[image courtesy of davidezartz on flickr]
If, like me, you braved the cold, wet and windy weather over the last couple of days, you’ll be forgiven for raising one eyebrow at the latest reports that Spring is here already, 11 days early.
The study found that four out of five animals and plants are breeding earlier because of changes in UK weather patterns.
I’m sure those animals will have a better nose for recognising gradual changes in weather so I won’t argue with them.
The reason I thought this was interesting is because in my blog post earlier this month, I said I hoped that climate change experts would make predictions and conclusions about climate change with significant forethought so that mistakes like those surrounding the melting of the snow on the Himalayan mountains wouldn’t occur again.
So I was really pleased to hear an interview with climate change expert Dr Stephen Thackeray, a biologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Lancaster, who had the presence of thought to acknowledge other factors before suggesting that earlier Springs are a result of rising global temperatures.
He said: “There appears to be large-scale patterns in accelerating change across terrestrial ecosystems. This may suggest large-scale drive like climate change is responsible for the changes in the data.
But it’s early days yet to say climate change is responsible for these changes.”
Let’s hope this attitude will continue in the future. If so, we might get fewer stories like this, which suggested that faith in climate change experts has diminished recently because of misleading climate change predictions. Fingers crossed, anyway.
