Again tonight, for the third night in a row, central Florida is bracing for freezing temperatures. Temperatures have been so low that one farmer describes his fruit, still on the trees and frozen solid as “hard as a golf ball”. The extent of the damage to the fruit and vegetable crops is not known yet, but it could be rather severe.
The state supplies 70% of domestically grown fruits and vegetables during the winter months, and many of them are still in the field, including oranges, strawberries, blueberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, squash, zucchini and green beans, McElroy said. He said the impact on consumers will depend on the extent of the damage, which is not known.
“Generally speaking, when supply goes down, prices go up, so it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if we saw a rise in prices for fruits and vegetables,” McElroy said.
McElroy said growers and assessment teams for the counties, state and U.S. Department of Agriculture will measure the damage to 14 million acres, but the full extent won’t be known until sometime next week.
Here in the Midwest we had a couple of days where it actually got rather nice – into the 40s. But that ends tonight. We are going right back into the deep freeze with more bitter cold. Plus snow over the weekend. But if you don’t live in the Midwest, don’t think you’re getting off lightly. A coast-to-coast storm pattern is setting up and it may get a bit frisky just about everywhere in the coming week.
I thought that we got a lot of the fresh fruit and veg from Mexico or Chile or somewhere like that. By way of the supermarket, of course. Any way, the forecast here is for snow off and on for the next five to seven days.
We have had a very nice week. 50s and 60s in Nebraska. Still 35 at 11:10 pm. Supposed to be very cold by Saturday. Haven’t heard about snow yet.
As a Florida resident I can certainly confirm it has been mighty bloody cold here this week. Warming up today, though and supposed to stay mild for at least the next wek.
There is no demonstrable downside to global warming.
You have just seen the demonstarble downside to global cooling. There are plenty more where that came from.
One can move people from a rising ocean that might cover a few hundred or thousand low lying square miles taking 200 years to do so. Or build a few dikes like the Dutch.
Glaciers: What does one do with 40 or 50 million people from the northern half of North America alone? 200 million northern Europeans and Russians? In the space of much less than 100 years?