Cherry Blossoms

I had a thought this morning about global warming. How has the date for cherry tree bloomings and the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC changed over the years? This might be a proxy for what is happening to the temperature at least in the Eastern United States. I Googled this idea and found the following chart (see: EPA Source Data for reference) of these dates over the last 94 years. As one can see here first hand, there seems little change in this indicator date except for a up-spike in 1988 and 1998 ... and, in fact, the 2014 and 2015 dates are quite late relative to much of the past:

For you Kool Aid drinkers I have also included a reference to a Boston University/Japanese study of cherry tree blossoming times around Kyoto, Japan which purports to show the opposite effect over a much longer period of time. However, it does concede that warming caused by urbanization trends may be an influence on this data. It also states that the dates for the Washington, DC festival have moved earlier by about a week ... which, as we can see above, is clearly not the case. So it might be that this study is also Chicken-Little biased (ala Mann's "hockey stick" which has been fully debunked by the actual data) ... see: Boston University PDF Reference.

Screw Job #4

Our Dear Leader has just slammed the White House door on visitors as a consequence of the government spending sequestration that started on March 1^st (see: Washington Times Story)   No longer can Girl Scout troupes tour our First Family’s residence while visiting Washington, DC to see the cherry blossoms.  No longer can a future President say hello to Barack Obama on a Boys State visit (like Bill Clinton did with JFK many years ago).  No longer can the hoi polloi see the 54 Christmas trees that Michelle Obama lavishes on her residence at year end (see: Oh Oh Tannenbaums).  What does this White House public access cost our government?  Maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a year?  And our Secretary of State, John Kerry (who served in Viet Nam), just signed over a U.S. taxpayer check to President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt totaling $250 million (see: Huffington Post Story) because he promised to be nice to us.  (This amount equals about 1,000 years of the White House being open to visitors.)

I think the world has started to spin out of control …