A U.S. map showing the rapid increase in average winter temperatures across the U.S. published last week showed us by crunching the numbers what we gardeners know in our bones: It’s getting squishier out there.

Not always toasty. It’s still cold. Just much toastier than before.

Thirty-five years ago, when I bought my Pasadena garden (and a little cottage sitting on the edge), there were three or four regular night frosts, the morning ice glistening on the rosebushes and irises, every winter, and seven or eight in the different microclimate just down the hill, the floor of the Arroyo Seco canyon where the Rose Bowl is.

It has been well over a decade since we saw any frost at all.

The map published by Climate Central shows that our Southern California coastal zone is an area that has seen average winter temperatures rise between 2 and 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970.

That’s not nearly as much of a change as back East, where all of New England is in a zone where winter low temperatures average 5 degrees higher than 54 years ago.

This is not a matter of opinion. It doesn’t matter to the real world if a politician like Donald Trump finds it convenient to pretend that “climate change is a hoax.” This winter’s numbers are just a small slice of the data pie showing that this year is the hottest on record. “The global mean surface air temperature from January to September 2024 was 1.54°C above the pre-industrial average. It is the first time the world has exceeded 1.5°C of warming,” reports the World Meteorological Organization.

King Canute can command the tide to recede all he wants, but the rising current pays no heed to his royal wishes. But the perhaps apocryphal story of the actual ancient English king, crowned in 1027, as told by his chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, was meant to tell the opposite of how history is now understood. After the tide continued to rise and wet his shoes in spite of the command, Canute stepped back and declared, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, except He as heaven, earth, and the sea obeys eternal laws.”

A king, or a president, cannot have any effect on global warming and other examples of climate change by ordering the atmosphere and oceans to stop warming. The laws of chemistry and physics are eternal laws. But the president may, out of a desire to appear populist, or whatever reality-denying motive is at play here, once again withdraw our nation from the Paris Agreement, which was negotiated by 196 countries in 2015 “to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature increase this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”

And sure enough, Trump will do just that once in office.

It’s a national embarrassment, yet another; it is anti-human, as well as anti-Earth. For those of us who favor Earth over, say, Mars, and don’t want to leave our great-grandchildren an inhospitable home planet, it’s a nasty political maneuver.

But that doesn’t mean that smart, everyday Americans will give up on our own fight against climate change, as absurd as it is that the president’s likely actions will see us join only a small group of countries, including Libya, Iran and Yemen, in the denial.

We contribute 13% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and American scientists, engineers and politicians of good will will continue to work to bring that number down, pending the Trump administration’s colossal blunder. As Max Boykoff, a professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado says, yes, it will be “a loss of confidence and a loss of opportunity for the United States to be in a leading position in a clean energy economy, and more generally in other global issues.”

But: “The renewable energy sector has grown to a point where it actually makes a lot of economic sense to continue to benefit from these market trends. With the way the economy has been moving, the Trump administration’s withdrawal … may have more symbolic significance than actual functional significance.” Keep up the good fight, even if this president is unlikely to achieve the wisdom of the old king.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].