MAMMAL METEOROLOGIST: With climate change altering weather patterns, what good is a groundhog's prediction anymore?
Image: NOAA
The United States' smallest meteorologist must be scratching his head about now.
Each February for the past 125 years, Punxsutawney Phil -- the Pennsylvanian groundhog long considered a living symbol of Groundhog Day -- has sauntered from his burrow to cast a shadow on the weeks and months ahead. His predictions, though not always accurate, are cheered by hundreds of fans who flock to his den at Gobbler's Knob, a wooded hillock just outside the town that bears his name.
The ground rules for Phil's tradition have always been clear: If the groundhog sees his shadow, six weeks of winter are yet to come; if no shadow appears, then spring is on its way.
But with cold weather stubbornly absent across much of the Northeast this year and spring seemingly already under way, Phil may have beaten Old Man Winter to the punch. Now it's anybody's guess what a groundhog's shadow may portend.
"NEWS FLASH: Groundhog Day cancelled! Phil says he's pretty sure spring *already* arrived in western PA, preempting tomorrow's event," joked climate scientist Michael Mann in a Twitter post yesterday.
The winter of 2011-2012 is already among the top 20 warmest in historical memory, and is likely to earn a third- or fourth-place record in parts of New York and New Jersey, said Art DeGaetano, a climatologist and professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University.
That conforms to the trend of the past decade, which has seen three of the four warmest winters since meteorological data collection began, he said.
A mixed forecast
Much of the cold that would usually descend across the United States this time of year is trapped in a northern pressure system called the Arctic Oscillation, he said.
The warmer weather patterns have implications for animal species up and down the region, including Punxsutawney Phil and his fuzzy brethren, said Paul Curtis, a professor of natural resources and Cooperative Extension wildlife specialist at Cornell.
Groundhogs are one of the few animals that achieve true, or "profound," hibernation, burrowing down below the frost line for the coldest months of the year. During this period, which usually lasts from mid-October to late February, a groundhog's heart rate drops from 80 beats a minute to only three or four, and its body temperature falls by 60 degrees.
Warmer temperatures shorten hibernation, causing groundhogs to burrow later and rise earlier than is customary, said Curtis.
While this probably won't have a harmful effect on the woodchucks, other species will respond more strongly to the mild weather, with possible implications for humans, he said.
"The big one is deer," he said. "Mother deer emerge from mild winters with a lot more of their body fat still on them, meaning that they're less likely to drop stillborn calves. That can certainly make for a population swell, particularly when you have a number of warm years back-to-back."
Although deer can devastate plant life when their populations grow out of control, the real danger to humans comes from the ticks they carry, said Curtis. Deer ticks spread Lyme disease, a debilitating bacterial infection that can result in symptoms from chronic muscle aches to paralysis.
"We've seen a huge upswing in reported cases recently, from about seven in 2009 to 70 in 2010," he said.
Calm before the snap
There's another danger in the mild weather that might catch even the punctilious Punxsutawney Phil unawares. Plants and animals that have been lured out by the early spring could be caught at their most vulnerable moment by a sudden cold snap, said Curtis.
"When we look across the board, we see birds nesting and frogs calling as much as 20 days earlier than normal," he said. With the winter still undecided, a sudden snowfall could threaten their newborn young, he said.
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10 Comments
Add CommentSounds good to me. I like spring.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLol, I guess the warmists will try anything to hide the fact their predicted warming for the last decade did not happen.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut the warmists screwed up mentioning El Niña. They need to suppress anything that could imply nature is more than capable of warming the planet. So post warmists, here is your chance to claim El Niña has nothing to do with weather, that only your human produced CO2 has caused this horrendous warming of winter this year and put the groundhog out of a job.
I think the cold air just moved to Europe. It's freakin' freezing over here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou really do need to try and pull your head out of your own a**, and stop watching Faux News and stop listening to Rush Limpballs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this'Non-Scientific American'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh my God, how can this poor creature survive without the meaning that humans give to him? Not that he hasn't survived for millions of years, of course, and now here comes climate change! What to do, what to do!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow that I think of it, groundhogs have experienced countless climate changes over the millenia, long before human being were even around. Ice ages, terrible storms, heat waves, hurricanes, tornadoes and they're still here.
Climate change has been happening for a long, long time. Grow up and get used to it.
Nature balances itself out whatever may happen. But, sometimes balancing can mean bad things to happen. Beware!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a difference between short-term fluctuations and long-term trends. Even since 1998, the temperature trend is +0.155C per decade. When you look back to 1980, the trend is +0.170 per decade. It's still getting warmer, despite 4 out of the last 5 years being dominated by La Nina and historically low solar output. Nobody denies this and nobody serious about climate science denies that there are other forcings on the climate besides CO2. What you fail to realize is that we have these warming trends, and the ONLY forcing that is changing appreciably enough to explain the warming trend is CO2 forcing. The sun is in a relatively inactive phase, and has been for the past 20 years, yet every decade is warmer than the last. Volcanic activity is low (about %1 of what is necessary to drive the observed increases in CO2 concentration) and cannot be causing CO2 to increase anyway because Volcanic CO2 has a different isotropic signature than the CO2 we see building up in the atmosphere. The C12/C14 ratios in the CO2 we observe building up in the atmosphere clearly indicate fossil fuels as the source of increasing CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCosmic rays and/or sunspot numbers have almost ZERO correlation with clouds, and it doesn't matter because the cloud feedback is weekly positive.
CO2 traps heat and is causing the EXACT warming pattern climate models have predicted for decades. No other explanation encompasses the data better than AGW. The world's ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC ESTABLISHMENT has endoursed it. Try finding a professional scientific body that doubts humans are changing the climate with our CO2 emissions! There are scientists that disagree sure, but there are also scientists that think HIV doesn't cause AIDS or that continental drift is wrong. These scientists are rightly ridiculed just as much as climate science deniers. I don't know what else you need to change your mind.
As one who suffers from temperature-dependent (not light-dependent) seasonal affective disorder (I know, it's not in DSM but I know it exists because I have it), you won't find me complaining that it's too warm. Summer can't come soon enough or last long enough.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome UK ladybugs choose where they're going to past the winter season depending on how cold the winter is going to be every year, and it seems most of times they succeed in the right choice. Somebody knows the mechanism involved in this ?
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