New USDA plant hardiness map released

The other guy is wrong to say that 'it is just math', because it isn't.

@Lorax7 you are right with this statement about the new hardiness map. I interpreted your statement in the climate change debate people were trying to start.

This map is just past data and a little math, then colouring added. 100% True.
 
Went from zone 6a on one end of town but 6b on the other to 6b across the board.
So, um, still zone 6.😐

No, seriously, this A or B thing isn't exactly accurate. It was just a way to placate the dummies who'd constantly argue over zones, and it didn't work.
My daughter has a Spanish lavender in the flower garden that had a tag that read zone 7. I'll let you know come spring.

Also, @Gabler is right.
I can't do the math any more now days, but I can tell you how they fudged it, and man is there allot of fudge. And if it comes from a politician, just assume it's Willy Wonka in disguise.
 
I remember in the 80s and 90s when certain sects in the gov't were pushing global warming. A writer got into his car to actually visit as many USGS official weather stations as possible. He found many in huge asphalt parking lots, near jetways in airports, etc. I've just learned to take all data sets with a grain of salt. Many studies start out with a conclusion and search for data to prove it. As far as how the new zone parameters will affect MY gardening practices, they dont.
This has probably gotten better these days. There has never been more data on weather and climate then there is today. Many national governments have complex satellite monitoring networks that can measure with enormous granularity over large areas. More and more people have personal weather stations feeding large networks of localized data.

All of that feeds an enormous, feed of weather and climate information that literally needs super computers to process and model.
 
Thanks for trying to science-splain to a scientist, but you clearly don't know what you are talking about. The stats here are dead simple: average of the annual low temperature measurement from each sensor. You're welcome to disagree with their methodology for interpolating the results between the geographic locations where their 12,000+ sensors are (and they published the raw data, so you could compute your own map using your own preferred interpolation method if you want to), but the data at the sites where the sensors are located is unbiased.

Sorry, man. I wasn't trying to start a fight. It just caught me by surprise to see you say it was straight math, when it's my experience there's a lot of human decisions that go into decades of data collection. Your explanation clarifies things significantly.
 
But then we have you throwing out this very oddly titled essay that's about statistical methods in medical studies. The title was wrong because even the esasy itself doesn't say that most published research finds are false. And the paper clearly only talks about medical studies. Not about all of science. But you just throw this out here at random.

I've seen the claim a lot of places, and it seemed to me it's relevant to a discussion about statistical methods and the sort of motivated reasoning that leads to skewed results. The article I found was just meant by way of example.
 
Low temperatures are something so simple that you can measure it yourself without any special knowledge or equipment.

To look at this map and conclude that there is a world-wide nefarious conspiracy to fake low-temperature readings requires you to be off the deepest end of conspiracy theory deep ends.

Although I suppose that's not really that big of a stretch if you're one who thinks that all scientists in the entire world are just making stuff up for fun.
 
This thread got fun. You people really get riled up lol.
 
What makes that an upgrade? I don't think higher numbers mean better climate, just warmer.
The fact that we are warming expands the ease of cultivation for some of the species that are borderline here. In terms of Bonsai diversity, and species one can successfully grow outside year-round it is a definite upgrade.
 
I've seen the claim a lot of places, and it seemed to me it's relevant to a discussion about statistical methods and the sort of motivated reasoning that leads to skewed results. The article I found was just meant by way of example.

Then please cite a few phrases from Ioannidis paper and please link these to the USDA map methodology and explain to me how this leads to a skewed result. I refer you to the 2012 paper on the methodology as USDA says the 2023 map uses the same method.
Let's get to the meat and potato's then, because I have no idea what you are getting at.

I'll move a bit back closer to your position from the Lorax7 'it is just math'-position. Because there are some models regarding elevation and PRISM used to create this map. So it isn't just a map of past temperatures. But in the same vein, I cannot connect anything that Ioannidis mentioned in his paper on statistical methods in medical research directly to this map.
 
