Year 4, Month 3, Day 6: One Piece In The Shape Of A Pair

Public Opinion, a news outlet in Chambersburg, PA, tells us about a fruit scientist and what he had to say:

Local fruit growers wanted to know about hail netting after Rob Crassweller, Penn State pomologist, finished his talk on climate change.

What color? What mesh?

Crassweller had said very little about hail during his presentation on Thursday to the Franklin County Horticulture Society at the Savoy Restaurant in Waynesboro. It’s a four-letter word fruit growers don’t like to hear or speak.

Crassweller spoke at length to the 40 growers about expected changes in pruning, pests, production and plant diseases.

“That’s something we can handle,” said Dwight Mickey, secretary of the county fruit growers. “You just have to learn to adapt. Those are things we can control, the influx of new insects and diseases.”

Hail on the other hand is unpredictable and usually devastating.

Mickey, Pennsylvania’s 2012 Grower of the Year, lost most of his 2011 apple crop to a hailstorm.

[snip]

Crassweller told growers he would not get into the causes of climate change.

“Things have changed and will continue to change,” Crassweller said. “We know enough that things are going in a different way.”

Indeed. Why ask for trouble? Sent February 24:

As global weather has gotten steadily weirder over the past year or so, the ranks of those rejecting climatology’s conclusions have thinned. But this means only that denialists have moved back to their next line of attack: even if the climate is changing, that doesn’t mean humans caused it.

And given the history of conservative denialists’ behavior, it’s easy to understand why Dr. Rob Crassweller abstained from addressing the causes of climate change when talking with Pennsylvania fruit growers. Nobody wants the obscene phone calls, hate mail, death threats, and frivolous legal actions that have disrupted the lives and careers of climate scientists whose conclusions indicate that anthropogenic global warming is a fact.

But ignoring a truth won’t make it go away. Climate change is real, it’s here, it’s dangerous — and human civilization is its primary driver. The sooner we face the facts, the sooner we’ll start making progress against a profound civilizational threat.

Warren Senders