That state has the authority to make money, it can't simply run out of it's own currency.
A country can print as much currency as it wants. In that sense it cannot run out of money. What it can't do is print as much currency as it wants, and still have people want that currency, or have them accept it at the previous value. In that sense a country certainly can run 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.
But if you spend that "own" currency on building military equipment that doesn't work instead of farming to feed your citizens, that "own" money doesn't spend very far when buying from outside sources.
What about global cooling scare[1], which obviously turned out to be nothing but I'm sure was used to scaremonger people?
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.
I still think cooling is a larger long-term threat than warming. Warming is a temporary disruption for humans, but the biosphere will, overall, flourish. Cooling is more of a general threat to Earth life, and it's pretty sure to happen. We are subject to periodic ice ages. The difference, I guess, is that the warming is upon us NOW, while the ice age is potentially 50,000 years off.
If you believed that humans are causing global warming, then you wouldn't have to worry about the possibility of global cooling: we can obviously put a stop to that if we ever find ourselves facing the onset of a real ice age.
Technically, we're experiencing an ice age, albeit the tail-end of one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation If it ends, things don't look good for us; we'd have to re-do all our infrastructure at the least.
"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.
> Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon.
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.
I remember a New Agey book talking about California becoming an island, the Mississippi River flooding the Great Plains essentially splitting the US in two, and Florida being completely underwater... by like 1990.
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.
True, but it means that you maybe shouldn't partake in extreme hysteria.
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.
Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon.
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.
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.
Wow, 1 generation survived all kinds of terrible events, so it surely means this was all made up and that there's no problems that could eventually lead to catastrophy over a 'long' period of time that is more than the lifespan of one human being.
> 1 generation survived all kinds of terrible events
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.
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.
> Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the 1970s for the 80
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.
....8000 years from now, as part of the normal interglacial cycle, which is exactly what I said. And given that civilization is less than 10000 years old, just returning to the previous ice age would technically fulfill the quote you tried so hard to pull out of context. Did you actually even read the entire abstract?
30 years ago my mum said the same about the coming next 30 years. I am not saying that your hunch is wrong. I just want to caution that people were thinking similarly a while back. Don't underestimate the will and resourcefulness of men.
If you acknowledge the negative effects of potential growth, do you also see the upsides of it?
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.
I am told day-in and day-out about how awesome this exponential growth thing is. Month after month, year after year, they just keep stuffing this exponential growth right up my in face without me even asking for it. Exponential growth has got the entirety of the world's mindshare behind it. It's not enough to just constantly scramble everything and revolutionize everything, and eat everything up. Ya can't even utter a word against it; everyone must bend a knee to it. It's the only model that anyone seems to be able to think of. "Circle the wagons, someone criticized it!" The reality is that we get nothing but exponential growth, and promises of more exponential growth. It's the only future we see now. It's the only answer have to any kind of problem. What are we going to do about all this debt? Exponential growth. What are we going to do about retirement? Exponential growth. What are we going to do about the climate? Exponential growth. How are we going to feed our exponential growth? More exponential growth. We're addicted to exponential growth mindset and we are now incapable of imagining anything else. No, I don't need to constantly mouth platitudes about the upsides of it, not anymore. Not after the rivers and fields I frequented as a kid are choked with garbage and plowed under for subdivisions. But oh yeah, exponential growth. Everybody loves it. Can't say a word against it. Like a watermelon growing in a lightbulb. This exponential growth thing isn't gonna work out in the end, people. But hey, your computer is fast, you little ingrate.
It astounds me how people who are otherwise intelligent and who understand the scientific method don't believe in anthropogenic climate change. It doesn't fill me with a lot of hope for the future, since we can't begin to work on this problem at the scale we need if so many of us don't think there even is a problem to begin with.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070402230356/http://www2.gol.c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar