Cherry Blossom Fraud

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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By Paul Homewood

From the Economist:

HANAMI, the Japanese custom of contemplating the impermanence of life by gazing at the fleeting beauty of blossoming flowers, goes back a long way. “The Tale of Genji”, a tenth-century masterpiece that is perhaps the world’s first novel, devotes a chapter to the cherry-blossom festival staged in the emperor’s great hall. Diarists have keenly chronicled the comings and goings of cherry blossoms for centuries—records from Kyoto, the old capital, date back 1,200 years. This precious, ancient data set reveals a disturbing trend: in recent decades, the blossoms have emerged much sooner than they once did.

From its most recent peak in 1829, when full bloom could be expected to come on April 18th, the typical full-flowering date has drifted earlier and earlier. Since 1970, it has usually landed on April 7th. The cause is little mystery. In deciding when to show their shoots, cherry trees rely on temperatures in February and March. Yasuyuki Aono and Keiko Kazui, two Japanese scientists, have demonstrated that the full-blossom date for Kyoto’s cherry trees can predict March temperatures to within 0.1°C. A warmer planet makes for warmer Marches. The usual full-blooming date in Washington, DC, whose cherry-blossom festival is a relative newcomer (it launched in 1927), has also moved up by five days since the first recorded date in 1921.

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Early blooming has nothing to do with “climate change”, but the urban heat island effect.

Since 1890, the population of Kyoto has expanded hugely:

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Moreover, the city has been transformed from what it would have looked like even fifty years ago. A concrete jungle has now grown up around the original medieval city.

Furthermore, Kyoto sits in the Yamashiro basin, surrounded on three sides by mountains, and opening to the south. This helps to trap urban heat.

In fact, the study which the Economist refers to does not even mention “climate change” or “global warming” in its Abstract. It simply states that flowering dates correlate to temperatures in February and March.

Indeed, the paper actually refers to another study which found that urbanisation accounted for 1.1C of warming in Kyoto between 1940 and 1990. This is actually more then enough to account for flowering a week or so earlier.