I recently ran across a report from the USDA (National Water and Climate Center). Page 19 of the report provides some frightening details. The weather is supposed to be dry in “Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan” and above the normal range of temperature.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the contiguous United States experienced the warmest meteorological winter (December-February) and the third warmest February on record. One noticeable implication has been the record-low amount of ice coverage throughout the Great Lakes.
Per the March 8 report from NOAA: “The average temperature across the contiguous U.S. last month was 41.1 degrees F, 7.2 degrees F above the 20th-century average and ranking as the third-warmest February in NOAA’s 130-year climate record. Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin each had their warmest February on record. An additional 20 states saw their top-10 warmest February on record. Persistent winter warmth resulted in a steady decrease in ice coverage across the Great Lakes, which reached a historic low of 2.7% on February 11 — the lowest amount of ice coverage on record during mid-February.” Open the report>>
Throughout the regions, environments are so unpredictable. The native plants, the pollinators, the trees and shrubs, the birds and the animals cannot keep up with this. This is threatening our way of life and our ecosystems.
Read Accent Natural Landscaping’s Climate Change is Moving Things Around.
The e-mail photo courtesy of NASA. It depicts NASA’s new three-dimensional portrait of methane, the world’s second-largest contributor to greenhouse warming, showing it rising from a diversity of sources on the ground and how it moves through the atmosphere. Combining multiple data sets from emissions inventories, including fossil fuel, agricultural, biomass burning and biofuels, and simulations of wetland sources into a high-resolution computer model, researchers now have an additional tool for understanding this complex gas and its role in Earth’s carbon cycle, atmospheric composition, and climate system.
From Lucy Lalitchka: Your information is so valuable. We need to be prepared for what may face us in this warming climate. Good conservation methods are more important than ever.
I agree, Lucy — Donna