indices of climate change in my back yard

the epa has published a list of forty-five indices of climate change..some of them such as carbon dioxide emissions i cannot measure ( even though i know my activities emit them )...the level of arctic and antarctic sea and land ice...or glacial melt...there are a few i can monitor in the relative comfort of my back yard or house however...heating and cool degree days is one...the call sixty five degrees fahrenheit the dividing line between heating and cooling days...this seems unrealistic to me..at sixty-five degrees i would have the windows open and the heat-a/c system would be off...still i can monitor how many days the heat and a/c run and what temperatures they are set at...high and low temperatures is another and that would be a natural to go with heating and cooling days...i have a rain gauge so heavy precipitation events ( we have been exceeding the annual average rainfall here for some time ) and drought would be simple indicators to keep track of as well...

my yard is replete with trees..deciduous and fir...( somewhat of a mitigation to my emissions...the perennials are carbon sinks too )...

as well as vegetables and flowers that all leaf and bloom ( the locust trees bloom and when the seeds fall it looks a lot like snow ) cyclically throughout the season so the first leaf and bloom dates should be simple to track over the seasons...the epa says we are running four to eight days earlier than the first leaf and bloom days were in 1950..a multi-year project for my dotage...

i have recently taken sophie d. coe to task over her statements about teocintli being unable to mature and set seed in northern latitudes...it is doing so successfully in my back yard...

both the seeds and the berries i am finding in my yard in november are there because the growing season is getting longer...the first frost is coming later and plants with longer seasons have the time to do what they do...in my yard and all over...

and i am finding one that is not on the epa's list...this is carolina horse nettle at the community garden on campus...it is not native and the garden is well north of its native range...it still is robust, blooming, and reproducing where it does not belong...an invader from a different climate that is in a new home not so different that it cannot survive...i know the climate is changing...i can see it empirically...i have me beliefs about why it is changing even though i cannot prove them to anyone's satisfaction...especially the deniers...that is understandable given human nature..it doesn't change fact.