A few years ago, a friend moved to North Carolina — and promptly began a campaign to convince me to relocate.
“You can play golf all year round,” he said.
“I’ll just wait 10 years,” I replied. “By then, thanks to climate change, Chicago will be North Carolina.”
That conversation popped into my head as I celebrated Presidents Day last week on the golf course, wearing shorts. A few days later, I relayed the exchange to the Field Museum’s senior conservation ecologist, Doug Stotz.
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“I was at a meeting today, in Indiana,” he said. “We were discussing developing a climate change adaptation plan for ecological management in the Indiana Dunes. And this ridiculous weather was on everyone’s mind.”
Through Feb. 22, Chicago had six straight days with temperatures of 60-plus degrees — the first time that’s ever happened between December and February. During that span, record high temperatures were recorded five times at Midway Airport. According to WGN-TV’s weather blog, that also was the 67th straight day with less than one inch of snow, breaking a 95-year-old record.
“I like it as much as everyone else,” Stotz said. “But I don’t approve.
“This is not the way February is supposed to be. There will be consequences.”
Maybe not immediately.
“What we’ve just gone through is weather. Severe weather happens and we still return to the norms,” he said. “Climate is the long-term averages of weather. . . And there’s no doubt that the climate is getting warmer.”
Like, North Carolina warm?
“Not North Carolina — North Carolina is too wet,” Stotz said. “The expectation is we’ll look more like Arkansas in 2050 and East Texas in 2100. We’re headed west.”
For the record, the average August high temperature in Chicago is 82 degrees, according to usclimatedata.com. In Little Rock, Arkansas, it’s 93. In Dallas, it’s 96. The average annual rainfall in those cites is 39, 50 and 41 inches, respectively.
“The expectation is the precipitation will shift into winter and spring, and out of summer,” Stotz said. “We’ll get more precipitation, but it will do less good because rain is needed in the summer when things are growing.”
Speaking of growing, that’s the reason I called Stotz in the first place. The neighbor’s maples are budding, and some other things are greening up way earlier than normal. I wondered what that might mean for spring gardens and summer shade, among other things.
Stotz’s scientific conclusion?
“It depends,” he said.
Despite the weekend’s relative cool down, we’re still trending warmer than the average February high temperature of 34 degrees. A sudden cold snap, Stotz said, “would kind of stop all this stuff in its tracks.”
Some more permanently than others.
“Early bloomers like crocuses and snowdrops would be done for the year,” he said. “For the most part, with leaf buds, they’ll start over. A maple might lose the early buds, but there’ll be another round.
“They might not be as thickly leaved as some years, but they won’t be leafless.”
Of course, especially if it stays warm, the leaves could be under attack from bugs. Such is the domino effect of changing weather patterns.
As Stotz explained it, migratory birds decide to travel north based less on temperature than length of daylight. The insects some of those birds eat arrive with the warmth. If the bugs show up before the birds . . .
“What you’ll see is more insect damage to the trees because the birds aren’t here to eat them,” Stotz said.
Rebecca Collings, a senior resource ecologist for the Cook County Forest Preserve District, said the term for food and habitat falling out of historical patterns is “phenological mismatch.” In 2012, one such weather-spawned mismatch erased one endangered species, the Karner blue butterfly, from the Indiana Dunes, one of its few remaining habitats.
The caterpillar that becomes the butterfly feeds on the wild blue lupine flower. In 2012, an unusually warm March prompted the caterpillars to emerge early, before the flowers, and a hot, dry summer killed many of the flowers.
“They have not been able to find Karner blue butterflies in the Indiana Dunes since then,” she said.
Things have been changing for a while now. In 1990, USDA plant hardiness zones had most of Illinois in Zone 5. Now, Chicago is Zone 6, and the southern tip of the state is Zone 7 — which is great, if you like cacti.
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Collings was matter-of-fact about what’s to come, saying, “Weather extremes will become more common. In general, the weather will continue to get weirder.”
All of which only added unintended poignancy to the words of the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, outlining a new direction for his department while speaking Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
“The future,” Scott Pruitt said, borrowing from noted malaprop comic Yogi Berra, “ain’t what it used to be.”
Forget North Carolina. Montreal is looking better all the time.
Phil Arvia is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southland.