Climate Change Could Drive Coffee To Extinction By 2080

Hugh Pickens writes "Coffee is the world's favorite beverage and the second-most traded commodity after oil. Now Nick Collins reports that rising global temperatures and subtle changes in seasonal conditions could make 99.7 per cent of Arabica-growing areas unsuitable for the plant before the end of the century and in some areas as soon as 2020. Even if the beans do not disappear completely from the wild, climate change is highly likely to impact yields. The taste of coffee, a beverage of choice among Slashdot readers, will change in future decades. 'The worst case scenario, as drawn from our analyses, is that wild Arabica could be extinct by 2080,' says Justin Moat. 'This should alert decision makers to the fragility of the species.'" Read more, below. Hugh Pickens continues: "Arabica is one of only two species of bean used to make coffee and is by far the most popular, accounting for 70 per cent of the global market, including almost all fresh coffee sold in high street chains and supermarkets in the US and most of Europe. A different bean known as Robusta is used in freeze-dried coffee and is commonly drunk in Greece and Turkey, but Robusta's high caffeine content makes it much less pleasant to most palates. In some areas, such as the Boma Plateau in South Sudan, the demise could come as early as 2020, based on the low flowering rate and poor health of current crops. The researchers used field study and 'museum' data (including herbarium specimens) to run bioclimatic models for wild Arabica coffee, in order to deduce the actual (recorded) and predicted geographical distribution for the species. 'Arabica can only exist in a very specific pace with a very specific number of other variables,' says Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens. 'It is mainly temperature but also the relationship between temperature and seasonality – the average temperature during the wet season for example.'"

Comments

So... It now is...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wake up and smell the coffee, before it is too late"?

We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[csumpi]

Oh, wait...

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[Znork]

If TFA is accurate, "Climate change is happening so fast that caffeine farms would have to move their plantations 50m every decade to survive, he added.", this would be another case of OMG the HORROR.

Of course, calling them caffeine farms may be an indication that 50m might mean something other than 50 meters and that someone hasn't had their morning coffee. In that case one would hope more care is taken with any units used in actual calculations underlying the cause for alarm.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[durrr]

We hit peak intelligence by 2000. We'll drive it to extinction by the 2030s if these predictions don't grow any more sensible.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, do you think energy companies would be trying to squeeze gas out of rocks i.e. fracking if oil wasn't running out? Face it, oil has peaked. Since 2000 how have gas prices been? Any wars in oil rich regions? Hmmm, yeah, seems like this oil thing could be on the way out...

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[s0litaire]

Don't worry!

We'll all be gone anyway by December 22nd....

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fatphil]

Oh noes! By the time they're nearly extinct, 6 decades down the line, they'll have to migrate 300m! That means that their neighbours will of course be in the perfect position for growing arabica. Even if FTA meant 'miles', heaven forfend, at most this means production would move to a neighbouring country.

This is a total non-story.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[CrazyDuke]

I will buy your house now for $100 and take delivery on December 23rd...

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[modmans2ndcoming]

I think the article writer meant MILES and since he is too stupid to hold down any other meaningful job, he is of course on the science beat of an on-line publication.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[Jmc23]

How does your brain even come up with something like that?

My friend has some coffee growing on a small hill, but only on the top 50m is it cool enough to grow. 10 years and she won't be selling coffee.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[Jmc23]

There's the problem, you were trying to do that thinking thing you're unfamiliar with.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[roc97007]

Dude, do you think energy companies would be trying to squeeze gas out of rocks i.e. fracking if oil wasn't running out? Face it, oil has peaked. Since 2000 how have gas prices been? Any wars in oil rich regions? Hmmm, yeah, seems like this oil thing could be on the way out...

You're comparing apples and muffler bolts. The US is sitting on large amounts of oil. For one reason or another (environmental lawsuits, short-sighted politicians, and that it's easier to buy from someone else) we haven't exploited it yet. Natural gas and the whole fracking thing is a different issue. It's not used out of desperation, but because it's relatively easy to do.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[roc97007]

I'm having trouble parsing that.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[ColdWetDog]

So get her a bulldozer and make a bigger hill. That would be the American way.

