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"Birds are laying eggs earlier than usual, plants are flowering earlier and mammals are breaking hibernation sooner," said Terry L. Root, a senior fellow with Stanford's Institute for International Studies (IIS) and lead author of the Jan. 2 Nature study.

There are lots of reasons to be concerned about this trend, not the least of which is the amplification of global warming through a positive feedback. (Since ice is a lot more reflective of sunlight than ocean water, melting sea ice allows more heat from the Sun to be absorbed instead of reflected, causing temperatures to rise more rapidly, thus melting more ice, and so forth, creating a positive feedback and raising the Earth’s reflectivity, also known as its albedo.)