Kyoto cherry blossoms now bloom earlier than at any point in 1,200 years

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mmomentmaker about 4 hours ago 54 commentsRead Article on jivx.com

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binarymax•about 3 hours ago

We have a cherry blossom tree. It bloomed a week earlier than last year. We’re not in Kyoto but I did notice and it’s a bit strange. I also noticed some other blossoming trees that typically bloom for about a week, went green after 3 days.

lysace•about 3 hours ago

Anecdotes like that with a 1 year horizon.. that's what we call weather.

A 1,200 year time series.. that's definitely in the climate area.

billfor•about 3 hours ago

If you go back a few million, that's also climate. We're still in an ice age. https://www.climate.gov/media/16817

crowbahr•40 minutes ago

And human civilization entirely sprung up during it, all of our nations, our cities, our pastures, our lives are built on the ice age. We need to start cooling the world down and we're doing the opposite

altcognito•about 2 hours ago

Longer periods can be called paleoclimate. As you may have noticed, most types of humans did not exist in previous climates, and we are unfamiliar with the conditions of those time periods, much less if we were to bring them upon ourselves in a period of time that isn't even capable of being shown on the chart you've chosen to use.

tardedmeme•32 minutes ago

Apparently humans can't survive outside of an ice age, then. Maybe we shouldn't end it prematurely.

biophysboy•about 2 hours ago

A better time range would be the average species lifespan of the plants and animals we eat. Too short a range highlights noise; too long a range highlights unrelated data.

shiandow•about 2 hours ago

Okay? Let's keep it that way then I suppose.

b112•about 2 hours ago

I'd trust such data a lot more, from any other source.

dylan604•about 2 hours ago

We say the same thing about southern California. When the forecast is the same for 350+ days out of the year, that's not weather, that's climate.

I say that as someone from Texas that lived in LA for several years. Texas weather changes by the hour and this time of year it is advisable to keep an eye on it. In LA, you could go weeks without checking the "weather".

lotsofpulp•about 1 hour ago

That does not make any sense to me. SoCal is famous for having stable, comfortable weather (and hence its high land price). Some places have volatile weather, some places have more consistent weather.

BobbyJo•about 3 hours ago

Weather can be due to climate, and time series are composed of anecdotes.

tshaddox•about 2 hours ago

> time series are composed of anecdotes

This is incorrect, and is a very common misunderstanding of what the term "anecdote" means and what the actual problem with anecdotal data is.

The dichotomy is between "anecdotal evidence" and "scientific evidence," and the important distinction is not that the latter simply has more data points than the former. The critical distinction is about the methodology used to gather the data, not merely the number of data points gathered.

lysace•about 3 hours ago

Key words: can be

Longer time series are indeed composed of many samples/anecdotes.

sandworm101•about 3 hours ago

Climate is also dimensional. Kyoto is a point. A point over time is a line, a line through a 3d set of data. That a single point is seeing an effect is interesting but not as significant as widespread changes. Only when multiple measurements create a 2d map of realtime data, which becomes a 3d bulk over time, should we draw conclusions. Sadly, that is also happening. But the later should be the topic of conversation, not a single very visible data point.

jfengel•about 2 hours ago

The single visible data point is interesting, as an illustration.

It doesn't prove climate change one way or the other, but that is a discussion that ceased to be meaningful decades ago. Climate change is real, it is significant, and it is caused by humans. Further arguments about that are a (deliberate) waste of time.

Having accepted that, and dismissed the time-wasters from the conversation, we can look around for things that we notice. One of them is the way it affects the times that trees bloom, giving us an opportunity to discuss the way that affects other aspects of the ecosystem.

That, in turn, helps inform conversation about just how important the consequences are. Unlike the fact of climate change, it's not obvious how much the consequences matter to us, and what should change to avoid them. That is a conversation worth having, but it has been impossible while we're still listening to people reciting decades-old falsehoods.

edbaskerville•about 1 hour ago

Interestingly, if you have one-dimensional observations f(t) of a k-dimensional strange attractor, the lagged vector time series [f(t); f(t - tau); f(t - 2 * tau); ...; f(t - (k - 1) * tau)] maps onto the full k-dimensional attractor. Specifically (as I check Wikipedia) it's a diffeomorphism, an isomorphism of differentiable manifolds.

Presumably the earth system isn't at anything resembling an attractor right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are trying to use related techniques to try to detect qualitative changes in the system dynamics (like bifurcations).

Maybe someone more knowledgeable could chime in on whether/how measurements at a single point on the earth's surface might be used to do that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens%27s_theorem

Havoc•15 minutes ago

It’s because things are going great, right? Right?

childofhedgehog•about 2 hours ago

I had visited to see the cherry blossoms in 2017 and felt that we were going too early but actually made it for the peak. It’s scary how quickly the dates are shifting. I wonder what impact the earlier blooms have on the trees over the coming years, as this does not seem to be natural.

morkalork•about 2 hours ago

A dataset curated by humans, spanning over a thousand years, is awe inspiring on its own. The first person to record their observation must have had no idea what they started. Are there others like this?

ljf•about 2 hours ago

If you liked that you might find tbe lost of oldest companies interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

It was sad when I checked some time ago how many ancient Japanese companies have closed in tbe last 50 years.

owlninja•41 minutes ago

The times had a little story relevant to this recently:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/climate/japan-cherry-blos...

dylan604•about 1 hour ago

You mean like the Egyptians keeping records on the constellations?

gla67890543•about 1 hour ago

Global warming or global climate change? No mainstream media is talking about it now.

lysace•about 3 hours ago

So it's a reformatted version of: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/date-of-the-peak-cherry-t...

1234letshaveatw•about 1 hour ago

My fruit trees bloomed later this year. It has been a cold spring in my corner of the Midwest, colder on average and we are dropping below freezing the next few nights :(

ramesh31•about 1 hour ago

All across the northern US. We didn't have a single leaf on the trees until the last few weeks here in the northeast.

linuxftw•about 2 hours ago

It's entirely possible that modern horticultural techniques are resulting in the trees going dormant earlier, accumulating the required chill hours, and then breaking dormancy earlier. It's quite likely that the care of the trees has changed substantially from 1900 onward.

cf100clunk•about 3 hours ago