I don't know where to post this, so here goes.
I found this thru a link that Ned posted (thanks Ned - been looking for this). The A's & B's have been dropped and some zones have changed. For example; Milwaukee & Chicago used to be zone 5B, & now Chicago is zone 6 & MKE still zone 5. Anyone have their zone changed?
http://arborday.org/media/zones.cfm

The map says zone 5-6 but no way is Chicago zone 6. I am in a northwest suburb close to the city and I have never seen us referred to as zone 6.

Perhaps this was adjusted for USA warming? It is irrefutable scientific fact that the past decade, USA have warmed up considerably on the average. the zones needed readjustments.

The US of A have warmed up according to scientific instruments, and they don't lie like the politicians, and can't all be wrong all over the USA at the same time. We also have more extreme mood swings in the weather, but the annual averages are up. This is expected from global warming, resulting to definite climate change, in the USA and most places of the world.

thanks Patty ,
See Joe i told ya we where in the same Zone but its wrong only time we got below 40 was during the Artic Blast here in florence ..Never snows here and we seldom have to wear jackets although im still worried i may need some help eating some Naners next yr Tammy

JackPine, I heard this same example (MKE-Chicago) recently from the gardener guy Paul James who said "good riddance of those A's & B's. Chicago would be warmer than NW of it. Living near the lake, it is always warmer in winter & cooler in summer. Big cities also have more concrete & tall buildings to hold warmth. You have more green space which would cool things down a bit.
Did you guys around Charlseton SC go up a zone???

In my lifetime, SE South Carolina has been zone 9, then zone 8 and now back to zone 9.

I understand Joe feelings, but I respectfully suggest that we refain from expressing political views here.

Ned

Hoping not to mention the p-word anymore, I am open to discuss this topic very scientifically as this climatic change is affecting us all. 5% of the scientists may not believe that global warming is happening versus the 95% that does, but 100% agree about the global climatic change.

If 95% of your best doctors have concluded that your child is in immenent fatal danger if you look properly at the symptoms, would you hold on to your belief on the 5% that says otherwise? Would we not do something about it? The whole world is at stake here.

On the positive note, it is dramatic climatic improvement for my backyard growing, but I do care about the rest of us. The improved local effect in my backyard would only be temporary, we are just undergoing transitory climatic changes. California's grape wine growing would be the first to suffer in terms of quality, as we will have higher frequencies of these more than 100 degree day temperature. Fruit growing in the central valley has started to suffer this year and our climatologists predicted more of this pattern to come. The major cause is global warming. I'm sorry if Global Warming is no longer a scientific topic but now considered a political one.


So I will stick with the topic at hand...

And speaking about this topic, the USDA zones, new or old, are very crude estimates of your area's climate patterns. A much better one to use for us hobbyists are the Sunset zones. This one included our specific area, sunset zone 14, that is characterized by maritime influences part of the day. California has tremendously diverse zones and regional microclimates to be accurately described by USDA zones alone. The Sunset zones, likewise, needs readjustments.

Ned, feel free to correct me if I go overboard to the political side of otherwise scientific discusssions. I don't mean to offend anyone, and would always want to focus on scientific discussions of the topics. Sometimes, it is hard to separate when the issues affects us entirely, after all, there's still that human part in me.

Joe, Thanks for taking my comment in the context in which it was intended.

I agree that there is a serious problem with the use of carbon based fuels, and that global warming appears to be the big one. This problem has evolved over many years and was not caused by anyone in particular. I don't have a scientific mind, but I can name the many of the more obvious causes. Most of them are choices we, and, by extension, our governments make. Here in the USA, the government is basically doing what the majority of the public demands. There seems to be no way to bring the situation under control, because no one wants to sacrifice a thing.

First and foremost I believe the worlds population explosion must be controlled. Of course this is political suicide for any politician that even suggests such at thing. Everyone believes it is their right to reproduce as often a freely as they choose, and to own as much as they can amass.

Then there is China, India, and many other countries, that have just started on their quest to modernize. They will not be denied.

We must learn to live with less, and to learn to conserve what we have. Bigger cars, Mac mansions, more and larger boats, , more consumer goods, frequent long trips/vacations to far away places - they all contribute to the problem. The list could go on and on. Most of us are all guilty in some way. Here in the 40’s and 50's, when I grew up, no one would have dreamed of going to Virginia Beach for a "Citrus Expo". They would have thought you had lost your cotton picking mind if you had even mentioned it, but I will be there!

