"Those of you who want to debate whether or not there is climate change please go to the HT forum." Ditto. "One factor that must be considered is the urban heat island effect. Cities generate a lot of heat as well as being barriers to surface air movement. An urban/suburban garden will be more conducive to zone marginal crops than a rural area." I agree, and it is certainly a factor in some of the local changes to climate. The city where I grew up had a population of 35,000 when I was a child, with tracts of open space even in the city. Those are all developed now, as well as much of the agricultural land which once existed just outside City Limits... and population is now over 60,000, not including the suburbs. My gardens are located both on my suburban property, and on a rural property 6 miles away. Six miles difference isn't much, but it has about the same effect on my home garden as moving it 200 miles South. The first frosts (which severely damage my rural garden) seldom cause much damage near my home, where I generally get an extra 2 weeks or so of productive growing season. That is only localized warming, though. I would agree with Soilent, the length of the growing season in rural areas has not changed significantly since my childhood. The developed areas - and their associated micro-climates - have just gotten larger. For good or ill, that is where most of us live. "I'm wondering whether some of what you are talking about is just a breakdown of regionalism. Which is to say that some crops are considered "southern" as a habit of social mores, and not climate." I too believe that could be at least part of the regional changes to gardening. The wealth of seeds available to gardeners now, as compared to the past, could also be a factor. Had I wanted to grow cowpeas in my youth, I would have had to plant black eyed peas from the supermarket; there were no local sources for other varieties, and very little information in my region that those varieties even existed. Now I could go through SSE, order seed online from Baker Creek, or swap with members of garden forums, and find dozens. The point being that we have much more information & seed at our fingertips, on a national (and dare I say international?) level, than was available even 30 years ago. We've gotten smarter. This has presented more opportunities for gardeners to experiment with crops that are non-traditional for their area. For example, I grow & collect yardlong beans, and love Egyptian spinach, Moringa, & water spinach as summer greens. Could I have grown them successfully in the climate of the 60's? Maybe I could have... but there is no way to make a proper comparison. There were few sources back then, and little available information on their proper culture. But I think the topic of modifying gardens to suit climate change misses the point. If a garden is diversified, something will always do well, regardless of the weather. This summer was a hot one, and I banked on that & planted more hot weather crops than usual. That turned out to be a good decision, and it has been a great year; but it was only 3 years ago - during the sun's abnormally quiet minimum - that we had a record cool summer in my area. Hot weather crops did poorly that year, but peas & runner beans did wonderfully. If there is one thing we can count on as gardeners, it is that something always does well, and something always fails. The object is to reduce the chance of failure as much as possible. I stretch my envelope to a great degree, and often plant varieties that are not entirely suited to my climate... and heartily recommend the practice. It is part of what makes gardening fun. However, I never put all my eggs in that shaky basket. It is best to do a mix of challenging crops, backed up by varieties that have proven themselves over time to be locally successful.