Geez. Some people. Do we have to think up everything?

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[ColdWetDog]

I'll try (I agree, but it's an AC...):

Plenty of oil. Plenty more of other hydrocarbons. The Problem is that we are addicted to fairly cheap hydrocarbons and really cheap oil. We appear to have really sucked out the vast majority of easy stuff. Makes sense - if there is light, sweet crude (easier to refine) sixty feet below a desert sand pile, you pull it out before drilling 10,000 feet down into the abyss. But now we're into the 10,000 foot stuff. Expensive (those rigs ain't cheap). Or dodging ice bergs.

And then there is the looming problem of what to do with all that carbon that we're tossing up in the air.

So, yes, we can continue on munching down fossilized hydrocarbons for probably a couple of hundred years but we will likely take down the global economy AND the global environment in the process. Some of us think that we have a fairly narrow edge to skate in order to avoid that problem. But in the short term, smoke'em if you got 'em.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[theshowmecanuck]

Didn't read the other articles I guess. They meant metres. As in altitude. You can only go up so far before you run out of mountain. Plus there is this funny physical trait of them being kind of conical... surface area seems to get less as you go up. Might not be able to just move to another mountain because it may not have suitable daylight or rain (probably more study needed).

Evolution is a bitch, and these plants evolved to grow with certain environmental conditions including seasonal changes and moisture. That also leaves out things like symbiotic relationships with other animals like insects, bacteria, mammals, etc. While I am no evolutionary biologist, I would hazard a guess that 50 years is a bit short to for it to adapt too much. But who knows, maybe they can be treated like grapes and moved somewhere else. As long as it doesn't cause some sort of invasive species issue or something equally negative with bringing in non-native plants to another country.

I know of a possible parallel in vanilla, but it was back in the day when the idea of 'invasive plant species' was not known or understood. Vanilla originated in Mexico. It is actually from the orchid family and took a few centuries for someone to finally figured out sometime in the 19th century how to grow it successfully (i.e. on a commercial scale) outside of Mexico. Granted it wouldn't have taken so long to figure out today, but I think the analogy still holds up if not in an accelerated form. IIRC Madagascar is where most comes from today though some people say that the best still comes from Mexico. Maybe it's a good thing they broke Mexico's lock on vanilla so long ago. Otherwise we would have had even more deadly vanilla gangs and vanilla massacres. We dodged a bullet on that one.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

So, you need to move your coffee farm, and the guy in the next field doesn't want to sell. Or there's a town in the way. Or, since coffee only grows on volcanoes, the soil is wrong, or there's a valley, or there's volcanic vent in the way. Or the weather patterns are just wrong. Or there's no irrigation water.

This is one thing people don't get about climate change. They assume that if the change is gradual (which it won't necessarily be, but let's ignore that), crops can just move further from the equator, or downhill, or whatever. A lot of the time there's no place to move to.

And of course the same goes for natural biomes, only more so. Which is why wild arabica (and a lot of other species) is in trouble.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

Yeah, because if you don't collide with the iceberg on schedule, icebergs must be a myth. I mean, you do know there's a finite supply of oil, right?

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

12,000 years ago there was a mile of ice where I'm sitting. Worldwide weather was vastly different. 12,000 years barely even counts evolutionarily.

I wouldn't sweat this issue. With humans helping things along, and the greedy profit motive, I'll predict coffee will be even cheaper in 2080. Assuming it's even grown at all, instead of spit out by a replicator.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[Mashiki]

Dude, do you think energy companies would be trying to squeeze gas out of rocks i.e. fracking if oil wasn't running out? Face it, oil has peaked. Since 2000 how have gas prices been? Any wars in oil rich regions? Hmmm, yeah, seems like this oil thing could be on the way out...

Are you kidding? With fracking the price of oil has done nothing but decline, hell up here here in Canada we keep coming up with new technologies for both oilsand(or tar sand if you prefer) reclamation, and for fracking. In fact, fracking has become so good that the price for natural gas has bottomed right out of the market. It's so cheap, that it's cost prohibitive to do anything but cap wells and let them lie until they're needed or the price rises. Even CN(one of two of the largest national railways) is looking at retrofitting all of the diesel engines to run on natural gas. Used to also be that the price BBL for oil reclamation from tar/oilsands had to be around $60, it's around $41 now. And I haven't even touched on shale.

