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.
It’s because things are going great, right? Right?
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.
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?
If you liked that you might find tbe lost of oldest companies interesting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies</a><p>It was sad when I checked some time ago how many ancient Japanese companies have closed in tbe last 50 years.
The times had a little story relevant to this recently:<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/climate/japan-cherry-blossom-database-scientist.html?unlocked_article_code=1.elA.ZRzq.Vv5v8tYmF_EG&smid=url-share" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/climate/japan-cherry-blos...</a>
You mean like the Egyptians keeping records on the constellations?
Global warming or global climate change? No mainstream media is talking about it now.
So it's a reformatted version of: <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/date-of-the-peak-cherry-tree-blossom-in-kyoto" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/date-of-the-peak-cherry-t...</a>
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 :(
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.
See also<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721771">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721771</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811668">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811668</a>
Now this is climate science I can get behind.
Don't worry though guys, climate change isn't real. /s<p>1200 years is a serious timescale, I think humans generally struggle reasoning about long durations or very vast distances. Which leads to them instead postulating how all these other more present, more recent and nearer things can be to blame when what you really need to do is zoom out (in space and/or time).
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Really disappointing first parse of the comments.<p>My average comment quality is pretty terrible, but these are on par.
Many factors in this. Heat islands from urbanization in Kyoto, different species bred for earlier blooming, etc.
If only we had a plausible hypothesis that covered not only early blossoms in Kyoto, but hundreds of other observations in climate all in the direction of a rise in global temperature, be it in urbanized areas or in remote regions like Antarctica or glaciars... Damn scientist, they might be sleeping or something.
Is the "etc" here "because of human greenhouse emissions, the earth is rapidly warming"?
If these events where random noise then they would distribute in both sides of the climate models; We don’t observe that. Events only seem to match or be worse than expectations.
> The signal is local to one species
lo heat, why doth thou radiate? from your islands; blooming species differently...
Trees often bloom based on the surrounding climate and conidtions. Warmer bursts in early spring lead to early blossoms.