I finish by saying I started out in a little frame house without AC, heated by a coal fire, with one Sears Silverton radio for entertainment, and a 4 party telephone for communication. Things worked out ok. We can only trust they will in the future.

I personally started gardening as part of wanting to be the solution.

fertlizer, obtaining plants, etc arent "free", but in Gary Paul Nabhans book "Coming Home to Eat, the pleasures and politics of local foods", he discusses some garden research that indicated that gardening in his area, even with watering, was less energy intensive than buying all "imported" foods.

It is true that grocery companies, polititians, and large corporate farms are doing what the consumer wants, but i dont think the average American is aware of the insane ammounts of subsidies exist in the large scale corporate food world. (This is not meant to be inflamitory, I dont blame any party, flavor, or variety of people, just acknowledge that few Americans really pay attention to how things work. also there is a high demand for cheap portable food...)

Clothes, furniture, you name it. Stuff am cheaper, and more cheaply made, so we buy more. its sick if you step back and analyze it.

Cars have historically gotten better milage than they do now, and other countries who are more serious about quality of life and sensible government regulation DO have higher MPG vehicles.

Back to global warming- If you want to do anything positive, start with compact flourescent light bulbs, and use daylight whenever possible. Recycle. Bring used or fabric bags when you go to the grocery.

And hope that this change of temperatures, which also includes more intense storms, doesnt adversely affect all agriculture in the country!

Global warming at the present time, ?maybe? However, over the eons the temperature of the earth has risen and has fallen. We MIGHT be on the rise (it takes many many years to actually know) and if we are, the time will come when the world temperature will again decline. It will happen over and over and over. None of us will be here to see it. The fossil record tell us that palm trees used to grow in Colorado. If there is gobal warming or if there is no gobal warming, I really don't care much. Colorado winters are still VERY COLD. - Millet

This is true, and the earths plates continue to move as well...

While it might likely be true that for the past millions of years, our planet's temperature has risen and fallen when mankind was not yet present. For the past 650,000 years, we have the highest carbon dioxide levels based on credible past geological records. We are doing right now, one global atmospheric experiment that never before this planet has ever experienced, and everyone could suffer, and all of our best climate models shows that we are going to suffer if we are to continue this present rate of fossil consumption.

Our current rise in carbon dioxide and global temperature rise is the biggest spike to appear on geological time scale and I am afraid that even if we are to correct our mistakes right now, the inertia of the errors of our ways would still be felt in generations to come. Meaning, it would get a lot worse. Let us simply enjoy our life time now and let the future generation care for itself. We will let them inherit the unstoppable exploding bomb, so to speak.

Ice ages come and go every 10 to 15 thousand years, but over the past decades we are on super exponential rise, the kind of spike, which has never been on geological time scale. It used to cycle for eons, but now, in terms of hundred years, and in geological time scale, the current situation is equivalent to a sudden big spike. Heck, earth may wipe out mankind in the process of correcting itself for the new equilibrium. There is a big possibility that we could become a runaway greenhouse planet like Venus where the daytime temperatures are simply hellish and the only thriving lifeform would be microbial. I hope it would not be that extreme, and also hope that with all these global warming, the Antartic would at least become the paradise it once was, with palm trees and citruses, but I can assure you, there would be no billions of people left.

We have technologies right now that can combat all of our current fossil problems if only we are serious enough to get rid of our oil addiction. But because of greed and our fear of changing the status quo, as a species, we are most probably doomed unless we collectively wake up.

When energy is harnessed from the sun, hydrogen as storage of energy is the answer to most of our energy problems in the future. The sun's energy is the most efficient neutral type and non-polluting way of satisfying our energy needs. Waves, hydro-electric dams, wind, biomass, ethanol, and even the fossil fuels are all solar powered.

Granting that we have perfectly solved the fusion paradox and the radioactive material disposal from fission reactors, and prevented all types of accidents that has plagued our nuclear reactors, there is still a big problem in using nuclear and fussion power. These energy sources are not part of the normal equilibrium and will shift thermal balance towards a hotter atmosphere as there is a net heat accumulation when unnatural sources of energy such as from the splitting or fusing of atoms are being utilized and ultimately most of this unnatural sources contributing to the delicate atmospheric balance end up being dissipated as heat ultimately even if our overall efficiency is 100%. Unless we can pump out the waste heat into deep space, these kinds of energy sources should not be used as the major energy source for the future of mankind. It will always be a net heat gain for our atmosphere now that we have carbon dioxide that traps and retains most of the heat end products generated for any kind of energy usage for our convenience regardless of efficiency.

