Global Warming’s Halloween Horror
October 29th, 2007
Global warming threatens our 4th of July celebrations with droughts that have forced communities to scrap plans for fireworks displays. And it threatens our White Chistmases with winter heatwaves. And our Arbor Days with record wildfires. And now it imperils our Halloweens.
In a story headlined, “Rain, Drought, Wipe Out Pumpkin Crops Across U.S.” Fox News reports the frightening news:
Scorching weather and lack of rain this summer wiped out some pumpkin crops from western New York to Illinois, leaving fields dotted with undersized fruit. Other fields got too much rain and their crops rotted.
Pumpkin production is predicted to be down for the second straight year.
One expert ominously predicts a run on pumpkins: “If you’ve got to have them for your 5-year-olds, I certainly would not wait a long time to get them.”
Even Stephen Colbert has reported on what he calls the War on Halloween (though, characteristic of his out-of-the-mainstream politics, he doesn’t make the obvious link to global warming).
The bottom line, however, is clear: Pumpkins (like most people) hate extreme weather. Sadly, global warming means more droughts and more deluges.
What exactly does extreme weather done to pumpkins?
Hot, dry weather causes pumpkins to produce too many male blossoms and too few female ones. Farmers also can blame drought for scads of small pumpkins as well as lighter weights because of a lack of water.
Standing in a 2-acre pumpkin field at his Buffalo farm, Bob Gritt lamented the poor color and small size of the crop surrounding him.
“The color’s not real good on them,” he said. “There’s not very many big ones in there.”
At least Gritt has pumpkins. Some West Virginia farmers don’t.
The West Virginia Pumpkin Festival has found itself in the unusual position of importing pumpkins for the four-day event beginning Thursday that lures about 40,000 visitors to Milton every year, organizer Martha Poore said.
All this is enough to make one lose faith in the Great Pumpkin. The impact is nationwide:
… production is down two-thirds in West Virginia, Kentucky and parts of Ohio….
The drought has also hurt growers in western New York, and in Michigan, as much as half the crop has been lost because of hot, dry weather in the north, Michigan State University extension educator Ron Goldy estimates. Heavy rain that left standing water in southern Michigan fields caused much of the crop to rot, a problem Goldy says also affected parts of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
Ask southern Illinois grower Sarah Frey what happened this summer and she’s quick to respond: “Thirty percent loss, at least. Hot, dry weather, drought. It was all those days that we had that were 105 degrees.”
And who gets hurt? The American consumer, of course, as price rises but quality drops:
“There’s no moisture in them…. The public is paying more per pound for it, but they’re getting less.”
Scary!
Equally troublesome, we are forced to turn to imported pumpkins:
Pumpkins from Australia and Italy consume massive amounts of energy in transportation, releasing more greenhouse gases — one more amplifying feedback to worry about.
October 29th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Joe,
This year’s version of the better get your pumpkin before they run out reminds me of back in the 60’s and 70’s, every year there’d be a news story that barbers predicted shorter hair was coming back in style. Glad you posted this in Humor. Here in Illinois, there’s plenty of pumpkins including a good selection of white, red, yellow and purple beauties. The real question is where do all the unsold pumpkins go. Seems like at about 5 or six p.m. on Halloween, they all just disappear.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:48 am
So exactly how much was the pumpkin crop down overall? The article didn’t say and I’m wondering if it’s unprecedented or if it falls within year to year variations that have been experienced in the past.
Are there other reasons, not related to the weather that the pumpkin crop could be down? Possibly farmers using their land for more profitable crops?
Finally, when you were cherry picking quotes from the article, you left this one out. “Indiana, conversely, got a big crop, which Meadows attributes to adequate rainfall there and in northern Ohio, the nation’s top pumpkin state.” Can we blame global warming on that too?
October 30th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Pumpkin-picking, not cherry-picking.
Yes, I focused on the “news” — extreme weather hurts the crop, not the dog-bites-man story of how normal weather gives us a perfectly fine crop. Why? Because global warming means more extreme weather, not more normal weather.
October 30th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Joe,
In the context of a hundred or even two hundred years, all weather is extreme. There is no normal weather. Weather has patterns, but it is essentially chaotic. All the charts on global warming show not the actual temperature, but the anomaly - the deviation from the “norm”. It is striking to see that almost none of the yearly points fall on the lines showing the norm. Every year is an anomaly.
October 30th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Paul:
Global warming makes the weather measurably more extreme. Longer and more intense heat waves. Longer and more intense droughts. More precipitation falling in extreme rain events. More severe storms. This is one of the major predictions of the science, and so far it has come true.