“This is the most severe weather anyone here has ever seen,” Ms. Cox said. “We have got to find a way to talk to people about what’s happening. I’m not sure how to do that. The best I can come up with is to call it ‘climate variability.’ That’s an expression people seem to accept.”

Farmers and state officials in Georgia, Florida and Alabama are still trying to assess the damage done by Michael, which had the strongest sustained winds of any storm to hit the Southeast since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. But the destruction is already believed to be on a scale not previously seen in Georgia, a $65 billion-a-year agricultural powerhouse.

The state’s total losses, clustered in the southwest, could top $2.5 billion, according to Gary W. Black, the state agriculture commissioner. The cotton crop this year could be a near total loss, with damage estimated at between $300 million and $800 million.

Crop insurance will cover a fraction of that damage, in part because payouts are calculated on a 10-year average yield kept low by the damage done by Hurricane Irma last year, said Plenn Hunnicutt, an executive with South Georgia Crop Insurance. “That was nothing by comparison,” Mr. Hunnicutt said. “Everything south of Mitchell County, that’s basically gone now.”

In many parts of Georgia, climate change is infrequently discussed. A half-dozen conversations with farmers, academics and agricultural officials were cut short, politely, when the words “global warming” were uttered.

“That’s politics, and I don’t want to get into it,” said Raynor Churchwell, a programs specialist with the Georgia Farm Bureau. “Weather is going to happen, it’s not something we think too much about.”