These little buggers (pollen) are making earlier appearances.

A statistical analysis of natural systems by an international research team, which includes many members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has provided additional evidence that man-made climate change is altering the behavior of plants, animals, rivers and many other natural systems, according to the Nature.com article.

The team studies the behavior of 829 physical phenomena and 28,000 biological species by looking at data sets going back to 1970.

One of the researchers created a map (see page 10 of the pdf) of the world, which showed areas of warming and cooling from 1970 to 2004 and compared those areas by putting the thousands of data sets on the map to see if they were consistent with warming or not.

Most of the observations came from the northern hemisphere, while Africa, Australia and Latin America were relatively poorly represented.

In around 90% of the cases where there was an overall trend detected it was consistent with predicted effects of climate warming. One question I have....What % of all cases studied was an overall trend detected?

Some examples of what changes where linked to warming based on the research....

--Plant flowering times
--Bird nesting
--Ice melt
--Salmon migration
--Pollen release
--Decreases in polar bear and krill populations

Exerpt below is from the Nature article.......

"This paper outlines an extremely robust case for linking a range of observed physical and biological changes to human-induced climate change, specifically warming," says Roger Jones of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research. "Unfortunately, the coverage of such data is not global and many regions of the world, including Australia, are not very well covered. Many of the regions that lack coverage are also thought to be highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change."