Posted on 03/20/2012 3:12:33 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
As spring officially begins today, America’s poet laureate of the changing seasons is getting renewed interest for his contributions not only to literature, but modern-day science.
Britain’s The Guardian newspaper recently reported that the journals of Henry David Thoreau have been recruited to glean crucial insights about global warming. Thoreau, a studious amateur naturalist, recorded the date of first spring-time blooms for a wide variety of plants in his native New England. But comparing Thoreau’s observations with more recent data, Boston University researchers have concluded that today’s flowers are blooming about 10 days earlier – powerful evidence that the Earth’s temperature is rising.
“We had been searching for historical records for about six months when we learned about Thoreau’s plant observations,” Richard Primack, a biology professor at Boston University, told The Guardian. “We knew right away that they would be incredibly useful for climate change research because they were from 150 years ago, there were so many species included, and they were gathered by Thoreau, who is so famous in the United States for his book, Walden.”
Thoreau was a lively and voluminous journal writer who chronicled a great many topics, and readers can get a good idea of his talents as a diarist in The Journal: 1837-1861, a one-volume softcover abridgment of the journals published by New York Review Books in 2009.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Later.
Shocking!
cycles within larger cycles is too much for little lefty brains to comprehend.
They can handle X is happening-Bush’s fault
The heat island effect of cities springing up in Massachusetts are more likely to blame than planetary warming.
I thought Thoreau lived during the “little ice age” we always heard about, as when Dickens wrote all those snow and ice stories about London.
“That goverment is best which governs least” -Henry David Thoreau, naturalist.
I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817–62)
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