Fruit Chaos is Coming

[Alex]

Climate change and fruit crops (article in the Atlantic)

 

Quote

Georgia, the iconic peach state, lost some 90 percent of last year’s crop—a Georgia summer without peaches, an unfathomable thing. An unusually warm winter robbed the trees of the period of cold they need to bloom in the spring. The buds that did emerge were, like the ones in the Northeast, killed by a cold snap in the early spring.

 

Fruit trees evolved to live in more stable conditions; they’re exquisitely well adapted to the rhythm of a usual year. But instead of reliable seasons, they’re getting weather chaos: Springtime, already somewhat of a wild-card season, “is getting more and more erratic,” Theodore DeJong, a fruit-tree physiologist at UC Davis, told me. As a result, trees’ sense of seasonality is scrambled. And instead of reliable peaches and plums, we’re getting fruit chaos. It may not happen every year, but it’s happening more frequently.

 

[liuzhou]

I wouldn't panic. Most of the fruits we eat are human-enabled hybrids and have been for centuries. Nothing new.