Guardian: Climate Change Will Kill Your Coffee
Climate change is killing the taste of your coffee, claims a new report
in the Guardian's Environment section.According to environment editor
Damian Carrington, "global warming is leading to bad, expensive coffee"
because "rising heat, extreme weather and ferocious pests mean the
highland bean is running out of cool mountainsides on which it
flourishes."
The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is set to echo Shilling's concerns in its latest report due to be published on Monday. It said, "The overall predictions are for a reduction in area suitable for coffee production by 2050 in all countries studied. In many cases, the area suitable for production would decrease considerably with increases of temperature of only 2.0-2.5C." But leaks from the IPCC's forthcoming report have already themselves nullified the concerns over economic growth with regard to climate change.
The
latest estimates say that a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global
temperatures will cost the world economy between just 0.2 and 2 percent
of its GDP. "If the lower estimate is correct," James Delingpole wrote earlier this week for Breitbart London,
"then all it would take is an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent
(currently it's around 3 percent) for the economic costs of climate
change to be wiped out within a month.
"This
admission by the IPCC will come as a huge blow to those alarmists...
who argue that costly intervention now is our only hope if we are to
stave off the potentially disastrous effects of climate change."
The
Guardian notes that "Climate change is also increasing the frequency of
extreme weather events, as more energy is trapped in the atmosphere",
though IPCC advisor Matt Collins begged to differ when referring to
Britain's extreme weather events this year. He said: "There is no
evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in
the way it has this winter... If this is due to climate change, it is
outside our knowledge".
. . . . Dr Shilling advised that creating genetic variants could be the
answer to saving the coffee industry. "I
am very optimistic this strategy will produce the plants we need," he
said. "But the weak point is the time available. It is a race – if we
had started 10 years ago, we would be very confident that today we would
have tools to battle climate change. But I wonder if coffee growers
will be able to withstand climate change for another 10 years."
Shilling may be in luck. According to a recently published, peer-reviewed paper, the pause in warming temperatures may yet last into the 2030s, with Arctic sea ice already recovering.
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