We're All Doomed By An Early Spring

Leave it to the global warming alarmists to claim that we're all doomed because of nice weather:

(AP) The capital's famous cherry trees are primed to burst out in a perfect pink peak about the end of this month. Thirty years ago, the trees usually waited to bloom till around April 5.

In central California, the first of the field skipper sachem, a drab little butterfly, was fluttering about on March 12. Just 25 years ago, that creature predictably emerged there anywhere from mid-April to mid-May.

And sneezes are coming earlier in Philadelphia. On March 9, when allergist Dr. Donald Dvorin set up his monitor, maple pollen was already heavy in the air. Less than two decades ago, that pollen couldn't be measured until late April.

Pollen is bursting. Critters are stirring. Buds are swelling. Biologists are worrying.

"The alarm clock that all the plants and animals are listening to is running too fast," Stanford University biologist Terry Root said.

Blame global warming.

The fingerprints of man-made climate change are evident in seasonal timing changes for thousands of species on Earth, according to dozens of studies and last year's authoritative report by the Nobel Prize-winning international climate scientists. More than 30 scientists told The Associated Press how global warming is affecting plants and animals at springtime across the country, in nearly every state.

What's happening is so noticeable that scientists can track it from space. Satellites measuring when land turns green found that spring "green-up" is arriving eight hours earlier every year on average since 1982 north of the Mason-Dixon line. In much of Florida and southern Texas and Louisiana, the satellites show spring coming a tad later, and bizarrely, in a complicated way, global warming can explain that too, the scientists said.

I've noticed that when I put milk on my cornflakes, they don't stay crunchy as long as they did when I was a kid. I blame global warming.

Seriously, there are many parts of the country who are not experiencing this spring-like weather (it is Spring now, you know). It snowed in Chicago today, and Montreal has had so much snow this year they fear it won't be all melted by the time winter comes around again (if it does).

The Earth's climate has never been static - it has changed from warmer to colder and back through innumerable cycles over the centuries. Although the alarmists are claiming that this could be a warm year, after last year in which global average temperatures gave back nearly 100 years of global warming, a little early greenery would be nice.