Limited role of climate change in out-of-season Joshua tree flowering
Yoder, J. B.; Carlson, C. J.; Callahan, C. W.
Show abstract
Last winter, community scientists recorded anomalous winter flowering by Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia and Y. jaegeriana), and some speculated the bloom was caused by climate change. We trained machine learning models that reliably identify weather triggers for seasonal Joshua tree flowering, then applied frontier methods from climate science to simulate flowering in a counterfactual world without human-caused climate change. Surprisingly, we found winter blooms in 2018-9 and 2025-6 were driven by high winter rainfall, not rising temperatures--and therefore, are probably the result of natural weather variability, not climate change.
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