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Climate Change Finally Impacts Important Industry
Socguy writes "According to a New Zealand scientist, Jim Salinger, the price of beer in and around Australia is going to be under increasing upward pressure as reductions in malting barley yields are experienced as a side effect of our ongoing climate shift.
"It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up," Mr. Salinger told the Institute of Brewing and Distilling convention."
Those of us who home brew have already seen the hit on both barley and hops.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
I'm sorry, it seems pretty ridiculous to me to attack climate change by trying to go after *each* and *every* little thing someone deems inefficient given the benefit and environmental cost. You'll never be able to enumerate everything that's inefficient, because a) there are so many activities, and b) it depends on quantity that exists solely in other people's minds.
We're going after barley today, and tomorrow it will be celery or lack of solar panels on buildings or computer that go to sleep too slowly etc etc etc.
A much more rational and simple approach would be: Tax all fossil fuels at the current cost of sinking the resulting carbon out of the air. (Actually, you just want to sink the fraction of existing output that needs to be removed in order to stabilize concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere but if I put that in the definition it would be too hard to untangle.)
Apply the funds to sinking CO2.
Then, all product use is carbon neutral. For all people, adjusting to climate change is simply a matter of buying whatever you want, so long as its cost is justified by its current price (which has been changed to account for the tax.) Given the new prices, all entrepreneurial activity redirects to account for higher fossil fuel costs and raises resources spent on minimizing this input.
This method is necessarily the least painful approach because and change in activities necessarily comes from those activities that have least benefit, as people currently judge them, and work up from there.
Furthermore, as the price of sinking goes down, the tax can go down.
Furthermore, this is robust against non-compliant countries, as their goods can be tarriffed to pay for whatever sinking they won't pay for. Or, if necessary, other countries can sink CO2 using general tax revenues.
Oops, I forgot, people would still be able to drive SUVs under this, so scratch it.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Think of the children!
The barley yields have been underperforming since 2006, so this is cumulatively a big problem for the beer industry and its customers.
However, there are many other crops from which alcohol can be derived. A sudden price increase in beer will send drinkers to the arms of other libations. This should, in principle, keep the price of beer from fluctuating too wildly. In another couple years when barley yields are back at their maximums, this will all have been a bad memory.
More like:
Think of the underage drinking teenagers!
Or will this force us to re-consider legalizing "weed"? Since with no beer, they'll just move up the chain, anyway.
People will not pay whatever the beer industry charges.
I remember reading a Newfoundland drug enforcement police officer's comment once to the effect that beer and spirits stores profits were up whenever the police managed to put a big dent in the illegal drug market.
I told you the world wasnt going to end, i told you it would be MUCH worse.
Here we face a HOT future with NO BEER!
I vote for the government to start giving away suicide packs (but not legalize mariguana).
NO SIG
so lets latch on to something generic... even though it occurs all the time we seem to think its only bad now.
Its always worse for those of the current generation, we conveniently forget the previous ones. I have some grandparents who can tell you about the real hell they faced in Kansas during those drought days way back when, makes the pansy crap we complain about today just that.
I guess with all the stories about the earth having not warmed recently, taken a year or two dive, that the lead off words must change to fuel this engine of profit for certain groups and businesses. How much barley production is lost to other more cash ready crops? With the current increases in the value of corn and wheat because of the misguided ethanol production in the US would it not make sense that other areas shift to fill the gap?
Putting climate change in the same story as beer either points out the hypocrisy of it all or just shows how silly we are willing to become
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yeah it has nothing to do with.. oh.. climate change HYPE causing a shift of crops from barley to corn to make Ethanol..
There's nothing in the article about reduced yields... just shortages of barley and aluminum and sugar and sugar (sic).
Ms. Read said that in addition to climate change, barley growers are grappling with competition from other forms or land use, such as the dairy industry.
And don't forget these fine proofs of global warming... (ooh sorry, Climate Change)
"The price of beer is likely to rise in coming decades because climate change will hamper the production"
"He said climate change could cause a drop in beer production within 30 years"
Now there's an inconvenient truth for you...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
The Warmlist has already been updated with this new information.
The article is very light on details, but it is just today's 'Everybody panic' story about global warming (climate change, or whatever). He is full of it. He says it 'may' cause a drop in barley production in au in the next 30 years. Oh crap. As if droughts and floods never happened before the ICE.
