A new report published by the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B finds that temperature alone cannot account for early cherry tree blossoms, and light pollution from major cities also plays a role.
The research was put together by Spalding Associates, citizen scientists from the U.K. and The University of Exeter Penryn Campus, and found that buds were forming seven and a half days earlier than normal in areas with high amounts of artificial night-time light.
That could explain why Washington, D.C.’s famed Cherry Blossom trees have been blooming earlier, according to veteran meteorologist Anthony Watts. He points out that in a growing city, there’s more light now than in the past, potentially leading to earlier blooms of the cherry tree.
“Trees also respond to increased light, be it sunlight or light pollution from a growing and glowing city,” Watts wrote in a piece published Thursday on his blog Watts Up With That.
“We found that artificial lighting can accelerate tree leaves budding, and effectively the onset of spring by a week,” Professor Richard Ffrench-Constant of Exeter University wrote in a piece published on the university’s website.
While Watts agrees that light pollution is triggering early blooming, he takes issue with the notion others have made that man-made global warming has anything to do with it, especially as it pertains to D.C..
An article published by The Washington Post in 2012 only referenced warming as the driving factor behind the early buds. “Temperatures and blooms dates reveals Washington’s average March temperature has warmed 2.3 degrees in the last 90 years and that the cherry blossom peak bloom date has shifted a little more than 5 days earlier (based on simple linear regression),” the article reads. “In other words, real-world data support the overall idea that the D.C.’s March climate is warming and the blossoms’ bloom dates are shifting earlier in response.”
The author “didn’t even consider any other possibility,” Watts notes. “He assumed warming was the cause from the start, set out to prove it while excluding all other possibilities, and then bolstered his preformed conclusion with ‘real world data.’ Problem is, that’s not science, it’s activism.”
Watts concedes that D.C. temperatures have risen over recent years, but says that is a local phenomenon to major cities experiencing the “urban heat island” effect, not due to man-made global warming.
“That temperatures have risen in Washington, D.C. is no surprise,” Watts wrote in a piece ran on his website Thursday. “But I argue that it is a factor of the city growth and increased local heatsinks retaining heat at night rather than global warming.”
The Environmental Protection Agency defines a heatsink, or urban heat island, as, “Built up areas that are hotter than nearby rural areas. The annual mean air temperature of a city with 1 million people or more can be 1.8–5.4°F (1–3°C) warmer than its surroundings. In the evening, the difference can be as high as 22°F (12°C).”
Simply put, the more people that live in a confined area, the more heat is produced from things like roads and buildings. Not only can they produce heat, they can also store it, making major cities warmer than the rural areas surrounding them.
Watts has also noted that placement of many of the temperature sensing stations are suspect, and Fox News ran a story in 2013 explaining that the government closed 600 temperature sensing stations due to the same concerns. Some temperature sensing stations were found to be situated right next to commercial air conditioning units, which produce their own heat and can skew the actual temperature data.
“The question remains as to why they continue to use a polluted mix of well-sited and poorly-sited stations,” Watts told Fox News.
The finding is important for its implications that certain unusual features of the environment can’t always just be explained by claiming global warming, highlighting the need for a deeper understanding of the issue.
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