83 degrees tomorrow in Northern Illinois - Chicago Area (bizarre weather)

This is totally bizarro weather - 83 degree's tomorrow here near chicago. Normal temp should be around 30 degrees..with 40 degree's being a bit higher than average.

I remember a few years ago i was telling my mom and friends that it almost felt like that the Longitude/climate had shifted up north a bit..this was the summer of 2010 when weather started to get extremely unusual. The summer of 2010 here in the chicago area felt different than before. It felt more "tropical" in nature..very muggy and humid all through the summer with almost zero relief and this trend has not stopped since.

I told my mom that it feels like weather down in atlanta moved up to chicago..like a big shift in climate and right now this really has me wondering if that is true.

Recently i read an article about how certain plants and tree's that grew much further south ..are now growing in more northern states where they would never grow in the past.

Below is not the exact article i read..but pretty much explains what i been noticing in my area...

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RALEIGH – Area gardeners may have suspected odd weather when their rare palms, gingers and bottle brushes - which had no business growing this far north - actually survived a North Carolina winter.

Winters came and went, and the subtropical exotics continue to thrive.

U.S. agriculture officials recently confirmed what plants have been telling us for years: Winters aren’t as cold as they used to be. The temperature difference over the past two decades has caused a marked shift in this state’s winter-hardiness planting zones, the weather bands on a map that indicate where plants will grow.

According to a new zone map from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the zones have shifted by several counties in parts of the state, including a total reclassification of Johnston County from Zone 7 to Zone 8.

The difference is most noticeable along North Carolina’s southeastern rim, where the dividing line between those two zones has migrated more than 100 miles, from the Atlantic coast as far inland as Charlotte.

If the trend continues, sometime in this century Raleigh will be reclassified into the same climate zone that today includes Dallas and Montgomery, Ala. Raleigh, technically in Subzone 7B, is now less than 1 degree away from being in Zone 8.

The bands in the plant hardiness zone map represent 10-degree differences in average minimum temperatures, and even a subtle shift registers with leafy beings long before humans catch on.

“There’s no question in most of the United States we saw a shift of 2 to 3 degrees,” said Tony Avent, owner of Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh and a technical adviser on the new map. “There’s dozens of plants you can grow in 7B that you can’t grow in 7A. It makes a huge difference.”

But gardeners take heed: Warmer weather doesn’t mean the end of those late freezes that can waste a riot of petals overnight. Warmth will confuse plants, forcing them to break dormancy weeks ahead of schedule, said Ted Bilderback, director of the J.C. Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh. These plants will go about their business, budding, blooming and leafing out as if summer were around the corner, only to be flash-frozen by an Alberta Clipper.

[link to www.rockymounttelegram.com]