Year 3, Month 4, Day 6: Let’s Have Another Cup Of Coffee, Let’s Have Another Piece Of Pie

New Hampshire’s fruit growers are getting worried, reports the Nashua Telegraph:

When you were basking in record warmth last week, farmers were worried. They knew the abnormal weather was making some plants vulnerable when seasonable weather returned.

On Monday night, their fears were realized.

“It got down to 21 degrees in some spots. On apples, we could have lost as much as 10 percent,” said Chip Hardy, owner of Brookdale Fruit Farm in Hollis. “If it had gotten down to 15, we could have lost 90 percent, so we were lucky it didn’t get that cold.”

The problem is that trees and bushes were fooled by a stretch of 80-degree days last week, producing their flowers roughly a month earlier than usual, leaving frost-sensitive buds exposed.

Fruiting plants from apple and peach trees to blueberry bushes and grape vines are vulnerable, as are some decorative plants such as magnolia trees.

We are so fucked. Sent March 30:

Yes, the early spring seems like good news for those who want to get out and bask in the sun. But farmers are right to be worried. When weather is this unpredictable, agriculture is impacted in countless ways, with ripple effects throughout our society. Large monocrops are more vulnerable to extreme weather and invasive insect pests, and food prices inevitably go up as availability goes down.

And yet our society is remarkably resistant to connecting the dots between isolated regional weather events, and the broader transformation of our climate that shows every sign of accelerating into a planetwide disaster. David Brooks’ article downplayed the obvious link between New England’s “winter that wasn’t” and global warming — a connection that we dismiss at our peril.

What is happening in New Hampshire is happening in thousands of regions all over the world; we must wake up to this clear and present danger.

Warren Senders