According to the article in the Washington Post, the changes are based on data from the past 12 years. The data was gathered from many more sites than the previous base (which was gathered 22 years ago). It is solely for cold hardiness and doesn't consider possible changes in heat. The mountain house was and remains solidly 6a, but down here the barely 6b was rezoned into 7a. As anneliese points out, in reality that depends on the specific site. My back patio and veg garden area is surrounded by house and then trees and tall fencing. It's been reliably 7a for decades and now would meet the criteria for zone 8; that doesn't mean plants with a maximum hardiness for 8 can be depended on to survive every winter -- but it would take an exceptional cold spell to kill them. OTOH, the front yard is much colder: open and facing north, in the past few years I've lost shrubs rated for zone 6 and even for zone 5. Which isn't going to stop me from trying them again, lol. So far *this* winter, we've had three nights that cooled to the high teens, and maybe 5 more that were below freezing. Climate warming or normal chancy variance, I don't think there have been enough cold-hours to meet the requirements of the pear trees. February may be cold enough, but the norm is that Feb throws us one or two snow storms and then starts to warm up. I may have to search for an organic orchardist.

Actually, the drought in 2012 is one of the worst ones ever recorded in U. S. history. In a Weather Underground blog post earlier this year, Dr. Jeff Masters described 2012 as second only to one previous drought year in the 1930s. We have been able to mitigate its impact somewhat compared to, let's say, the drought decades of the 1930s and 1950s because we use a lot of no-till farming now, and because irrigation is more readily available. I'm going to link a graphic from a NY Times article about drought because it shows a drought footprint map for each year. When you look at it, you can see that there are very few years where drought has been as widespread as the 2012 drought. The drought of 2012 is especially notable because so many areas were in Extreme or Exceptional Drought which means not only was drought very widespread but it was very deep and prolonged. At the present time, drought is forecast to continue in 2013, although I sure hope the weather pattern changes and that doesn't happen. (Realistically, I think they are right that drought will continue, but I hope they are wrong.) What usually happens is we come back out of drought in spring and slip back into it in summer. I don't know what it has been like at anyone else's house in every year of the 2000s, but at our house we have been in drought for a meaningful portion of these years: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2006, 2005, 2003 and 2001. That's decadal drought right there. By contrast, in the 1990s we only had 2 or 3 years when drought was an issue. I lived in Texas then...not sure what it was like here in OK in the 1990s. What worries me is that drought is becoming more and more the norm. I wonder if we'll ever have a nice rainy decade like the 1960s or 1970s again. I was only a kid in those decades, but it seemed like it rained all the time. Looking at the drought footprint map, I can see that even those otherwise wet decades had a few drought years too. Drought often is decadal on a wide scale, but isn't always. Sometimes, local droughts won't even show up on the Drought Monitor because they cover a relatively small area. We had horrendous drought here at our house in 2003 but it doesn't even show up on the Drought Monitor, so I assume most of OK wasn't as dry as Love County was that year. We had under 19" of rainfall that year and our average rainfall is 38", I am so tired of the recurring droughts of the 2000s that I can barely stand to say the word. I want a nice, wet year where we worry and fret about flooding. I don't want flooding...but hope it is wet enough to stop just short of flooding. Here is a link that might be useful: Drought Footprint Graphic

its a spammer, they hit tons of old posts with the same gibberish embedded with links to their garbage....

There used to be "Homes of the Stars" bus tours in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, and there used to be people on Sunset Blvd selling maps of stars' homes. My friend Michelle bought one of these maps because she wanted to see Tom Cruise's house. We drove by it, but the wall was so high that we could not see the house. Remember the I Love Lucy episode in which she tried to steal a grapefruit from Richard Widmark's house? When my brother had an art opening at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica (which is a big deal), I had invitations printed with one of Kevin's paintings on one side and sent a bunch of them to the addresses I found on the map. None of the celebrities showed up, but Shirley McLaine's assistant wrote back and said the Shirley was out of town on that date. I think I would like the show. I'm not sure how one qualifies as a celebrity these days, but I would not include athletes, although I think that most people do. I just do not pay attention to them. I do enjoy seeing TV and movie stars out in public, but some of them I do not recognize, and someone has to tell me who they are. I like the houses in Malibu better than the ones in BH, but then I like the ocean views.