Innocuous Looking Gardening Zone App Reflects Earth’s Incredibly Fast Warming

Our species is not equipped to understand this, but let’s try with some examples

Glen Hendrix
6 min readJun 5, 2024
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

NPR has an innocuous looking article with a little app whereby you discover the USDA’s gardening zone changes for where you live. I discovered that the garden zone for my little town in Texas has been changed from an 8a to an 8b. This is to reflect the changes in average temperature from 2012 to 2023, which is now 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.

This does not just surpass the 1.5 degree Centigrade (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) self-imposed limits for climate change: It makes a mockery of it.

See, that’s not so bad, is it? Here we are in Texas above the much talked about limit for climate change of 1.5 degrees Centigrade, and most of us are still alive. Never mind that if it increases at this rate for the next fifty years it will add another sixteen degrees (F) to the tally. Which is ridiculous. Preposterous. It’s just an outlier incident. It is only applicable to a small geographic area (which, hopefully, may be true). Someone made a math (or “maths” depending on your age) error somewhere. Except …

Climate scientists now believe climate change is happening ten times faster than any other climate change in the…

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Glen Hendrix
Glen Hendrix

Written by Glen Hendrix

Artist, writer, poet, inventor, entrepreneur

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