Climate and Hot Summers

NASA has announced that last summer was the hottest on record. Well I would beg to differ, at least my plants tell me so. NASA states:

The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880, according to two separate analyses by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists. The 10 warmest years in the instrumental record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000. This trend  continues a long-term warming of the planet, according to an analysis of surface temperature measurements by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) in New York. In an independent analysis of the raw data, also released Friday, NOAA scientists also found 2014 to be the warmest on record.

 I ran their map program and obtained the following:

Now if one looks closely one sees that my area was not really that hot. It was Europe, East Russia and Canada that were hot and parts of Brazil.

Let us examine my backyard. Yes my very nice backyard, and my sentinel plants the Hemerocallis genus.

First we look at the date of first bloom on the three early species:

Now what we have plotted is the date of first bloom where the date is the number of days from January 1 until the bloom date. Thus the larger the number the colder the season. A downward sloping line means warming. H minor going back to 1990 shows warming. But last years was the 4th coldest in 25 years. Not the warmest. The same can be said of the other two species bu H dumortierii shows little evidence of warming.

Why plants? Well plants integrate climate over a year. They reflect what is happening in an integrated manner. They are better than surface measurements.

Now I looked at the date of mid cross. This is the date when I had reached 50% of my total crosses. It is an integral of an integral if you will. It looks across all hybrids and tells when the peak blooming occurs. The results are below:

Again 2014 was not bad. The 50% point was about July 19th. In contrast 2013 had July 8th, almost 10 days earlier. Also 2012 showed a date of July 7th. Thus from my few thousands of plants perspective 2014 was one of the coldest years on record.

I guess one really should look at the data. Plants are great creatures. The use the sun more than any other creatures so why not use them to tell us something. The reason is we really have so few Botanists. Perhaps we need a few at NASA.