Mar 2, 2017 3 min read

The calendar says spring will arrive March 20.

More precisely, it will arrive at 6:29 a.m., when most of us will be too busy to notice because we’ll be preoccupied with waking up, showering, pouring a bowl of cereal or otherwise getting ready for the day.

That’s when the calendar says spring will get here. For people in this region, and throughout much of the Northeast and Midwest, spring actually seemed to arrive somewhere around Feb. 11 or so. The high temperature in Pittsburgh that day was a balmy-for-February 55 degrees, well past the average high temperature of 38 degrees. That was just a foretaste of what was to come, though. One week later, on Feb. 18, the high was 67 degrees, 27 degrees above normal. And then, last Friday, we came close to reaching 80 degrees when the thermometer topped out at 77.

Being able to dust off the bike, linger at a sidewalk cafe and guffaw at Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction of six more weeks of winter was pretty sweet considering that it wasn’t that long ago we were stashing Christmas decorations away.

But, for some, the unseasonable warmth has come with a nagging sense of guilt. Being able to roll down the car windows and hang up the winter coat is great for chasing the doldrums away.

However, as an Associated Press story that appeared Wednesday on the front page of the Observer-Reporter noted, the sting in the tail of this early spring is the possibility that plants and crops that have started blooming could be damaged when a freeze hits this month or in April. Even more disturbing in the long run is the possibility that this is evidence of creeping climate change and all the disasters that will flow from it.

Of course, fluctuations in normal weather patterns occassionally happen.

And the 77-degree high temperature last Friday beat a record 70-degree for that date that was set in 1906, before we were pouring epic amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and, as just about all scientists believe, changing our climate.

Some meterologists have counseled caution, saying that it’s too soon to tell whether the warmer temperatures of late have been a fluke or tied to climate change. Generally speaking, an unusual February warm spell is no more an indicator of climate change than a blizzard is a sign that it’s not happening at all.

Nevertheless, Katharine Hayhoe, a meteorologist with Texas Tech University, told the Chicago Tribune last month that we now experience twice as many high temperatures that break records than we did just a decade ago and “the reality is any conditions we have these days are different than they would’ve been 50 or 100 years ago because we’ve changed the background conditions.”

And another fact to keep in mind: 2016 was the warmest year on record, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The previous record-holder was 2015. And it broke a record set in 2014. All told, 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.

That’s the trend we need to think about. And, yes, worry about.