Scary Trivia

Q: What is the longest running record of plant bloom times in the world?

A: The cherry blossom records in Japan, which were started in 850 C.E.

Why does this matter, you may ask? Because it shows how much warmer the world has gotten in the last 50 years:


You'll note that the labels along the left side are dates, with April 5 at the bottom and April 15 up around the red line. Somewhere around 1950 or 60 the black line went earlier than any previous date and then kept going.

For more than a thousand years, the date bounced back and forth between April 10 and April 20, but recently it headed down toward April 5. The data on this graph end in 2010, notably. When they are next updated, I imagine some new dates will need to be added at the bottom.