Global warming has its winners as well as losers:

That’s a hollyhock in the front garden, still blooming away two weeks after the average first fall freeze date in Albuquerque. Overnight lows for November in Albuquerque this month have averaged 42 F, 7 1/2 degrees above average. Daytime highs are 8 degrees above average.

Obviously I’d be an idiot to hang anything on a single fortnight’s data, but this is consistent with a long term trend, with a “growing season” (last spring frost to first fall frost) averaging two weeks longer here than it used to. Good for the garden, eh?

update 6:30 p.m.: I almost forgot half the reason for this post, which is that the National Weather Service is forecasting a freeze Wednesday morning.

(click through for the fine print)

The official data is kept at the National Weather Service’s office, which is out by the Albuquerque airport, so these numbers are roughly good across the northeast heights. The valley tends to freeze earlier, and has already had a freeze, but you can see in the data that the trend toward later first freeze dates holds there too. The baseline of data is just a lot shorter.