Climate change in my front yard

It’s impossible to miss the connection between global warming and the aftermath of the April freeze in this region. As a local beekeeper explained to me last week, “It got warm too early and things put out too early. Then came the record cold.”

Walking around Asheville over the Earthday weekend, the frosted dead foliage on trees and bushes felt ominous, like harbingers of a dying planet. Oh, I know its a little too early to confidently predict that the sky as we knew it is falling, but if climate change works as predicted, this is a lot like the future we face. Plants adapted to conditions that have been approximately stable since the last major ice age will have to adapt very quickly to new conditions.

The USDA has already shifted its zone maps northward. Experts from the National Climatic Data Center predict that Asheville’s temperatures in 20 years will be like Jacksonville or Orlando today. The atmosphere will hold more moisture and the soil will be drier. Anyone not in thrall to Exxon-Mobil knows the drill.

So I look at the crispy flowers that won’t produce dogwood berries for the waxwings and squirrels come fall or acorns and beechnuts for the bears and deer or apples or grapes or berries … and I am terribly, terribly sad.

~ by bothwellsblog on April 23, 2007.