[pjc50]

This reminds me of the collapse of the Gros Michel banana variety, also due to disease. Near-100% loss of a food crop, even a luxury one, is an alarming thing to see though.

(I was wondering if climate change would be mentioned, but that doesn't seem to be critical there yet. Starting to be noticed in European grape terroir.)

[HugoTea]

They mention it as a critical factor, the disease is spread by insects, which is spread by hurricanes. The areas they grow the oranges never used to get hurricanes.

> Hurricanes turned out to be a vector for spreading the little winged bug. The wind carried the psyllid all over the state, dropping it off in hundreds of thousands of acres of groves.

> It was the perfect storm. And then, of course, there were the actual perfect storms, the high-caliber hurricanes that, before climate change, didn’t come to the Ridge: Irma, Ian, Milton, massive cells, all direct hits on the groves.

[tgarrett]

>The areas they grow the oranges never used to get hurricanes.

That's not correct: we have good data going back to 1851:

https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.htm...

Search for "FL": hurricanes have been hitting Florida frequently for the last 175 years.

[acdha]

That's not the point being made: the article clearly states that those areas did not previously get hit by storms at this level. Climate change is making hurricanes stronger and wetter, so even though they've been a phenomenon for as long as humans have lived there that doesn't mean that the frequency of damaging storms over an area can't change in a way which makes it worse for agriculture. There's an inflation-adjusted list of weather events which caused the equivalent of a billion dollars or more in damages, and the upward trend is pretty clear — it's like dismissing the impact of the machine gun because people used to have long rifles.

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/state-summary/FL

You get a similar problem with saltwater intrusion where, yes, it's never not been a phenomenon but now it's affecting a lot more people than it used to:

https://southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org/initiative/climat...

[tgarrett]

> That's not the point being made: the article clearly states that those areas did not previously get hit by storms at this level.

This is the conventional wisdom, and it is completely falsified by the actual data that I linked to. I wrote a python script to go process and plot it, and there has been zero increase in Cat 1, 2, 3, or 4 storms hitting the US since 1851 (there are only 4 Cat 5s listed total).

Try it for yourself.

[fnordpiglet]

This is obtuse. The assertion was a deviation in the areas of Florida experiencing hurricane penetration. This is a localized effect. You’re discussing the gross effects of an entire nation, in this comment, of an entire state in the prior. However no one is discussing Florida or the US. They’re discussing the orange growing regions of Florida, which is a region that has not historically had hurricanes, but has had them recently.

It’s like saying the UV radiation hitting the earth is the same as it was historically so therefore an ozone hole in Australia didn’t exist and cataracts can’t be higher there.

[tgarrett]

So what you are saying is that, yes there has not been an overall increase in hurricanes hitting the US over the last 175 years, but climate change has been specifically and precisely steering the hurricanes towards the orange growing regions of Florida in recent years, and is therefore to blame for the crop failures.

You have to diagnose a problem correctly in order to have a chance at solving it.

[caminante]

As @zdragnar pointed out below, people are talking past each other whether it's claimed in the article v. whether the article is right.

It seems many are jumping to biases about climate change without reviewing the data as you did.

And the article should've been written with more nuance.

[tgarrett]

Yeah, exploring data is always interesting, sometimes super interesting, and it's also healthy to approach things with a mixture of open-mindedness and skepticism - a sort of zen habit you can get better at with practice. Ideas serve me, not the other way around.

[slibhb]

Hurricanes do more dollars in damage because we're richer and there's more capital near the coast.

The idea that climate change caused hurricanes which spread insects is not impossible but seems unlikely. I don't think the statistical methods exist to prove it.

[caminante]

Valuations have skyrocketed and insurance premiums are insane.

I love the stories about people in FL self-insuring now because it's cheaper to repair drywall than pay premiums.

[caminante]

OK so the grandparent's comment was clumsy.

Now, I see a slate of historical hurricanes in FL from 2004-05 that hit the Ridge area. This contradicts the article as these weren't baby storms.

The issue is clearly the rise of this blight bacteria that has made the groves less resilient to storms and has weakend production.

[cineticdaffodil]

The meta reason is a missunderstanding of nature. Even the industry basically considers it a tamed beast of burden, while environmentalist usually consider it as a sort of gaia godess raped by industrial mankind. Nature is war and fast adaption of wha works. The trees war the grass for shade. And every mono culture, be they cloned crab or planted orchard, is a giant dice inviting disaster with every yearly throw. And on that scale adaption and transportation yields rewards for those animals and plants transporting anti-man properties fast. We are running a adveserial breeding program for anti-human critters. And when they exist, as they do and did in all places with longstanding human populations and agriculture- they take the invite on speed dial. We simply are dragged back into the eternal conflict. We always where a part of nature and this is how it feels like to be a part of that. Counter measures? Lets ask the statisticians.. anything that eats dice throws of the advesaries.

[expedition32]

The Netherlands has been fighting nature for a thousand years. Inevitably one day we'll lose but it's a worthwhile endeavour.