Oh if Canada dumped itself off the market, we'd be paying less. Then again, considering the amount of oil we sell to the US peh. Oil hasn't peaked, the price has peaked to a level to which is bearable in the economic situation, but it's still too prohibitive for actual growth. Not forgetting that the price would be lower, if it wasn't for OPEC, they're artificially limiting output to inflate the price.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fatphil]

No species which large numbers of humans, in globally influential countries, make profit from is in trouble.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[cheesybagel]

There are also large tar sands reserves in the Orinoco in Venezuela but I am guessing they aren't being explored properly for political reasons.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[demonlapin]

So what? We'll move from cheaper fuels to more expensive fuels, sure, when we scale up the Fischer-Tropsch or cellulosic ethanol plants to supply global gasoline needs, but even when all the coal's gone we've got nuclear fission left, and that's just today's technology.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

So, because things will change drastically in 12 thousand years, it doesn't matter what happens in the next 100? That's like saying "What's the big deal with Russian Roulette? Everybody dies eventually."

Even allowing for inflation, coffee prices have been going up pretty much continuously since I started drinking it, which was around 1971. So much for getting cheaper. Actually, all crops are getting more expensive.

Replicators? You think Captain Picard is going to come and fix everything?

Which reminds me: People always talk about how predictions of natural resource exhaustion and ecological disaster turned out to be overblown. They never talk about the optimistic predictions that were equally overblown. Wasn't Discovery supposed to be arriving at Jupiter right about now? Where's my personal aircar? Why do people still get sick? If you think "progress" is something you can count on to solve your problems, you need to get out more.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[Eunuchswear]

You're comparing apples and muffler bolts. The US is sitting on large amounts of oil.

"Proven oil reserves in the United States are 21 billion barrels"

The US consumes 18.8 million barrels per day (MBD)

So you think 3 years is "large amounts of oil"?

"Services under the U.S. Department of the Interior estimate the total volume of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in the United States to be roughly 134 billion barrels"

Ok, that looks more like it . 19 years. Still not exactly unlimited. Not going to be able to get it without the price going up a shitload though.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[flyingfsck]

Don't worry, once the planet warmed up sufficiently so that ferns are growing everywhere, they will capture said carbon into a coal seam and the CO2 problem will be fixed in a couple 100 million years or so.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[lister king of smeg]

So, because things will change drastically in 12 thousand years, it doesn't matter what happens in the next 100? That's like saying "What's the big deal with Russian Roulette? Everybody dies eventually."

Even allowing for inflation, coffee prices have been going up pretty much continuously since I started drinking it, which was around 1971. So much for getting cheaper. Actually, all crops are getting more expensive.

Replicators? You think Captain Picard is going to come and fix everything?

Which reminds me: People always talk about how predictions of natural resource exhaustion and ecological disaster turned out to be overblown. They never talk about the optimistic predictions that were equally overblown. Wasn't Discovery supposed to be arriving at Jupiter right about now? Where's my personal aircar? Why do people still get sick? If you think "progress" is something you can count on to solve your problems, you need to get out more.

To be perfectly fair though the price of everything has been going up (exsept computers the have been going down) that is called inflation.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[lister king of smeg]

While true you cant change the altitude significantly you can simply move farms north, you could also take up geneticly altering the plants to withestand harsher climets that can be done either through selective breeding for hardier plants (menedelion genetics) or do it in a lab. If you go that route we may actually increase the yeild coffee is mankind's favorite leagle drug chances of it going exstinct with a market as lucerative and addicted as coffee is virtually nil worst case scenario it is grown in climet controlled green houses

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[Alioth]

The US is sitting on large amounts of *unconventional* oil. The oil we need for the current business-as-usual needs to be cheap, conventional oil though.