SINCE I AM BORED AND TO GET THOSE LATE SUMMER JUICES GOING..... (PLEASE FORGIVE ME!!!) AND .. I PLANTED MY TROPICAL FRUIT IN UPSTATE NY From Thursday's Daily Telegraph "On Friday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivers its latest verdict on the state of man-made global warming. Though the details are a secret, one thing is clear: the version of events you will see and hear in much of the media, especially from partis pris organisations like the BBC, will be the opposite of what the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report actually says. Already we have had a taste of the nonsense to come: a pre-announcement to the effect that “climate scientists” are now “95 per cent certain” that humans are to blame for climate change; an evidence-free declaration by the economist who wrote the discredited Stern Report that the computer models cited by the IPCC “substantially underestimate” the scale of the problem; a statement by the panel’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, that “the scientific evidence of… climate change has strengthened year after year”. As an exercise in bravura spin, these claims are up there with Churchill’s attempts to reinvent the British Expeditionary Force’s humiliating retreat from Dunkirk as a victory. In truth, though, the new report offers scant consolation to those many alarmists whose careers depend on talking up the threat. It says not that they are winning the war to persuade the world of the case for catastrophic anthropogenic climate change ��" but that the battle is all but lost. At the heart of the problem lie the computer models which, for 25 years, have formed the basis for the IPCC’s scaremongering: they predicted runaway global warming, when the real rise in temperatures has been much more modest. So modest, indeed, that it has fallen outside the lowest parameters of the IPCC’s prediction range. The computer models, in short, are bunk. To a few distinguished scientists, this will hardly come as news. For years they have insisted that “sensitivity” the degree to which the climate responds to increases in atmospheric CO₂ " is far lower than the computer models imagined. In the past, their voices have been suppressed by the bluster and skulduggery we saw exposed in the Climategate emails. From grant-hungry science institutions and environmentalist pressure groups to carbon traders, EU commissars, and big businesses with their snouts in the subsidies trough, many vested interests have much to lose should the global warming gravy train be derailed. This is why the latest Assessment Report is proving such a headache to the IPCC. It’s the first in its history to admit what its critics have said for years: global warming did “pause” unexpectedly in 1998 and shows no sign of resuming. And, other than an ad hoc new theory about the missing heat having been absorbed by the deep ocean, it cannot come up with a convincing explanation why. Coming from a sceptical blog none of this would be surprising. But from the IPCC, it’s dynamite: the equivalent of the Soviet politburo announcing that command economies may not after all be the most efficient way of allocating resources. Which leaves the IPCC in a dilemma: does it ’fess up and effectively put itself out of business? Or does it brazen it out for a few more years, in the hope that a compliant media and an eco-brainwashed populace will be too stupid to notice? So far, it looks as if it prefers the second option ��" a high-risk strategy. Gone are the days when all anybody read of its Assessment Reports were the sexed-up “Summary for Policymakers”. Today, thanks to the internet, sceptical inquirers such as Donna Laframboise (who revealed that some 40 per cent of the IPCC’s papers came not from peer-reviewed journals but from Greenpeace and WWF propaganda) will be going through every chapter with a fine toothcomb. Al Gore’s “consensus” is about to be holed below the water-line ��" and those still aboard the SS Global Warming are adjusting their positions. Some, such as scientist Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, have abandoned ship. She describes the IPCC’s stance as “incomprehensible”. Others, such as the EU’s Climate Commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, steam on oblivious. Interviewed last week by the Telegraph’s Bruno Waterfield, she said: “Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said: 'We were wrong, it was not about climate’, would it not in any case have been good to do many of the things you have to do in order to combat climate change?” If she means needlessly driving up energy prices, carpeting the countryside with wind turbines and terrifying children about a problem that turns out to have been imaginary, then most of us would probably answer “No”." This post was edited by mes111 on Wed, Sep 25, 13 at 18:12

Just one of the odd facts about CC. Both ice caps are melting. Soon it will be Greenland. The amount of water in those huge deposits of ice will raise the level of the oceans by 40 feet. Submerging large areas. Major parts of New York City will be under water along with Florida, the Netherlands, etc. Some of the comments from those doubting CC reminds me of that movie where this man decides to build an ark. Near Washington DC. The media have a lot of fun with it. Until the dam breaks and everyone scrambles aboard. Far fetched but it is very similar to CC in that people can only see in front or their nose and ignore scientists that have spent their lives studying climate. And will instead cling to irrelevant personal observations.

Josh, Update on the "Little Ice Ages" of the "middle ages". Those occurred during the Moulder (sp?) minimum, where for a couple centuries the number of sunspots dropped drastically. During this time Europe had extreme winter temperatures that are refereed to "The Little Ice Age", and many people assume this was true for the whole earth. Nope, was not the case. Turns out it was a regional event. While the total radiance of the sun did drop, it was by a very tiny amount. There is little or no evidence of significant cooling over the rest of the globe. The puzzle was why? There has been no know explanation.... until recently. Turns out the sunspots are likely key. Reason being, ultraviolet light. Evidence indicates that ultraviolet light emissions from the sun dropped by up to half due to lack of sunspots. This ultraviolet light heats the upper atmosphere where the ozone is. Less UV=cooler upper atmosphere=changed conditions for the planet and climate. Turns out when you feed these resultant conditions into our current climate models, the jet stream shifts significantly OVER EUROPE and the north Atlantic, but not so much elsewhere. Result is much colder temps over Europe but not elsewhere. This is not proof that is what happened in the "Little Ice Ages", but it is a mechanism, and is an area of continued research. Assuming this turns out to be essentially correct as appears to be likely, then far from refuting that small changes in temperature will have little effect, it actually confirms it. Lastly, for those of you that don't understand the way that science is set up, it's not the same as the corporate world we are all familiar with. Everyone is trying to make a name for themselves. It's not profit (though money can come if your successful enough), but recognition. The way you do that is prove you are you are right. But to way to REALLY make a reputation is to PROVE everyone else WRONG and that your RIGHT. Why do you suppose you know the name Albert Einstein? Answer, he PROVED EVERYONE else wrong, and I do mean EVERYONE, and himself RIGHT. The upheaval that Einstein created happen once a century or two at most. Issac Newton, Darwin, Galileo, among a few others are comparable. Science is self correcting, that is why the story can change over time, but usually actually just becomes more complex as the understanding becomes more complete. So for a climate scientist the ideal would not be to confirm the current thinking, but to actually sink it. Problem is, that is looking less and less even a remote possibility. Arktrees