[cogitator]

Where's the related stuff on winter ending late? sounds to me like the calender just needs to be shuffled.

Winter isn't ending late. It's ending earlier. You can read the article that kicked off this thread, for one thing, and these:

Warming Trend Seen In Late Freeze, Early Thaw

150 Year Record of Freezes Shows Warming Trend

Here's some of the data from the paper.

[boris]

"Winter isn't ending late. It's ending earlier."

The chart shows a pronounced retardation of thawing over the time period shown. I.E., most of the curves, if fitted to a straight line, would have a positive slope (toward later thaws). Only if one ignores the bulk of the data and focuses on the (extremely) recent past, does any "early thaw" show. In fact, these curves constitute persuasive evidence that nothing whatever has changed, and that any variation shown "recently" is part of the normal "random walk" nature of the data.

--Boris