My favorite news story this week was a quiet story, easy to miss in the middle of stories of economic turmoil. A small resort in New York called Mohonk House has been home to 112 years of daily observation and recording of weather patterns as well as careful notations of the effects of these weather patterns on the local plants and animals. The first snow, the first whippoorwill, the first spring peeper, were all recorded, leaving nothing to random and hazy memories.
Last year's snowdrops. Or maybe the year before.
This year I am waiting for the snowdrops to bloom. Some of the snow has melted, and I searched in vain for a sign that they might have bloomed already and been covered up by snow. Some years they bloom as early as December, often it’s January, but this year it’s early February and I’m still waiting for their appearance. If I were to base my belief in global warming on my own limited sphere of observation, I might think that not only does it not exist, but there is actually a cooling trend. That’s why I’m glad there are dedicated observers like the ones in New York, writing their very mundane observations on note cards, year after year. It’s not likely when they started this that they knew how the appearance of the first whippoorwill every year would be such an important clue to the real effects of climate change on wildlife; they just thought it was significant and worthy of notation. The contributors were not meteorologists or biologists, but have contributed to the study of both, without realizing it.
I think it’s significant that the work was done in a format accessible to everyone. No computers, no scientific jargon. The data could be analyzed much easier if it was in a database. But its biggest significance is the continuity. Which means that someone would need to sit down and transcribe 112 years of daily note cards, not a job for anyone with a short attention span. In the relatively few years since the rise of computers, we’ve seen so many platforms, media, and file formats fade into uselessness, how can we plan for the next 112 years? Will there be some future students glaring into the past, wondering why we couldn’t have just written things on paper?
Note: it’s now Feb. 8, the snow is melting, and at last, the snowdrops are emerging! Only six more weeks of winter!
(This is a repost, transferred from my old blog. Original date Feb. 8, 2009)
