Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 30, 2002

The white dead nettle showed the greatest shift -- blooming 55 days earlier than normal -- in a new study tracking how climate change affects when plants flower.
— In a new measure of how a warmer globe is changing biology, British researchers have found that plants are blooming much earlier and they forecast the trend will continue if temperatures rise. A father and son team report in the journal Science that the first spring flowering of 385 species of British plants has advanced by 4&Mac195; days to 15 days in a decade when compared with the flowering date of the species over the previous four decades.

‘The next (thing) they will do will be to migrate, and I guess we will see that very soon.’
“THESE DATA reveal the strongest biological signal yet of climatic change,” the authors write in a study to be published Friday. The researchers are Alastair Fitter of the University of York and his father, R.S.R. Fitter, a naturalist and author who lives in Cambridge, England.
The senior Fitter started 47 years ago recording the first flowering date of the British plants in south-central England. In the new study, the researchers compared the changes in the first flowering dates with temperature trends in the same area over four decades.
Alastair Fitter said the mean temperatures for January, February and March - critical months for spring flowering plants - has warmed in the study area by 1.8 degrees since the 1960s.
“Some predictions of climate warming are 4 to 5 degrees C (7.2 to 9 degrees F), which would mean that these effects are only the beginning of a major shift,” he said.

55 DAYS FOR ONE FLOWER
For 16 percent of the species studied, the first flowering date in the 1990s shifted by an average of 15 days. The greatest change was for a plant called the white dead nettle. From 1954 to 1990, its average first flowering date was March 18. From 1991 to 2000, the plant’s first flowering date was around Jan. 23, a shift of 55 days. Sun spurge, a wild flower found both in the United States and the United Kingdom, shifted its first flowering date by about 32 days, the researchers found.
Alastair Fitter said the study supports the notion that flowering plants will be the first indicator of a warming climate.
“Plants will respond (first) by flowering earlier,” said Fitter. “The next (thing) they will do will be to migrate, and I guess we will see that very soon.”
He said some German studies already have shown that alpine plants are moving higher into the mountains in response to climate change.
Some other studies also have shown that the warming climate has affected insects. Alastair Fitter said he and his father found that plants pollinated by insects shifted their first flowering date more radically than those that are wind-pollinated. He said this suggests that these plants have an evolutionary history of tracking the climate-caused changes in the behavior of insects.

NATURAL, MANMADE OR BOTH?
Stephen Schneider, a Stanford University climatologist and environmental biologist, said the Fitter research “is completely consistent with other studies that show climate change is not a theoretical construct, but is actually happening.”
“This is precisely what you would expect in a climatic warming trend,” said Schneider. “Warming is going on and nature does respond.”
Environment news
However, Schneider said it is less certain how much of the warming is caused by a natural, global climactic cycle and how much is caused by humans. Many scientists believe that the planet is being warmed by an increase in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases coming from industry or from the burning of fossil fuels.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/759245.asp