Looking for signs of global warming? They’re all around you

GOTHIC, COLO. — David Inouye is an accidental climate scientist.

ogist started studying when spring on this mountain.

These days, plants and animals are arriving at Rocky week or two earlier than they were 30 years ago. The robins that used to arrive in early April slumber ever earlier.

“If the climate weren’t changing, we wouldn’t see these kind of changes happen,” Inouye said while standing on nearby.

It’s been 30 years since much of the world learned that global warming had arrived. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James gress, explaining that heattrapping gases spewed by the burning of fossil fuels were pushing temperatures higher.

But it turns out climate isn’t the only thing that’s changing: Nature itself is, too. That’s the picture painted by interviews with more than 50 scientists and an Associated Press analysis of data on plants, animals, pollen, ice, sea level and more.

You don’t need a thermometer or a rain gauge to notice climate change, and you don’t need to be a scientist to see it.

Evidence is in the blueberry bushes in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond, the dwindling population of polar bears of the Arctic and the dying corals worldwide. Scientists have documented 28,800 cases of plants and animals “responding consistently to temperature changes,” a 2008 study in the journal Nature said.

/ AP-David Goldman Farmer Aries Haygood shows how powdery the top layer of soil is on his freshly planted Vidalia onion farm in Lyons, Ga. The U.S.’s extreme weather has doubled in the 30 years since 1988, according to a federal index.