May is my favourite time of year and have you noticed that – after our rather cold winter – it’s a fantastic month for, well, the mayflower? I travelled from Brighton to London yesterday by train and mile after mile of hedgerow was filled with that wonderful blossom. Strange, then that the BBC isn’t reporting it – especially as in 2007, after a winter that was a tad warmer – it was inundating us with reports, for example here (at 7.42am)and here, that tried to panic us in to believing that early flowering hawthorn is a certain harbinger of the global warming disaster that Richard Black and his cronies tell us is going to engulf us all. The more that BBC so-called ‘science’ reports are examined, the more they seem to resemble the ramblings of deranged necromancers.
FLOWER POWER…?
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plants start growing because of the amount of light they receive, with the start of spring, days get longer, plants start growing, its got nothing to do with temps or loads more co2.
maybe if Dick Black the eco twat had a degree in the sciences, or read up about it, he’d know these things
but facts dont get mentioned at Al Beeb, just looney left propaganda
loads more co2.
But C02 is an essential chemical in healthy plant/vegetation growth. And the more there is, the better and bigger the crops. Or so I read!
Well the latest alarmism is that the co2 from man is the wrong kind and makes plants poisonous! 🙂
mailman — that’s a joke, right?
Beebinator
I’m afraid temperatures do have a lot to do with it, having been a fruit grower for many years. If it were just light that controlled the growing of plants they would grow at the same time every year, but they don’t, you get early and late springs.
This year is back to the type of spring we had in the 1970’s, with colder winters and spring, and frost in May, and sleepless nights for Fruit growers wondering when the frost will get the blossom.
The articles that Robin is highlighting were always rubbish, things go in cycles and we are now back into a cooling phase and are likely to be there for another 20 years.
The planet wobbles a bit on its axis. That’s why these things go in cycles. The northern hemisphere is a little closer to the sun for a while, and then not so close for a while. Plants follow the cycles.
One long-term wobble apparently changes things so much that Polaris eventually won’t be the North Star anymore. This kind of kills another belief system popular with Beeboids: astrology.
chris,
it dosnt matter what the temp is or how much co2 there is, if there isnt enough light, plants dont start to grow
co2 may affect the rate of growth but again, without the days gettng longer they dont grow,
i havnt noticed plants getting bigger over the past 20 years, past few years infact i havnt even been able to grow huge giant sunflowers cos the weathers been crap
“plants start growing because of the amount of light they receive, with the start of spring, days get longer, plants start growing, its got nothing to do with temps or loads more co2”
No, I’m a biologist and can tell you that some plants flower in response to day-length. All plants respond to higher temperatures, within their range of tolerance. Plants that grow in temperate regions such as the UK generally stay dormant until temperatures reach around 7-10C. Below that they remain dormant no matter how much sunshine there is.
This is not a mystery to farmers, gardeners etc.
well its a mystery to me, you must be a crap gardener
name me one plant or tree etc that starts to vegitate in the spring because of heat rather than the appropriate amount of light….errr i dont think theres one
keep up the bad work
Having lived in hot countries nearer the equator, you certainly notice that plants and trees grow more quickly than in the UK, but I guess there may be other factors at work than temperature.
Exactly the same thing on the morning comedy slot, “Farming Today”. Mainly devoted to a skillfully slanted piece condeming the baby eating Tories decision to cull badgers in TB hotspots, one of the great beeboid articles of faith ! They were all there, sid & dorris bonkers, calling themselves the badgers trust and a bloke who used to work for defra, citing a botched defra trial from years ago.
Defra, a rural byword for incompetence, ignorance and waste. Only the bbc could fail to see the irony in quoting defra to back up an argument. The paralel world that is planet bbc.
But it was lovely hearing the BBC being forced to report that the culling will now happen. They have always had utter sympathy for the badgers, damn all for the cows. Lordy how they were choking on it all this morning !
You can be pretty certain that anything said by DEFRA will be totally wrong. They are useless.
“Resemble the rantings of a deranged necromancer”, only because he is!
May is the most beautiful month of the year. The fresh greenness of leaves and grass. White blossoms everywhere – yesterday I saw bridal wreath, snow in summer, tiny white flowers on holly, magnolia. Hawthorns in full bloom – I picked some yesterday – the scent of lilac sublime. Bluebells, periwinkle, the ceanothus with its heavenly sky blue flowers…I could go on.
Please do!
Er, Millie, are you sure you are on the right blog ?
Er… Grant…um…Please Sir, but Robin started it O:-) with his reflection on the month of May and his wonderful picture of the hawthorn, which I love. Know poems about it an’ all. I may have been carried away a little with the wonders of May, or may. 😛
The mayflower is the one that sort of smells of urine, right? Yeah, I love that one.
ALS — stop taking the piss.
It’s eldeberrry that smells of cat’s pee, if that’s any use. In one poem, Ted Hughes referred to the aniseed, corpse like smell of Mayflower, while, in his ‘White Goddess’, Robert Graves said that it reminded some men of an aroused woman. Since Graves had been a WWI infantry officer, and would have been thoroughly familiar with the smell of corpses, I’ve always thought the only thing for it would be to check for myself – but have never got around to it.
I often get the smells of aroused women and corpses mixed up. It’s the reason I’ve been in trouble with the law so much.
“The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his Heaven—
All’s right with the world!”
Robert Browning,
Mr. Black gets his science hat on again and tackles geo-engineering:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2010/05/playing_god_with_the_climate.html
It could have been an interesting investigation into the vast amounts of money some are attempting to gouge to ‘solve’ ‘climate change’ because some media have pretty much ensured that if you call it green you get paid a lot more, no matter what.
But then, as has been noted before, most science ‘reporting’ is now usually headlined by the word ‘could’ and hence is pretty worthless.