AI-Generated Image Source: Adobe Stock
Windmills and solar panels at a vehicle charging station.
By Larry Wilson | [email protected] | Pasadena Star NewsUPDATED: November 30, 2024 at 10:42 AM PSTAn American map showing the rapid increase in average winter temperatures across the United States published last week showed us by doing the numbers what we gardeners know in our bones: It’s getting toastier out there.Not always toasty. There is still cold. Just a lot toastier than before.Thirty-five years ago, when I bought my Pasadena garden (and a little cottage sitting on its edge), there were three or four regular overnight frosts, morning ice glistening on the rose bushes and the irises, every winter, and seven or eight in the different microclimate just down the hill, the floor of the Arroyo Seco canyon where the Rose Bowl is.It’s been well over a decade since we have seen any frost at all.The map published by Climate Central shows that our coastal zone of Southern California is an area that has seen average winter temps rise between 2 and 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970.That’s not nearly as major a change as back East, where all of New England is in a zone where the winter lows are on average 5 degrees higher than 54 years ago.This is not an issue of opinion. It doesn’t matter to the real world if a politician such as Donald Trump finds it convenient to pretend that “climate change is a hoax.” This winter numbers are just a small piece of the data pie showing this year to be the hottest ever. “The global mean surface air temperature from January to September 2024 was 1.54°C above the pre-industrial average. This is the first time the world has exceeded 1.5°C warming,” the World Meteorological Organization reports.Related Articles
Opinion |
LA County’s homelessness spending policies expect success while subsidizing failure
Opinion |
Can Trump actually confirm Cabinet picks via recess appointments?
Opinion |
California taxpayers are voting with their feet and taking their families elsewhere
Opinion |
Rafael Perez: Americans really need to relax and stop taking national politics so seriously
Opinion |
Elon Musk gets it: America’s legal immigration process need to change
King Canute can command the tides to recede all he likes, but the rising tide pays no attention to his royal wishes. But the perhaps apocryphal story of the actual ancient English king, crowned in 1027, as told by his chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, was meant to tell the opposite of how the story is now understood. After the tide kept coming up and dampened his shoes despite the command, Canute stepped back and declared, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”A king, or a president, can have no effect on global warming and other examples o