Saratoga Apple’s Nate Darrow says his apple crop will be 1/4 of normal this year because of the weird Climate Changed weather this spring. A long hot spell in the spring tricked the trees into blossoming ten days to two weeks early. Then came a fairly normal cold patch that froze the forming fruit.
Looking over his boxes of Delicious, Galas, and Sun Crisp apples at the Dorset Farmers Market, Nate said, “This time next year we won’t have all these apples still in stock.” He estimates that his harvest will be 20-25% of normal, maybe as low as 10%. “It depends on how well the trees do at the top of the orchard, the trees that are above the pocket of cold air that settles in the valley.”
A few weeks ago, I freaked out when I saw snow covered blossoms arriving before the bees were out. Yet my pear trees seem to be setting some fruit. Perhaps my fruit survived because it wasn’t too cold. Nate said that the young fruit won’t handle 29 degrees or under. A little snow on the blossoms is OK. Some growers will actually spray water on orchards because the conversion of water to ice actually releases some heat that will keep the temperature above 29. Minor temperature changes at certain periods mean the difference between a successful or difficult year.
This is the Climate Crisis. A hardworking fruit grower has his livelihood made unpredictable by an ecosystem swinging out of rhythm. (Perhaps he should sue BP for lost income.) This is just another data point allowing us to ‘”solve for pattern” that says we are already living on an Earth experiencing a Climate Crisis.
Bill McKibben said on Democracy Now recently, “The planet that we live on now is different, and in fundamental ways, from the one we were born onto. The atmosphere holds about five percent more water vapor that it did forty years ago. That’s an incredible change in one of the basic physical parameters of the planet, and it explains all those deluges and downpours. The ocean is 30 percent more acidic, as it absorbs all that carbon from the atmosphere. NASA said yesterday that we’ve just come through the warmest January, February, March on record, that 2010 is going to be the warmest year that we’ve ever scene.”
The “debate” about “Is Climate Change happening?” should be over. McKibben’s new book Eaarth gives dozens of examples of how our world is already experiencing a Climate Catastrophe. He says that we live on an Earth so changed we might as well call it a new name, like Eaarth. But the debate isn’t over because it’s not a debate. “The Debate” is a well-documented public relations stalling tactic by fossil fuel companies to confuse the public while grubbing every last fossil fuel dollar. Wall Street will be under water before Exxon Mobil stops funding “The Debate.” Mother Jones magazine reports that Exxon Mobil spent 55 million dollars to fund think tanks to contradict mainstream science. The Debate Stalling Tactic has worked because the sky looks so big, the science is complicated, and consequences seem far off.
I guess it’s Human Nature “to need to see it to believe it.” Seeing this out-of-phase spring unfolding was my wake-up call. Now I’m sure that the Climate Crisis is actually happening and I’m a little freaked out because that means humanity is in a very dire situation indeed.
Skies are air oceans, limited, able to be polluted, changeable in their make-up. Carbon may invisibly disappear out of our tailpipes but it doesn’t drop out of the atmospheric mash-up for a thousand years! Carbon in the atmosphere takes a long time to be sequestered, or gathered back by plants. Carbon is more like a cathedral than a fart. Every flippant car trip causes pollution that will be in the atmosphere for 1000 years. As in, “Oh my god, do you really have to drive to return that movie?”
So we need to leave the coal in the hole and leave the oil in the ground. We need to stop burning stuff. We need to make burning oil and coal ILLEGAL! We need electric cars powered by an electrical grid that’s charged by solar and wind. We would already have these technologies if those selfish oil companies hadn’t been blocking and stalling and ‘debating’ for 40 years.
The BP Gulf Coast Oil Catastrophe is our national wake up call. We need to get off the oil. Oil companies are sociopathic non-human entities that don’t care who lives or dies. The oil companies are forcing humanity onto a Trail of Tears towards runaway climate change and Planet Death. We must stop them, stop burning oil, and protect the ecosystem stability that allow us to grow apples.
No comments:
Post a Comment