Here in Connecticut, many of the leaves are still on the trees. While they’ve turned color, they haven’t fallen off yet, a highly unusual occurrence. If they stay on much longer, and we get freezing rain, the leaves as well as branches will ice up, and the extra weight could bring trees down.
When I was a kid growing up here, freezing rain didn’t happen much, it snowed rather than rained in the winter. Sub-zero temperatures, while uncommon, certainly happened. Now it never gets much below 15 F. And we’re officially still in a drought! All of which shows a definite trend multi-year trend towards warmer weather.
Definitely noticeable everywhere to those of us with TV-watching habits. The NYC Marathon on Nov. 4, typically run amidst multi-colored leaves, had an all-green background this year, while the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, often held with no leaves at all, had the multicolored background typical of the Marathon.
If the weather stays too warm, then production of maple syrup is impaired – a serious matter indeed for me, as I use it in coffee, on granola, as well as pancakes.
You may well be right about your observations, but you may not, either.
Long-term change is hard to gauge. Anyone living in California between 1945 and 1968 would have assumed that the normal rainfall was between 4 and 8 inches, since it rarely exceeded that. To the extent that we have records, the actual average is closer to 16 inches per year, somewhat depressed by the long, post-war drought. The rains returned with a vengeance in 1968-69. A move theater, built near an old swamp that dried up, suddenly had water seeping in up to the first seven rows. It was the only movie theater I’d been to with a moat.
I can remember one fall in Wisconsin that was unusually mild and we still had leaves late into the fall. Trying to remember which one it was, and whether it came after a drought. There was one drought-ridden summer followed by a bitterly-cold winter that had almost no snow, and a couple of years later we had the biggest snowfall ever, more than twice the average (and snow continuing well into May, no less). So there is some normal variability.
None of this means global warming isn’t happening, just that the effects you’re seeing may not be part of it.
It’s true. My sister was born in NH on May 26, 1967– in the middle of a blizzard. The winter of ’68-69 gave us like six feet of snow– unheard of in NH– and I still have the photos to prove it. Then, in the 1990s, five or six consecutive light snow years put our local ski area out of business. (It;s now condos.) The year after they closed, snow returned to normal.
OTOH, extreme weather has definitely increased, and a recent article noted that natural disasters are now 20 times more common– and the temperature trend is noticably upward.