"Unconventional oil" is a euphemism for "expensive oil". The reason this oil is not being exploited at the moment is that it is far too expensive to extract while there is cheap conventional oil left. Not only is this oil not cheap, it cannot be extracted at a very high rate. It also needs large energy inputs to extract. Most of it may not even be worth extracting (as in it may take more than 1 barrel of oil energy equivalent to extract it).

Just to give you an idea of the difference in extraction RATE between unconventional oil and conventional, Canada's proven reserves is 1000 times larger than Mexico's Cantarell field. But after decades of expensive development, the output *rate* of these oil fields only equals that of Cantarell at its peak. You could have infinite oil but if you can't extract it quickly and cheaply, it's not going to solve the economics of energy production.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[maxwell demon]

I don't think AMD produces enough bulldozers to make enough hills from them.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

Did you miss the part where I said that coffee prices were going up faster than inflation?

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

And where are we supposed to get the cellulose? There are only so many trees and our agricultural lands are already maxed. Oh yeah, and we fertilize our crops with petroleum derivatives.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[Grayhand]

Oh, wait...

Where did you hear that? I've been following peak oil for decades and I never heard the quote by 2000? First we never run out. Oil eventually gets too expensive between extraction costs and rariety. We eventually have to find a new energy source. If we kept going as we have been traditional oil sources would be exhausted by something like 2056 but oil would likely cost $50 or more a gallon instead of barrel by then. Things like tar sands weren't factored in because no one had come up with a way to get the oil out of them. Right now it's being done using nearby natural gas so they are wasting natural gas to extract easier to transport oil. FYI it's a poor quality oil they get from the tar sands so it's not light sweet crude like is used for making gasoline. It takes a lot more processing and produces a lot more pollution to make gasoline. We can probably get by for a few hundred years with fossil sources but we are trashing the environment by doing it. Bad weather is just the start. By the end of the century it'll be 10X worse. Also it's shortsighted not worrying about the next thousand years and only caring what happens in the next few weeks or months. There is no current technology based on fossil fuels or nuclear that will last a thousand years so without more sustainable sources our current civilization is doomed. There are solutions we just have to decide if we want to make the hard choices or face the end eventually of everything we have built. If we leave it up to our grand kids it'll be too late. That's the real issue not when do we run out of oil. That question in of itself shows a lack of understanding of the problem. It's not running out but when do we run out of cheap oil? The answer really is it's already happened. The earliest gas prices I remember were around $0.25 a gallon when I was really young. It's around $3.50 now and if the economy was strong and demand was up it'd probably be $5 a gallon. Where do you panic? $5 a gallon gas or $10 a gallon gas? Both will happen in the near future so what are your plans when it happens?

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[bennomatic]

If you believe the Wikipedia, we're sitting on 218B barrels of oil, and some stats from 2006 I found say we're using 20M barrels per day. Some quick maths, and that's 30 years of oil if we (a) stay at 2006 levels of usage and (b) squeeze out every last drop. And yes, to be fair, (c) if we don't discover any more.

30 years ain't that long a time. And yes there's oil elsewhere, but we're also not the only drain on it.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[rtb61]

Why bother to read the article when it starts off with a lie. The USA is not the world, consensus is, tea is still the most drunk beverage never forget China and India. Coffee is the most traded, indicating that it changes hands amongst non-sellers who are simply inflating the price and tea more often sells direct.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[HiThere]

I suspect that coffee is sufficiently valueable that it will have it's genome sequenced long before it's in real danger, and lots of GM varieties will be created. But they should STILL be labelled GM. I want to have that information available when I decide which to buy, just like I want to know how much sodium, how many grams of (non-fiber carbohydrates), etc. Maybe I'll decide it doesn't make a difference. Maybe I'll want to test and see if I can tell any difference.

Still, I suspect that I wouldn't avoid GM coffee. And I still want to know.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[demonlapin]

Fischer-Tropsch. I didn't mention it just to be a show-off. Coal + water = hydrocarbons. Guess what the United States has plenty of? Coal and water.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[dbIII]

In fact, fracking has become so good that the price for natural gas has bottomed right out of the market

From where I'm looking (from the resource exploration industry) it looks like that was more due to a "gold rush" where everyone and their dog got into natural gas when prices were high and now they are having trouble finding people to sell it to.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[publiclurker]

Or even the length of the day/night. Some plants do not grow properly unless they have the correct amount of daylight. this is tied to latitude, and cannot be changed all that readily.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

Well, we have plenty of coal, and if you think converting it into CO2 and dumping it in the atmosphere is a good idea, well, that's an argument I'm thoroughly tired of. But where on earth do you get the idea that there's plenty of water?

