First in a two-day series
GOTHIC, Colo. (AP) – David Inouye is an unfortunate climate scientist.
More than 40 years ago, the biologist at the University of Maryland began to study when wildflowers, birds, bees and butterflies first performed every spring on this mountain.
Today, plants and animals arrive at Rocky Mountain Biological Lab a week or two earlier than 30 years ago. The robins who arrived in early April then appear in mid-March. Marmoter finishes its winter slurry ever before.
"If the climate did not change, we would not see such changes occur," Inouye said while standing on a bed of wildflowers that emerges on the first day of May as marmot's snoop around nearby.
It has been 30 years since much of the world learned that global warming had emerged. On June 23, 1
But it turns out that the climate is not the only thing that changes: Nature itself is also. It is the picture that was painted by interviews with more than 50 researchers and an Associated Press analysis of data on plants, animals, pollen, ice, sea level and more.
You do not need a thermometer or rainmeter to notice climate change, and you do not have to be a researcher to see it.
Evidence is found in the blueberry bushes of Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond, the declining population of polar bears in the Arctic and the dying coral all over the world. Researchers have documented 28,800 cases of plants and animals "responding consistently to temperature changes," says a study from 2008 in the magazine Nature.
"Nature is extremely sensitive to temperature and nature reacts to the warmer temperatures," says Boston University biologist Richard Primack. "The dramatic change is just before us."
In the 1850s, Thoreau charted when Walden Pond's blueberry blueberries first flourished. At the time, it occurred on average on May 16th. In the last 10 years it is on average April 23. Primack began tracking blueberries in the 2000s so he can not specifically say how much of the previous flower was due to warming temperatures over the last 30 years, but he counts about one third.
In 1983, the letter carrier John Latimer began to find out when the birds, the tiles and the butterflies appear when the trees and plants bloom and when they changed color and released leaves in northernmost Minnesota. Spring comes earlier, he found. But it is not consistent; There are some very late years spread, which gives a rollercoaster effect.
Beginning 30 years ago, the growing season generally grew around the northern hemisphere "quite suddenly to a new normal", with earlier sources and later falling, "said Mark Schwartz, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Geography. In the lower 48 states, 2012 was the earliest growing season on record until it was lined up in 2017, he said.
In the United States, the first frost of the fall is on average nine days later since 30 years ago, while last spring frost occurs almost four days earlier, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This means that the growing season between is almost two weeks longer. And some of the things that grow make us sneeze and suffer.
High ragweed days over America swelled from 1990 to 2016, according to a study by U.S. Department of Agriculture Lewis Ziska. In Kansas City, the number of high pollen days jumped from 58 to 81.
"Allergies and asthma are rising. Climate change is not the only reason, but it contributes," says Dr. Howard Frumkin, former environmental health care manager at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now at Wellcome Trust in London. Frumkin said ragweed and poisonous ivy trigger more powerful allergic reactions with higher carbon dioxide levels.
Some of the hardest hits on earth are under the water. Coral reefs are sensitive to warmer water, and there is no reef on this planet that has been unscathed by global warming, "said Mark Eakin, coordinator of the Cold War reef.
"Looking at coral reefs around the world, they have suffered a lot of damage," said Eakin. "Many of them are shadows of what they were before 1998."
There had been no global mass bleaching of corals – when they become white because of heat tension and often die – until 1998. Another hit in 2010 and then from 2014 to 2017 was the largest global mass bleaching of all those who destroyed the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, said Eakin.
Melting "Studies have shown that their survival rates, reproductive rates and body weight fall into most parts of the Arctic," says Steven Amstrup, former American Geological Survey's Best Polar Bear Researcher, and now a scientist at Polar Bear International. In parts of Alaska, Amstrup found a 40 percent population decline since the mid-1990s.
When Amstrup began studying polar bears in Alaska, he followed up the animal's return from widespread hunting in the 1950s and 1960s. But beginning in the late 1990s they began to lose their habitat and "we did not see so many big old bears".
Ornitologist George Divoky, on his 47th summer in Cooper Island, Alaska, studies beach birds, is another unfortunate climate scientist.
"In 1988 things began to get strange," said Divoky. In the years that followed, sea birds as the black guillemot arrived earlier, lay eggs earlier and did not survive, he said and blamed heat.
In 1989, Divoky counted 220 pairs of birds. Last year there were 85 pairs and two thirds of the chickens died.
"I was just studying birds," said Divoky. "I'm not proud that I can document the end of an Arctic navy colony."
Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist at Texas Tech, has heard that non-scientists accuse the government or researchers to manipulate temperature data to show warming. There are no cooking books, she said; Nature sends a clear signal of climate change.
"If you do not trust the thermometers, throw them out," Hayhoe said. "All we have to do is look at what's going on in nature."
The AP data logger Nicky Forster contributed to this story from New York.