Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

Fall Colors Are Getting Weird

New England’s colors are a disappointment. The West is riotous. Welcome to our weird new normal.

Leaves.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Discussing fall foliage with the experts can make you feel a little like you’re on an episode of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?

“The leaves change color — you remember this from elementary school — because of chlorophyll,” Kyle Cotner, the creator of The Foliage Report, said to me, demonstrating outsized confidence in my grade-school recall. “If you remember back to an art class,” Dr. Howard Neufeld, a professor of biology at Appalachian State University who’s also known as the Fall Color Guy, prompted me later, “if you have a red pigment, what’s its complementary color?” (Folks, it’s not “blue” — it’s green.)

But while the autumn portion of the tree life cycle may be a staple of primary school pop quizzes, it’s also a dizzyingly complicated phenomenon and one that’s been behaving … well, oddly. “There’s much less overall consistency and pattern,” Dr. John O’Keefe, the lead phenology scientist at the Harvard Forest, told me of the fall color he’s been seeing recently. “It’s just bigger extremes. And that’s, of course, one of the things that climate change is causing: wilder swings.”

Neufeld, who works out of North Carolina, has seen the same thing in his neck of the woods. Looking back over his 17 years of data recently, he noticed that “the peak color was always the same time of year: the 10th to the 20th of October,” he told me. But “starting in 2017, it’s all over the place.” Sometimes the peak colors would come two weeks late; other times it’d be early, or arrive on time. “As a biostatistician, I went back and I calculated how variable the timing was. And it’s twice as variable in these recent years as it is in the first eight years,” he said.

Neufeld stressed that his observations are not statistically significant yet, but he suspects that in a few more years, and with a few more data points, they will be. “My suspicion is that it’s the beginning of a climate change effect,” he said.

This sort of unpredictability is especially worrying because leaf peeping is estimated by Neufeld to be a $25 to $30 billion industry in the eastern U.S. alone during a strong fall color year. The number of fluctuating variables — from rainfall to temperature to cloud cover to fungi to one badly timed windstorm — can leave the towns and people who rely on autumn tourism feeling destabilized.Will this year be a good year? Will it not be, and word will get out, suppressing the crowds?

If there were ever a year for climate change to be impacting fall colors, it’d be this one. But the precise reason came as some surprise. It’s not the late heat, but the abnormal amount of rain that’s been the more significant variable at a local level. As Neufeld pointed out, “September was the warmest on record — but not in North Carolina and especially not in the mountains.”

That precipitation, which is also more likely because of climate change, has been both a boon and a bust for fall color. “With so much rain, the colors will not be as vibrant [in the northeast],” said Cotner, who tracks the trends nationally. “I’ve noticed places like Stowe, Vermont, are much duller this season and turning brown … I can tell you, I’m truly disappointed with the region compared to last year.”

But at the same time, the rainy trends in the Western United States have pulled the region out of its drought and created “probably the best [fall color] year in a decade,” Cotner went on, “especially the three all-star states: Colorado, Utah, California. Utah probably wins.”

While the main theme of fall leaves has been to expect the unexpected, it’s also true that “there is a slight trend toward [peak color] getting later over the 30 years that I’ve been watching,” O’Keefe, in Massachusetts, noted. It’s an observation that tracks with the greater climate research: Between 1952 and 2011, fall decreased from 87 days to 82 days, chipped away at by the lengthening summer. In general, “sunny days and cooler, crisp nights are when we develop the brightest colors,” O’Keefe said, but fall temperatures have increased on average by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit across the U.S. since 1970, Climate Central reports, and by as much as 4.5 degrees in parts of Vermont.

Of course, there’s more in jeopardy than tourism and Caitlin Covington’s Instagram content. Should the weird fall weather continue, then the actual makeup of the fall scenery could also start to change. Less hardy trees of one color might be beaten out by more competitive trees of another. Southern trees could begin to move north, and northern trees could retreat into Canada, or uphill to cooler elevations. Spectacular orange-and-yellow-and-red hillsides might become more monochromatic. When the forest ecologies change, the autumn landscapes will change in turn. Leaf peepers are just witnessing the aftermath.

But remember those brilliant 5th graders? They’ve got a part in all this, too. Fall colors “get more people out seeing nature than almost any other time of the year,” Nuefeld said. “So I'm hoping that when people go out and see them, they have a better appreciation of nature and want to do something to preserve it, so that their kids can go out when they’re their age to see the full color, too.”

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Podcast

Why Geothermal Is So Hot Right Now

Inside season 2, episode 6 of Shift Key.

Geothermal power.
Heatmap Illustration/Fervo Energy

Geothermal is getting closer to the big time. Last week, Fervo Energy — arguably the country’s leading enhanced geothermal company — announced that its Utah demonstration project had achieved record production capacity. The new approach termed “enhanced geothermal,” which borrows drilling techniques and expertise from the oil and gas industry, seems poised to become a big player on America’s clean, 24/7 power grid of the future.

Why is geothermal so hot? How soon could it appear on the grid — and why does it have advantages that other zero-carbon technologies don’t? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse speak with a practitioner and an expert in the world of enhanced geothermal. Sarah Jewett is the vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, which she joined after several years in the oil and gas industry. Wilson Ricks is a doctoral student of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he studies macro-energy systems modeling. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Technology

What Does OpenAI’s New Breakthrough Mean for Energy Consumption?

Why the new “reasoning” models might gobble up more electricity — at least in the short term

A robot with a smokestack coming out of its head.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

What happens when artificial intelligence takes some time to think?

The newest set of models from OpenAI, o1-mini and o1-preview, exhibit more “reasoning” than existing large language models and associated interfaces, which spit out answers to prompts almost instantaneously.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Climate

AM Briefing: COP Coming into View

On Azerbaijan’s plans, offshore wind auctions, and solar jobs

What’s in the COP29 ‘Action Agenda’
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Thousands of firefighters are battling raging blazes in Portugal • Shanghai could be hit by another typhoon this week • More than 18 inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours in Carolina Beach, which forecasters say is a one-in-a-thousand-year event.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Azerbaijan unveils COP29 ‘action agenda’

Azerbaijan, the host of this year’s COP29, today put forward a list of “non-negotiated” initiatives for the November climate summit that will “supplement” the official mandated program. The action plan includes the creation of a new “Climate Finance Action Fun” that will take (voluntary) contributions from fossil fuel producing countries, a call for increasing battery storage capacity, an appeal for a global “truce” during the event, and a declaration aimed at curbing methane emissions from waste (which the Financial Times noted is “only the third most common man-made source of methane, after the energy and agricultural sectors”). The plan makes no mention of furthering efforts to phase out fossil fuels in the energy system.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow