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binarymax
IG_Semmelweiss
Could it be the incoming "strongest of all time" [1] el nino weather pattern that is expected this year with high probability ? Usually it is only the eastern pacific is mostly severely impacted, but maybe there's a correlation
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/23/down-to-...
lysace
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
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
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
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.
adrian_b
The argument that tries to belittle the current warming by pointing that in the past there have been times when it was warmer, does not have any value.
Besides the fact that a much lower temperature than in the past can do a lot of damage to the present-day beings that are not adapted to such temperatures, those higher temperatures from the past had been stable for long periods.
Now, when such a higher temperature from the past will be reached, there is no guarantee that the warming will stop there.
The greatest danger of the current warming is that, if we do not do anything about it, nobody can currently predict with any certainty that it would stop at a still acceptable temperature, matching a temperature from the distant past, instead of continuing towards even higher temperatures.
rafram
As a human, I do tend to mostly care about the period of the Earth's history that has allowed humans to exist. I'm sure the Mesozoic was nice, but I wouldn't want to live there!
tardedmeme
Apparently humans can't survive outside of an ice age, then. Maybe we shouldn't end it prematurely.
biophysboy
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
Okay? Let's keep it that way then I suppose.
b112
I'd trust such data a lot more, from any other source.
timr
> A 1,200 year time series.. that's definitely in the climate area.
Superficially, sure, but this is not a good dataset for any climate related argument. Cherry trees live about 100 years under optimal conditions, so you’re talking about multiple generations of trees here, with significant adaptation and selection along the way (humans heavily influenced the development of these trees, and the current “standard” tree for cherry blossoms in Japan is actually a hybrid first created in the 1700s). In short, even if you set aside measurement reliability and consistency over time, this dataset is heavily confounded.
As an aside, you’ll note that the primary change is that the lagging tail of the distribution is pulling forward (i.e. the distribution is getting narrower) not that the distribution overall is shifting forward. You can find trees blooming “this early” many hundreds of years ago, just not as often as now.
adriand
But wouldn’t that be true for all periods in the dataset? You see ups and downs over the centuries, and in each of those centuries I’m sure humans heavily influenced their evolution. Then you see a pronounced upward trend that just happens to also coincide with what we know to be serious, sustained and highly unusual planetary-wide warming.
dylan604
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
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
Weather can be due to climate, and time series are composed of anecdotes.
tshaddox
> 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
Key words: can be
Longer time series are indeed composed of many samples/anecdotes.
sandworm101
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
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
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?
morkalork
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
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.
stingraycharles
Interesting that the top 5 is all Japanese companies. Any reason why this is? They didn’t experience the dark ages like Europe did (just a very wild guess) ?
SenHeng
Small, mountainous, resource-poor island at the far end of the world meant few were interested in conquering it. That meant Japan had the luxury of maintaining their culture unhindered for a very long period of time.
The Japanese royal family is the longest continuous royal bloodline on record. Oral records say its 2600 years old while archives exist from the 6th century.
owlninja
The times had a little story relevant to this recently:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/climate/japan-cherry-blos...
dylan604
You mean like the Egyptians keeping records on the constellations?
morkalork
Yes exactly. Like the Mayan observatory that could only have been built after tracking celestial events over many years:
carabiner
Japan did the same with tsunami records.
Havoc
It’s because things are going great, right? Right?
layer8
The chart is pointing upwards! It’s the exponential growth we need!
lysace
So it's a reformatted version of: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/date-of-the-peak-cherry-t...
htrp
>Latest peak ever May 4 year 1323
What would have happened to cause that late of a bloom?
anigbrowl
Volcanic eruption, most likely.
childofhedgehog
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.
ars
This title is not true, they are blooming earlier than the earliest average.
The nature of an average is that it smooths out peaks.
globular-toast
Looks like this has been true since about 1960.
21asdffdsa12
And the world changes away from oil- all it takes is two wars. With one third to come, because the world kept regions economically afloat with energy subsidies for oil, which can not be stable without that.
And with that global warming, we have a nice little buffer against events that could cause a rapid cool down. Exterior caused like asteroid strikes and interior caused like regional nuclear exchanges. And nobody asked us, nobody consulted us, nobody explained anything to us and we land incredibly well with local minimum hell. The Delusional people deluding themselves about human nature can even continue to delude themselves further.
Its a disaster, but of all the worlds and all the disaster, its the best disaster.
Sparkyte
Trees often bloom based on the surrounding climate and conidtions. Warmer bursts in early spring lead to early blossoms.
1234letshaveatw
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
All across the northern US. We didn't have a single leaf on the trees until the last few weeks here in the northeast.
johnmaguire
It's been a very warm and early spring here in Michigan.
1234letshaveatw
You are kidding right? It has been terrible, temp below average and tons of rain
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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.