It has been an unseasonably warm winter. A botanist in western Montana discovered spring Buttercups blooming in early January. (Listen to NPR for full story). Tulsa is experiencing unusual 70-degree winter weather and a half-year of drought, reported Shaun Epperson in The Tulsa World. Lake Ellyn did not freeze this year owing to low precipitation and unusually high air temperature, according to Hafsa Naz Mahmood from the Chicago Daily Herald. The scarcity of Breeder trout in the winter fishing season gives local fisherman reason for concern in Tampa, wrote Mel Berman of the Tampa Tribune.

Localized aberrations—i.e., warm winters in Montana, Tulsa, Chicago or Tampa—may by themselves not point to global warming, but they do indicate climate instability as a result of overall global warming. NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies found that 2005’s average global temperature is warmest on record, according to Julie Eilperin of the Washington Post.

Some of the more troubling aspects of an unusually warm 2005 are the impacts on vegetation. Crops may not be able to adapt with global climate volatility. The British National Farmers Union report on Agriculture and Climate Change predicts that climate instability will have an adverse impact on agriculture. In 2005, an unusually wet winter ruined the apricot harvest in Vietnam and an unusually dry summer destroyed the olive yield in the richest olive producing area in Spain.

One can be assured that though we may be rushing headlong towards agricultural extinction, we are not without a backup plan. The Norwegian government and crop scientists are gathering seeds of all varieties in a “doomsday vault” so that in the aftermath of climate destabilization, we can possibly reconstruct agriculture. It is good to know some governments are so forward-thinking. According to Fred Pearce’s article in the New Scientist:

The $3 million vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast- proof doors. It will not be permanently manned, but “the mountains are patrolled by polar bears,” says Fowler [director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust].

The mountains will continue to be patrolled by polar bears, that is, until the global warming renders them extinct.