Fossil fuels, carbonate deposits while solar powered are carbon sinks that the earth's ecosystem have achieved equilibrium with after so many billions years and therefore we should wean ourselves from exploiting these sources. The rate of releasing back carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by using these energy sources is truly disruptive and astoundingly dramatic when we talk about geological time scale. We have record levels of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere and we could not afford to have a disaster in this non-repeatable atmospheric experimentation. We only have one planet to experiment on, and we can't afford a single mistake. We may not be able to cope with what perturberances are there to come as a consequence of this big atmospheric manipulation, the ecosystem will not have enough time to adjust nor equilibriate, which perhaps mankind could be eliminated in the process of runaway greenhouse gas thermal death trap as one of those possibilities.

If we use plants to harness the sun's energy, at best the efficiency is 5% for accumulating biomass energy. Then we transform that biomass energy into hydrocarbon fuels, a process which is carbon emissions neutral, but the efficency is further reduced by transformation into alcohol or oil or hydrogen, perhaps the best available technologies to date, we would have achieved an overall 2% conversion efficieny from sun's energy via this process. The fossil fuels are even much worse than this.

There are existing technologies today that can harness the sun's rays into direct heating and splitting up of water with an overall efficiency close to 50%. Australia and Canada seemed to be leading in this area with USA quite far behind in terms of applied technology. The end products are either electricity or store energy as hydrogen fuel. With the recent research at University of Berkeley in capturing a wider spectrum of light, it is possible that theoretically we can achieve greater than 70% conversion of solar energy into electricity and practically when it becomes applied technology we can achieve 50% conversion efficiencies in solar cells in the very near future. If we use simple electrolysis to produce hydrogen, the energy efficiency is around 86%, and the overall product would be 43% efficiency from solar energy, and this is more than twenty fold efficient than utilizing biomass either from plants or fossil fuels. Now let us say we use the current technology on solar cells, we have 25% solar efficiency, turn this to hydrogen and we have an overall efficiency of 21.5%, still more than ten fold than what we can get with other natural means. Some concentrators with electrode catalysts are now 36% overall efficient in capturing the sun's power in the form of energy content of hydrogen. We have rooftops, highways, deserts and many unutilized vast lands that we can capture solar energy from to use it directly as electricity or to produce hydrogen fuel. There is even no need to pump and distribute hydrogen as we can produce them on site wherever there's water and electricity. We are distributing electricity right now, and producing electricity on various households would lessen requirements of large capacity wires. If we install solar collectors over all our roadways, that will provide shading and cooling of cars at the same time harvest solar energy. There would be cases which we have to physically transport hydrogen, but on the large, such transport system is not the major drawback. Aside from electricity storage, there is no other non-polluting element that we can store the sun's energy aside from hydrogen.

The major source is solar, whose major product is electricity, and we only produce hydrogen from electricity when there is an electrical discontinuity transport such as hydrogen powered mechanical machines. We only need to work to build the infrastructure and keep the manufacturing of solar energy capturing devices way down. We did it with cars, computers and other machines, surely we can do this with solar device manufacturing problems and their infrastructure.

I would consider geothermal as neutral heat polluter as long as we utilize only the natural existing resources and not dig out to build more. We have likewise equilibrated with it. These can be used to augment our energy uses.

Thus the sun, electricity and hydrogen is the exact answer that we already have in our hands. Non-polluting, heat-neutral, currently implementable, let us just get our acts together. So what more do we ask? Let's go to work.

Thanks Joe, certainly interesting, but I still say maybe yes - maybe no. Anyway, higher CO2 is good for the growth of my citrus trees. -Millet

I was going to rattle on and on about how the old timers around here talk about 50 yr floods vs. 100yr flood.. and how weather cycles.. and we have only been recording weather for a fraction of the time that the world has been here.. But Millet seemed to have put it all together better than I could have...

Yes I recycle.. I reuse lots of "disposable" stuff.. donate grocery bags to local food pantry.. Donate pop cans to I.O.O.F RD fund raisers.. Pop bottles get set out at the curb for city recycling.. used but not abused house items no longer needed get donated to church garage sale.. etc....

I don't think that my recycling is going to prevent "global warming" or the ice age.. but.. I do like that there is a bit less trash.. and millions of yrs from now they won't dig up a big fossilized trash pile that has my name on it.. Not how I want to be remembered.. LOL
And lots of the "recycling" goes to good causes..

Gina *BabyBlue*