Last edited:
Then please cite a few phrases from Ioannidis paper and please link these to the USDA map methodology and explain to me how this leads to a skewed result. I refer you to the 2012 paper on the methodology as USDA says the 2023 map uses the same method.
Let's get to the meat and potato's then, because I have no idea what you are getting at.

I'll move a bit back closer to your position from the Lorax7 'it is just math'-position. Because there are some models regarding elevation and PRISM used to create this map. So it isn't just a map of past temperatures. But in the same vein, I cannot connect anything that Ioannidis mentioned in his paper on statistical methods in medical research directly to this map.

I'm not sure how I can make it any more clear than explaining that the link I shared is just an example of an interesting trend. I'm not making any grand claims. Like I said to @Lorax7, I didn't come here to pick a fight. I'm just sharing something I found that seemed related to the topic at hand.
 
Last edited:
Then maybe you should read Ioannidis' essay. If you ignore his title, which was just meant to grab attention, the essay itself, while rather dry, it is quite interesting.
 
If you think even the USDA hardiness map is a conspiracy theory that was 'fudged by politicians', you should see a doctor. Honestly, I can't even tell if that comment is satire or not anymore. It reads like satire.
Didn't say anything about the map.
I was talking about @Gabler's general statement on piss poor applications of statistical methods becoming a trend.
Stereotyped weighting is one I see frequently, at least from my angle in psychology/sociology/education. A study is done, and the results don't match the hypothesis, which was based on the study official's preconceptions about the study population. Essentially they're thinking, "well everyone knows that group X does Y," and when they set out with the study they intended to prove it, but were disappointed. So in stead of admitting their hypothesis was wrong, or even arguing that there may have been a fault in their study that produced the result, they use vaguely related data from other studies or even other sources to weight the results, thus achieving numbers more like they wanted.
In education it's very common for a study to be so poorly planned and executed that it's essentially worthless. Like that one in the mid 90s that said that kids will believe anything they see online. It was conducted in class, and the teachers were required to say that the thing the students were asked to look up was true, though it actually wasn't. The source of authority purported to be measured was a bogus website, but the thing that was actually measured was the teachers' authority. People still quote that painfully out of date and horribly executed study today, but it was complete bunk.
I was actually part of that study in 6th grade. I remember how pissed I and half the rest of the class was afterward that these people were calling it science when it had such obvious flaws. If a bunch of 12 year olds can poke holes in your study with only half a thought, you're friggin doing it wrong.

As far as the map goes, so far no one is reporting more than a half a zone change, and the maps are allot less polkadotted. Overall an improvement over the 2012 version where they thought they could get it accurate to within a city block.🙄 And anecdotally from looking at this thread it also doesn't seem to indicate a substantial warming trend that isn't explained by urban heat islands.
 
The fact that we are warming expands the ease of cultivation for some of the species that are borderline here. In terms of Bonsai diversity, and species one can successfully grow outside year-round it is a definite upgrade.

It could make it harder to keep some species that need colder winters.
Scotts pine, mugo pine and Japanese white pine are ones that need a cold winter
Winters here have been getting warmer which has raised my concern about being able to keep these species here in the future
 
It could make it harder to keep some species that need colder winters.
Scotts pine, mugo pine and Japanese white pine are ones that need a cold winter
Winters here have been getting warmer which has raised my concern about being able to keep these species here in the future
Feel free to sell me all your pines. I love them to death and they grow like weeds for me.
 
It could make it harder to keep some species that need colder winters.
Scotts pine, mugo pine and Japanese white pine are ones that need a cold winter
Winters here have been getting warmer which has raised my concern about being able to keep these species here in the future
Adair is a pine man...and he's in a warmer climate. Yes?

See...I must be in a thick of a microclimate. As clearly I've seen colder winters. I went from being able to have a Ryusen in my landscape for years. To if I did it now. I might as set fire to my money.
 
Back
Top Bottom