[acdha]

How does that contradict the article? It seems like it supports it if those were the events which helped harm the previously-strong citrus industry - those storms are part of what hit at the peak, starting the decline.

[caminante]

Did you not see the article claim that the grove areas hadn't been hit by storms before/as big as some listed in the last decade?

Just not true with their phrasing.

edit:

for clarity, the author referenced 2017+ vintage hurricanes as if nothing of their intensity had hit before: Irma (2017), Ian (2022), Idalia (2023), Helene (2024), and Milton (2024). None of these got beyond cat 4. Meanwhile there were certainly other hurricanes that were cat4 that hit the groves in 2004-05.

[wolfie69]

Native Floridian here... although the story does not mention it central FL was hit in 2004 by hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jeanne, and in 2005 was affected by Hurricane Wilma as well. Before that you have to go back to the 1940s before inland central Florida was affected by hurricane force winds. I think the article left that out for editorial reasons, the recent hurricanes in the past few years the article mentions really contributed to the final demise of the orange industry.

And yes, you used to be able to go outside at night in March and April smell the beautiful scent of the orange blossoms. It is certainly something of "Old Florida" that I miss.

[patwolf]

Regardless of the debate of whether climate change has intensified hurricanes, it seems odd to blame hurricanes for being a vector for spreading the bugs. Wouldn't the bugs have spread via wind even if it wasn't climate change induced hurricane winds?

[wolfie69]

The hurricanes spread the insects rapidly over a very large area, within a few days. With so many hurricanes coming so frequently the areal coverage overwhelmed what could have been a response.

[treis]

Do you really believe parts of Florida never got hurricanes until recently?

[zdragnar]

To be charitable, they merely pointed out what the article said, even if it is obviously, objectively false.

[jibal]

It's not objectively false, people just can't read.

> the high-caliber hurricanes that, before climate change, didn’t come to the Ridge

[caminante]

You're making the parent's point.

These recent storms only got to Cat4.

Similar storms hit the aforementioned areas in 2004-05 including Cat4.

How do these revelations not contradict the article?

[HugoTea]

I have no idea what Florida's weather patterns are

[caminante]

Yes, people are jumping in because neither did the author, and it seems like that's core to the author's argument.

[schlauerfox]

Or the death of the American Chestnut the generation before, once so common its causually in a Christmas song, now all but gone.

[fuzzfactor]

Not to mention the loss of the 5-storey-tall coconut palms in South Florida back in the 1970's to Lethal Yellowing. The last resort treatment for these was tetracycline too but it did not save them. Plus they were not generally cultivated nor a local cash crop.

These things used form a massive canopy or grove naturally in so many places, towering over the homes and undeveloped properties.

Which is why so many old homes had the 3 inch thick white tiles on the roof. When one of the nuts comes down from up there it hits pretty hard, even if it's not a hurricane.

Almost all virtually gone, and what's there now is really all the result of landscaping efforts ever since, using resistant varieties that are quite dwarf by comparison.

[pg_bot]

A similar thing happened in France in the 1850s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Did this banana have seeds!? I've never seen one, but it looks awful. They were actually good?

[advisedwang]

No, it didn't have seeds either.

Have you ever had "banana flavor" candy that doesn't really taste like bananas? The flavoring is Isoamyl acetate, and I've heard suggestion that people called it banana flavor because it tasted more like Gros Michel. After switching to Cavendish banana the flavor name no longer made as much sense. Not sure how true it is though.

[advisedwang]

Someone in the thread linked to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ZtvpBoXzI, where Hank Green tells this same story... and tries a Gros Michel banana and says it doesn't taste like "banana flavor"

[tomrod]

I had them. They are wonderful, and even creamy.

I still love tiny red bananas though, they are so sweet!

[fuzzfactor]

Very true.

The bananas I had as a child back in 1960 had the strong flavor of isoamyl acetate along with the natural bouquet of related flavors in lesser amounts.

I hated it.

The space-age banana popsicles were even worse because they were nothing but isoamyl acetate.

[mech422]

I never had one, but apperently they tasted much better then the current variety (which IIRC, is in danger of suffering the same fate)

IIRC, there was actually a huge marketing push because people wouldn't each the current variety ?

PS - the old one didn't go 100% extinct, and you can get small numbers of them from specialty growers. Youtube has videos of people trying them (1)

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ZtvpBoXzI

[calebh]

You can buy a Gros Michel banana from Miami Fruit, although they are quite expensive (almost $40 for a single banana). There are reviews of the banana on YouTube as well - I highly recommend the Weird Explorer channel if you want video reviews of all sorts of strange fruit.

[xenadu02]

Most edible bananas are seedless and most cultivars (human grown) bananas are genetic mutants with triploid chromosomes (though a few are tetrapolid or diploid). Getting them to produce functional reproductive structures at all let alone viable seeds is very difficult. There are ongoing efforts to cross-breed with their wild cousins and to preserve genetic diversity.

[renewiltord]

This banana has reached mythical banana status because of rarity. The flavor of various tropical bananas is way better. Both Taiwan and India have many varieties substantially better tasting than Gros Michel.