The reductions in Malted Barley yields are a direct result of more farmers growing corn in place of barley in order to produce ethanol. The price of corn has gone up because demand has gone up, so therefore more farmers are producing/planting/harvesting corn.
Just once, why can't one of our poorly considered quick fixes work?
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Greenland's barley production jumps %500 and sees new global markets.
"According to a New Zealand scientist, Jim Salinger, the price of beer in and around Australia is going to be under increasing upward pressure as reductions in malting barley yields are experienced as a side effect of our ongoing climate shift."
When it comes to belief in global warming, the scientific method is completely unnecessary, as long as you agree with the mythical "consensus" dogma.
Where is the peer-reviewed article documenting the cause of the diminished barley harvest as being "climate change?"
I get it. No peer-reviewed article is required to PROVE AGW, only to disprove it.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Manbeerpig will kill us all!
And on the next Guinness commercial....
First Inventor: How do we make more money at this?
Second Inventor: I know--we'll tell them that barley is more expensive due to climate change!"
First Inventor (tapping bottles with the second): Brilliant!
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Climate change has impacted agriculture since it was invented. Nothing new here. The only "news" is that the article speculates this particular crop was affected by man made climate change. Quite a stretch.
\u262D = \u5350
Yeah yeah global warming is all a scam to profit American ethanol companies. The decades of global scientific reasearch is all a means to their ends. Oh wait, the rest of the World aren't lackeys of corporate America and is in fact costing the countries who are actually doing something about it hundreds of millions, making the whole corporate/government conspiracy angle truly ridiculous. As far as stories about "the earth having not warmed recently", what the fuck are you talking about? Do you think a cold week in March disproves global warming or something?
They drink beer? My friends didn't drink beer that often, not until we were about 17. Before then it was cider (cheap and strong) or spirits (usually vodka, or premixed vodka cocktails).
I never did weed, probably half my friends did.
Exactly! The brewer at the local micro brewery told me that the decreasing harvests were simply due to farmers getting out of the business. It seems the larger breweries had stockpiled so much hopps they drove prices into the dirt..so to speak. He said it was a normal supply and demand thing and that as soon as it once again became profitable to grow hopps the farmers would replant.
Or maybe Al Gore has drunk all the beer & just using Global Warming to cover his tracks.
As I understand it some solar scientists (outside of NASA) are predicting a period of reduced solar activity and lower (by 2.0C) temperatures for the next 3 or 4 decades. Of course the AGW proponents are saying hogwash to that. I guess we will all know who is correct soon enough, the next solar cycle is already late (cycle 24) and we will know within 2-3 years if a) it is weaker than the last one b) if it does or doesn't affect temperatures. Both sides however are predicting lower crop output (higher prices) and tragically we are already converting more food (grain crops) into fuel than we probably should be. The affluent will notice an increase in beer/food cost, the poor an increase in hunger/dying.
_GP_
Regardless, it is still affecting my beer making.
Two years ago, it cost about $12 to make a 5-gallon batch of beer, now it costs between $20 and $30.
(I know, I'm bitching about paying 4-6 dollars for the equivelant of a 12-pack of beer.)
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Global warming is causing changes in ecosystems ,and changing ecosystems can major disruptions in flora and fauna. And just because it gets warmer doesn't mean that the new ecosystem is going to be more optimal for agriculture. Raising the temperature a few degrees changed the Sahara from lush vegetation to desert.
Stable ecosystems are about balance: Enough vegetation for herbivores. Enough carnivores to keep the herbivores from stripping away all vegetation: Enough scavengers to clean up after everything, etc. So when change happens too quickly (decades and centuries instead of millenia) ecosystems cannot adapt, and the land might not be good for any agriculture.
You already see this in man-made disturbances like Easter Island. Easter Island once was a tropical rain forest. Over a few hundred years, the natives stripped the forests to make it the grassy plains that it is today. But due to these changes, the island's soil is very poor and cannot sustain much flora other than the grasses that exist there today.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"Climate Change Finally Impacts Important Industry" is not correct. The article makes no mention of any impact on an industry. It should probably read "Scientists Say Climate Change Will Finally Impact and Important Industry". The current title suggests that it has happened.
