Quote:
Originally Posted by jwmahloch
I read that the Bush Administration pulled the 2003 map and did not allow its release because they did not want it to show that the country was warming. The republicans are basically denying that global warming exists.
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I'd like to take this opportunity to clarify your vastly incorrect statement quoted above since I try to research what I'm talking about before I trash-talk others.
I found the ONE website that mentions the Bush Administration as playing a role in the rejection of the 2003 map. In the very same
sentence of the very same paragraph of the article, it says:
Quote:
Some observers suggested that the Bush administration pulled the map because it showed the nation warming, but Kaplan calls that idea an urban myth. “There was no memo from the White House,” she says. “The draft was rejected because it wasn’t web-friendly and wasn’t layered in a standard GIS format. The data were never reviewed – formatting and technology issues got it bounced.”
Both the 1990 map and the aborted 2003 version are unreliable because they use too little data to show lasting trends, Avent contends. “The first time they got a cold data set and the second time they got a warm data set,” he says.
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The article is found here:
Climate change comes to your backyard ? The Daily Climate
Now, from further research, please read this excerpt from Wikipedia about the rejected map and other updates:
Quote:
Updates
Differences between 1990 USDA hardiness zones and 2006 arborday.org hardiness zones reflect warmer climate
In 2003, a preliminary draft of a new USDA map was produced by the American Horticultural Society (AHS), compiled by Meteorological Evaluation Services Co., Inc. of Amityville, NY, using temperature data collected from July 1986 to March 2002. This was a period of warmer winters than the 1974-1986 period, especially in the eastern U.S.A., and thus the 2003 map placed many areas approximately a half-zone higher (warmer) than the 1990 map had. Many have noted that the map seemed to have drifted closer to the original 1960 map in its overall zone-delineations. While the 2003 AHS draft map purported to show finer detail, for example reflecting urban heat islands by showing the downtown areas of several cities (e.g., Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, DC) as a full zone warmer than outlying areas, the map also did away with the detailed a/b half-zones introduced in the 1990 map, an omission widely criticized by horticulturists and gardeners due to the coarseness of the resulting map. The USDA rejected the AHS 2003 draft map; the agency has stated it is creating its own internal map in an interactive computer format. As of May 2009 the AHS and the National Arboretum websites still present the 1990 map as current.
In addition, the National Arbor Day Foundation in the United States recently completed an extensive updating of U.S. Hardiness Zones in 2006, utilizing essentially the same data used by the AHS, the then-most-recent 15 years’ data available from more than 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the United States. Once the Foundation analyzed the new data, hardiness zones were revised, generally reflecting warmer recent temperatures in many parts of the country. The Arbor Day Foundation used the updated versions of the same sources of data as had been utilized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the creation of its hardiness zone maps. The 2006 map appears to validate the data used in the 2003 draft completed by the AHS. Like the AHS map, it also did away with the more detailed a/b half-zone delineations.[2]
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The Wikipedia page for the above quote can be found here:
Hardiness zone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia