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Yesterday I wrote here about how parts of Europe woke up to snow! Global warming alarmists have been telling us that winters would get milder and that spring would arrive earlier and earlier each year.

For example just two years ago Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) scientist Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe told German ZDF television that spring would be arriving earlier and earlier – because of global warming.

Unfortunately this is turning out not to be the case. The opposite is in fact happening.

Josef Kowatsch and Stefan Kämpfe at the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) write that spring in Central Europe has been cooling for almost 30 years now – and not warming – and it’s been arriving later and later.

To determine the spring trends, Kowatsch and Kämpfe looked at the mean temperature for February in Germany, which is a country that is ideally situated in Central Europe. Cold and snow at the end of February have a considerable impact on when vegetation starts to blossom. What follows is a chart depicting the February mean temperature for Germany over the last 28 years.

Figure 1: Data from the DWD German Weather Service show that the February trend has been cooling more than 0.5°C per decade over the last 28 years.

Figure 1 does not show any signs of spring coming earlier in Central Europe. The next chart looks at the Germany February trend for the last 22 years:

Figure 2: The 22-year February trend for Germany also shows a marked decline in temperature. Cold weather naturally acts to delay the onset of spring.

Kowatsch and Kämpfe write that if it were not for urban sprawl, the cooling trend would be even more pronounced:

Without population growth, industrialization and urbanization, the temperature measured today in Germany would be about 1°C cooler because almost every weather station is sited near the edge of a city or even in the city or airports. They are benefitting from various warming effects, which we will not look into in this article.”

The Germany February temperature trend for the last 17 years also shows a stark cooling:

Figure 3: Germany February temperature trend over the last 17 years.

Okay, February is only a single month that is crucial in determining how quickly spring in Central Europe gets started. Kowatsch and Kämpfe also posted the DJF winter temperature trend. Here we also see no warming over the last 28 years:

Figure 4: Winter mean temperature trend for Germany. Data taken from the DWD German Weather Service. We should be calling it cooling, and not warming!

How often do the German media show the above charts? Never. Kowatsch and Kämpfe write that the media have been warming-brainwashed, and the data clearly show that “spring has been starting later and later over the past 30 years“.

Not only do the temperature data show spring coming later and later, but so does the vegetation. Kowatsch and Kämpfe at EIKE provide the following chart:

Figure 5: Between 1990 and 2015 the budding of wild goose berries is now happening about 10 days later because the high winter months January and February (blue) have cooled. The green curve shows when the wild goose berries began to blossom, example in 2013 they did not blossom until after 1 April.

An analysis of the month of March in Germany also shows a cooling trend, Kowatsch and Kämpfe have determined:

Figure 6: March mean temperature for Germany has fallen more than a degree Celsius over the last 27 years.

This year February and March have been relatively mild, but Kowatsch and Kämpfe write that they have been near the mean of the last 30 years. They also write that behavior of various animal species also show spring coming later.

They summarize:

Winter and pre-spring have gotten somewhat cooler since the late 1980s, especially February. The temperature trend lines are negative. Therefore the start of spring is currently being delayed and is coming later than the relatively warm 1990s. Overall the start of spring 2015 is at the mean of the last 120 years and corresponds to claims made in the biological literature, spring literature, and in German spring songs. After almost 30 years of winter cooling we see: In the open unbuilt areas of Germany, where today there are no longer any weather stations, the following remains valid: Spring awakens in March. Spring awakens in March as it did 150 years ago at the end of the Little Ice Age.”