We have a number of examples of desertification which is in large part a local climate change. Supposedly there are examples going back to ancient times though I can't think of examples older than some tropical empires (Mayan and Khmer empires). There is the "heat island effect", namely that urban areas are warmer than surrounding areas, which is due to the lower albedo of these regions. These are man-made changes in climate. The global temperate has changed over the past few thousand years (according to ice and tree-ring data) resulting in a number of climate changes that have probably affected human industry. And the current global warming trend has supposedly resulted in shifts in the seasons and the start of the growing season for temperate regions.
Up the chain? Weed is down the chain. Alcohol is more harmful than weed.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
People will not pay whatever the beer industry charges.
I remember reading a Newfoundland drug enforcement police officer's comment once to the effect that beer and spirits stores profits were up whenever the police managed to put a big dent in the illegal drug market.
If people are using beer (i.e. ethanol) to get a drug high, they're going to pay whatever the price is. You don't see too many addicts quitting due to cost.
That's not to say they're going to buy Sam Adams over Beast, but they'll still buy.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Climate change is not the reason for ethanol in gasoline. The reason is political: to reduce dependence on energy from foreign sources, as well as to buy votes from corn farmers via subsidies.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
And now there's rioting in Haiti over food shortages (i.e. prices). So, the first human sacrifices at the altar of the Global Warming religion are occurring right now.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Why does the headline claim that climate change is having an impact on the growing of barley when the very brief linked article makes no such claim. This climate scientist uses, "likely will", "might" and "will" quite liberally.
I find it impressive how the media has so effectively shifted the terminology from "global warming" to "climate change". So now any time weather deviates from some arbitrary norm we're feeling the effects of climate change. And don't forget to add that it's man-made!
In fact, on NPR recently a NASA scientist stated that the Argo satellite has shown slight cooling over the past five years. Another thing is that scientists are starting to find that CO2 doesn't quite provide the positive feedback that causes a rise in temperature, instead it acts as a sort of damper. If I could find where I read that I'd link it here but inevitably any search on global warming and climate change results in a flood of propaganda.
Inevitably, the climate change supporters will claim that these findings aren't statistically significant or that local temperature findings aren't relevant. Basically, if it doesn't reinforce the climate change agenda it's dismissed. Any anyone with disputing data is biased.
And nevermind the fact that we've had climate change since the Earth has first existed. And furthermore, history has shown that increased global temperatures have lead to human prosperity. Idiots like Ted Turner seem to believe that rising temperatures will somehow lead to drought and widespread famine but as far as I know no scientist has made that claim yet.
Faced with the difficulty of separating anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic influences, they reverted to the time-honored method of taking data.
The trouble is that some of the data doesn't support some of the theories. It used to be that scientists would be happy to falsify their theories or modify them when presented with new data. Lately it seems people are starting with theories and trying to find data to support them, which is fine to that extent, but then discounting data which is found that contradicts their theories.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
To quote Al Gore "THE DEBATE IS OVER". This is not up for discussion anymore. The science has been settled. It has been proven and outlined in "An Inconvenient Truth". You are not allowed to question this. I don't care about "cool winters or years". If the oceans completely freeze over it just proves that global warming is real and more severe than previously thought. Climate change is real. The climate changes. We need the government to buy massive amounts of carbon credits for the poor who can not afford them. Did you not hear Al Gore? Climate change is real. The climate changes and we have already proved it. This matter is now closed.
Reporting of this kind is lame because you hear about every time something costs more because of a bad crop etc. but you never hear about all the times prices fall because of a bumper crop. It's just news focused on the negatives designed to get us all to pay attention. Well they've cried wolf one to many times and I just don't care anymore.
Do you think a cultural push toward hysteria proves global warming or something?
--- these days, what with business and stuff, you gotta get your emails...
...welcome our new barley-free overlords. While there is nothing appealing paying more for Duchesse de Bourgogne or Longhammer, the prospect of Natty Light, Keystone, Budweiser, Miller, Coors, etc., disappearing forever gives me comfort in these dark, warm, melty times. We're talking about a product (yes, only one product--there are no meaningful distinctions among the brands) so bad that the tasting contests have to create a category called "American-Style Lager" (read: macrobrew) to accomodate them. And something tells me the big breweries pay the competitions to have that category there in the first place. You know the organizers have to be huge beer snobs, and even Level 1 Beer Snobs automatically get the Hating on Macrobrews feat. Check out the Bud/Miller/Coors Web sites and notice how they each win the category every four years. It's almost like they're just taking turns.