By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer
Since the end of the little ice age in the 1850’s, earth’s climate has been warming—no surprise, since that’s what defines the end of any ice age. But given the natural vicissitudes of weather, how do you measure overall change? One way is to track leaf-out, bloom, and seeding dates of plants across North America. There aren’t enough scientists to do that, but there are easily enough gardeners—which is why a consortium of universities in the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) wants your help.
By logging onto Project Budburst and registering, you’ll get a master list of plants being tracked, then be able to enter data from your own location. Everything will be compiled and entered into a master database that was started when the project began in 2007. This year’s tracking began Saturday, Feb. 15.
Past ice ages have come and gone with no apparent help from humans, and the results have been dramatic for all species involved. The present fear is that this time, we’re accelerating the warming process by dumping carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas that accelerates the warming process) into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates.
This might lead to faster and more extreme warming, which could increase storm intensities, raise sea level enough to submerge cities like New York and London, and wreak havoc with our global food supply. Studies like this one may help supply evidence, one way or the other, about human involvement in climate change.
