I’ve got a question for global warming folks?
when I was a boy driving down to Florida with my folks in the early to mid 1960s and going down US HWYs 90, 98, 19 and 41, we used to see out first groves as far north as Tallahassee and St Augustine...Lake City and so forth all the way down to Pre-Mouse central Florida when the main attractions were Cypress Gardens and Silver Springs, then the 1989 freeze killed everything north of I-4 and now since then one has to go as far south as Yeehaw Junction to find groves in numbers...that is 200 miles south of where they were used to be.
IF the earth is warming then why is this that the frost line is moving south.
Good question, I would think that the enviros would have a plausible answer if global warming is a fact.
I was born and raised in south-central FL 71 years ago, and I well remember those large citrus groves as far up the east coast as Green Cove Springs across to the Gainesville area and on to the Gulf Hammock area on the west coast. I haven't been back there since 2001, but at that time I didn't see many groves along I-75 until just north of the Tampa Bay area.
BTW, as the grandson of a pioneer FL citrus grower I can tell you that a frost doesn't normally harm citrus. It takes a hard freeze to seriously damage a citrus crop, and even lower temperatures to kill or seriously damage a mature tree. I don't remember the exact formula, but IIRC something like 7 or 8 hours exposure to sub-freezing air will cause severe damage to oranges, but not necessarily to grapefruit. Also the sugar content of the fruit is another determining factor in the point where citrus is damaged. Of course that time period decreases rapidly as the temperature falls farther below the freezing point.
When I was a boy it was common on very cold mornings to see huge clouds of black smoke hovering in the freezing air above citrus groves. The foul smelling smoke was emanating from the hundreds or even thousands of kerosene-burning smudgepots that were lighted in the groves to hold off the chill on sub-freezing mornings. To put the cost of that practice into perspective in re current prices, kerosene cost about 8 to 10 cents per gallon at gas stations back then, and probably much less at the distributors for large quantity buyers such as citrus growers. In earlier years burning stacks of resinous pine wood called "fat lighterd" by FL natives was commonly used for the same purpose. Burning either of those fuels in the groves was outlawed many years ago because of the air pollution it caused.
I realize that none of this is relevant to the thread, but I am old enough now to mimic my own senior citizen relatives who also rambled on incessantly about uninteresting topics when I was a kid.