A correspondent in Mississippi reports in with respect to her blueberry crop:
Low of 23F this morning broke record by SIX DEGREES F. Even covered with agribon-50 which gives 6F protection…still froze the (already set!) berries.
Same varieties my grandmother grew in the 70’s and 80’s…never lost a crop to freezes either…
It’s an every year thing now…we’re discussing whether to just pull them up and do something else, or go ninja with freeze protection (agribon50 + agribon 30 + tarps) which will involve even more severe pruning of the plants…they were 8ft tall. By the way, read tweet this morning that no blueberries north of I10 made it…up to I 40)…unless covered more than we did.
There is not much of the United States that is south of the I10 left to grow blueberries in. The red line in the following map is the I10:
We seem to be living in at least three parallel universes. In the first one a priestly class of climate scientists is predicting fire and brimstone unless we mend our evil ways:
The good news is that if we heed their final warning and do exactly as we are told than the warming might be limited to 1.5°C.
The second parallel universe is the temperature record which has been absolutely flat:
A great torrent of carbon dioxide has been released into the atmosphere over the last 44 years since the start of that graph but as it shows the temperature has been absolutely flat. I don’t know what the margin of error is in the UAH temperature record, and I don’t want to impune the work of Dr Roy Spencer in putting this record together by suggesting there is a margin for error, however the last result may be within the margin for error and in effect we have had no change in temperature for decades.
The third parallel universe is the ground truth of the sort experienced by our correspondent in Mississippi. She can’t grow things that she used to grow because of record low temperatures. According to the maps, plant hardiness zones having been moving poleward:
The maps above are based on the average annual minimum temperature of any given spot — a metric that plays a big part in determining if perennial crops like orange trees will make it through the coldest months. Each zone marks out a 10 degrees F band, from -60 to -50 degrees F in zone 1 to 60 to 70 degrees F in zone 13. According to the article those maps came from, plant hardiness zones are moving north in the U.S. at 13 miles per decade. Thay may be over now.
Perhaps we can get some guidance from the heavens, specifically the Oulu Neutron Monitor. This is based on an anonymous comment on a post on WUWT some fifteen years ago in which the commenter effectively said “You idiots, climate is controlled by the magnetic flux from the Sun.” The way the comment was structured suggested the author was one of the priestly class of climate scientists who was likely well paid, intelligent and bored. Out of idle curiosity he determined the major control on climate. This is what that looks like since records have begun:
There was a step down in solar magnetic activity in 2005. With the lags in the climate system, temperature peaked in 2016. The plant hardiness zones will retreat south and blueberries will be a fond memory.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare
Freeze out of perennial fruit crops is a common problem. The most recent example is the grape crop in Southern France April 9th 2021. It is much more serious if the entire fruit orchard/vineyard is lost down to the roots.
In the Finger Lakes in NY (My Father was a Grape grower on Keuka lake) bad freezes happen about every 20 years but can also happen 3 years in a row (the problem of averages), In cold regions were freezes outs are a big risk, growers hedge their bets with a variety of grape of different levels of hardiness. Other’s simply spend the money on labor to bury their vines in three feet of soil in the fall….expensive but it works.
A 50-60 year freeze has to be devastating. My condolences to the Blueberry growers in Mississippi.
I grow a cold hardy variety…12 bushes for home use only. We produce plenty but of course we don’t always have fresh berries… but dried works, so does frozen and preserves.. They also make good wine….blend with grapes, blackberries and some elderberries. Also great in homemade Lambic.
One night at 20 below and they will be wiped out…that is if I live long enough to see it…. it could happen anytime or 200 years from now. or never. This is the life for perennial croppers
Not sure why more people don’t grow blueberries in their yards…. the fall foliage is beautiful and they are easy to grow….. you just need to keep acidifying them 2-3 x a year in neutral and more often in sweet soil.
Some of the worst freezes in the Finger Lakes occurred during the warmest years of the so called “global warming” period of the 1980’s and 1990’s. It’s just weather.
April 1st is days away!
Blueberries, blueberry relatives and variants grow well up into North Canada. There is no danger of a blueberry shortage.
I live in Virginia and I raise blueberries.
I’ve also lived in Louisiana and picked blueberries at a commercial ‘Pick-your-own’ farm.
Those blueberries grew 8-10 feet tall and had some of the largest blueberries I’ve ever seen.
Trouble is, South Louisiana rarely reached 32°F, i.e. freezing over several decades, until very recently.
Until, that is, a couple of very cold fronts swept down to South Texas and east over a few years.
All of the normally warm weather had the Louisiana blueberries flowered and fruit set before the cold blast came through.
It’s a lot easier to keep some fields warm a few nights than to keep them shaded and cold for weeks.
When the glacial period returns, Louisiana will be able to grow cold adapted blueberry plants, likely again.
Perhaps, everyone should help maintain beneficial warming to fend off the glacial period. Nuclear powered infra-red snow melter?
Regarding “Low of 23F (somewhere in Mississippi) this morning broke record by SIX DEGREES F”: Breaking a record temperature for a single date by 6 degrees F or more, even in places where weather records go back more than a century, is normal American weather and not evidence of long term trend of global temperature change in either direction. Please have a look at how record high and record low temperatures in Philadelphia (going back to 1872) have a lot of variation from one date of the year to an adjacent one, For extreme examples, Philadelphia’s record highs for 2/25 and 2/26 are 10 degrees F apart, and Philly’s record lows for 1/29 and 1/30 are 12 degrees F apart with the warmer one of these record lows being set in a recent year. And, I remember 4/12/1977, when Philly got to 92 which broke the previous record of 78. Also, sometime in the early 1970s, one of Philly’s major newspapers had a small article about March of that year being the first March (in about or a little over a century) without any weather records being broken. The title of that article was “March Sets Record for Nothing”.
Regarding “The second parallel universe is the temperature record which has been absolutely flat”: What’s up with following that with a graph that clearly shows a warming trend? The author of that graph (Dr. Roy Spencer) says its linear trend is +0.13 degree C per decade.
Regarding “There was a step down in solar magnetic activity in 2005. With the lags in the climate system, temperature peaked in 2016.”: The graph shown to support this claim has its peak at 1990. Is this a claim of lag of global temperature from solar activity being 26 years?
There is the sunspot count, which has record going back before 1965 and that peaked in the late 1950s.
There is also another matter for global temperature, which is ENSO. 2016 had one of the two greatest El Nino spikes of global temperature since the one of 1878, and March 2023 has the end of the third dip of a rare triple dip La Nina. Next time we get an El Nino of almost any intensity, in the likely event that global temperature sets a new record high even in JRA-55 and UAH TLT, how would one explain such continuation of the warming trend on solar activity?
There are Blueberries and June berries, they are not that same. What you buy in the store is generally June berries, not Blueberries. You don’t find Blueberries outside of the Northern Forest.