It’s the first day of winter. Regardless, the weather is getting warmer.

About a month ago I spotted my neighbor Tim Hamilton working in his yard after dark.

He wore a headlamp to watch, and the sight of a man raking leaves under a powerful spotlight was unusual. Turns out his tree had its bark removed two weeks earlier than planned.

The intensity of autumn color in the leaves of the region may vary, but they fall like clockwork, says Tim, who keeps an exact garden diary. This year’s drop comes a full two weeks earlier than usual. This summer’s drought may be a factor, but our summer droughts are getting longer and longer every year, with only a few exceptions.

Sometimes the signs of a warming planet are obvious: Longer summer droughts make leaves fall earlier; warmer air makes storms bigger and wetter; rising sea levels mean fair-weather floods occur more often and water levels rise higher. Summers are getting hotter and the boundaries between seasons are shrinking.

In winter, when the summer solstice arrives on Thursday at 10:27 pm, it may be harder to spot signs of a warming world because it’s cold.

Doug Myers, chief scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the entire planet is warming. In the Southern Hemisphere, our winters are their summers. They are now experiencing the effects of warming. It’s just harder to spot them here because we’re in winter.

When you’re writing about the weather, it can be especially difficult to articulate, will it snow today? Instead of climate: Will we all die from deadly storms and crop failures?

Take for example all the seasonal forecasts released around Thanksgiving. They say: When the weather gets cold, it will snow. If the weather is warm, it will rain.

Well, duh.

Yet climate change increasingly dictates the mid-Atlantic’s fairly basic weather equation.

Temperatures next week are expected to be about 10 degrees above historical normal for this time of year. This may be related to melting of polar ice caps and glaciers, reducing their cooling effect. Probably not.

But while the Southern Hemisphere experiences extreme heat, Nature predicts the Southern Hemisphere will suffer the same record-breaking heat as in 2023, which could make our winters suddenly much colder.

You may remember that when we had a really, really big cold snap, meteorologists started talking about the polar vortex, Myers said. The polar vortex is the wind around the poles that keeps the coldest weather around the poles.

When the heat in the South becomes severe, it reaches the upper atmosphere in the form of so-called Rossby waves, triggering a chain reaction of energy that causes the polar vortex to collapse and opens the door to plummeting temperatures in Maryland.

Myers said the main cause of the polar vortex tilt in 2014-2015 was super-hot air in Indonesia.

Just as Atlantic hurricanes are energy organisms created by heating ocean water, deep freezes can be created by heating the air on the other side of the planet.

Myers said it took the polar vortex off the rocker.

So if it gets really cold here because it’s snowing instead of raining in the south, yeah, that’s climate change.

Gregg Bortz, a spokesman for the Department of Natural Resources, wrote in an email that the last major ice break year was 2018, the last time we cleaned the Annapolis Harbor. Prior to that, in 2015, the annual freeze was caused by the polar vortex.

Ice formation in the Chesapeake Bay is not unheard of, even though the last recorded complete freeze was in the winter of 1977. Maryland uses a small fleet of buoy supply vessels named JC Widener, Eddie Somers and AV Sandusky, as well as the workboat HJ Elser as an icebreaker when needed.

“These ships are prepared to break ice every year as needed,” wrote Boots. “Especially for some of our ports, most importantly Smith Island, our ships are literally a lifeline, allowing food and supplies when the port is inaccessible.” Fuel comes through.

If climate change threatens to bring deep freezes in January, here’s why you might be eating a different variety of tomatoes next summer.

In November, the USDA updated hardiness zones to reflect mild winters within 5 to 7 miles of the Chesapeake Bay. These areas are a guide to what to plant and when.

“Our area is no longer Zone 7B but now Zone 8 because the neighboring United States is 2.5 degrees warmer than it was 11 years ago,” said my neighbor Tim. To the casual suburban gardener, this isn’t a big deal, but to the farmer, it is.

Winter is when farmers and gardeners start looking through seed catalogs, looking for crops that will go to the ground earlier than usual and that can tolerate warm weather and few clouds.

Farmers are also affected by climate change in another way. Wild swings between freezing temperatures and above-normal temperatures can cause plants to bloom at the wrong times.

Dave Myers, a longtime farmer who now advises farmers with Maryland Cooperative Extension, said this has always been common, but it does seem like we are having a longer warm spell. This is quite troublesome for fruit growers and perennial crops. It often results in premature germination.

However, farmers are often more concerned about weather than climate.

Myers said it’s all intertwined and has nothing to do with Gulf scientists. I don’t think farmers are too pessimistic about the climate, they are very adaptable. They are thinking about next year. Will next year be a good year?

They are looking at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, where researchers have been studying global warming for 37 years, making it the world’s longest-running climate research program.

They have documented some effects.

One experiment actually simulates a warm world in this tidal salt marsh, said J. Patrick Megonigal, senior scientist and associate director for research at the center. There, the marsh warms to three different temperatures above ambient, representing different futures.

In a warmer future, plants will stay greener longer in the fall and emerge from the soil earlier in the spring. The light snow disappears immediately rather than lingering as a sure sign of early winter.

It’s very intuitive, Megonigal said.

What no one could see was the main focus of the experiment, a doom loop involving the microorganisms in the system. Those gases that produce methane gas are more active in a warming world, emitting them at increasing rates. They add to the greenhouse gases that already contribute to climate change.

This means that one greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is causing other greenhouse gases to be emitted faster and their concentrations to rise faster. Megonigal said this was not a positive feedback. What a dramatic result.

There are some other signs if you look closely, but not all.

Tundra swans and snow geese that fly south to spend the winter on the Chesapeake River may colonize New Jersey’s swamps.

Less snow and ice means less salt on roads and less salt washing into the Chesapeake River.

The shad migration, the migration of fish that were once abundant in the bay, is changing enough that soon when shad bloom along the coast, it won’t happen anymore.

The old question of rain vs. snow must now include this: The amount of moisture contained in warm air doubles every 20 degrees Fahrenheit, so when it rains in the winter, it pours.

Rising water levels due to climate change may one day change the science of studying water levels in the Smithsonian Everglades outside Annapolis.

By increasing elevation at the same rate as sea level rise, marshes can only remain marshy rather than open water. If for some reason it starts to sink, Megonigal said, it could cause the swamp to collapse.