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

I was unaware that it could be changed at all.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[icebraining]

According to the Composite Index of the London-based coffee export country group International Coffee Organization the monthly coffee price averages in international trade had been well above 100 US cent/lb during the 1970s and 1980s, but then declined during the late 1990s reaching a minimum in September 2001 of just 41.17 US cent per lb and stayed low until 2004.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[Mindcontrolled]

Don't disturb their om, mate. Didn't you get the memo? Oil prices are high because Obama. Doesn't have anything to do with the fact that EROI is beyond crap for those proven reserves. Doesn't have anything to do with the fact that lots of leases aren't even taken because the return is so crappy. No, not at all.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[demonlapin]

You really don't understand chemistry, do you? You can boil salt water or waste water for the water gas reaction. The molecules don't care.

As for coal, I thought you were trying to argue that we were going to run out of fuel. Now you're trying to tell me we shouldn't use the fuel we have, which is an entirely separate argument, and one which presupposes that we're not going to run out. Which is it?

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

Go back and read what I actually said. I never used the word "fuel". I merely pointed out the fallacious thinking behind the title of this thread.

I confess that I didn't bother to look up your Fisher-whatever. Provide a link next time.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[publiclurker]

You can, but it requires large greenhouses and artificial lights. I used to live not too far from a place that raised poinsettias for Christmas. When the time came, they darkened the entire greenhouse and lit it from within to get the day length correct and force the leaves to turn red. Something like this would definitely lead to very expensive coffee.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

My bad. When you talked about "changing the amount of daylight" I thought you meant literal day.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

OK, curiosity got the better of me. And guess what? Seawater is not suitable for F-T processes.

http://leg.mt.gov/content/committees/interim/2007_2008/energy_telecom/assigned_studies/coal2liquidpage/Coal2liquidone.pdf

You right wingers and your magic technofixes.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[demonlapin]

We already established you don't understand chemistry. Now I'm starting to suspect your greater problem is that you can't read, period. Salt water never appears in that report. Unsurprising, considering it's from Montana.

Re:We'll run out of oil by the year 2000.

[fm6]

No it doesn't. But the report does say that the main way the process uses up water is in cooling. Ever try to use salt water as a coolant?

Already rare

[bogjobber]

Wild arabica is already quite rare.

Re:Already rare

[93 Escort Wagon]

The article seems a bit wrong. It specifically talks about the Arabica species, and only mentions Robusta in passing as a lesser-used bean - but Robusta has, over the long haul, usually been the bean of choice for most big-name coffee brands like Folgers. While in the very recent past they were incorporating more Arabica beans (and it was only for a handful of years that Arabica did outsell Robusta), these companies have now started to reverse that trend again because of the price difference between Arabica and Robusta.

Who this really might effect is the specialty coffee sellers, such as Starbucks and Tully's. They've used "100% Arabica" as a selling point.

Re:Already rare

[HornWumpus]

You're taste in coffee is equal to your taste in cars (based on handle).

Folgers et al are actually a good study in overemphasis on price. When Folgers/Maxwell House etc were introduced it was decent coffee, but price wars forced the coffee companies to gradually increase robusta content. The market was a slowly boiling frog. This is why old American folks (70+) just can't taste the difference.

Folgers etc is undrinkable acidic piss. I have literally gone without rather then drink that crap.

I also loved when Charbucks was caught buying Robusta. They wanted to keep it quite, but the Indian state they bought the Robusta from thought it meant they had 'arrived' as a coffee growing region.

Re:Already rare

[dbIII]

The only stuff here that isn't 100% Arabica is the premixed coffee, sugar and milk drinks sold in petrol stations (gas stations).
You guys have plenty of Italian immigrants, how do crap chains like Starbucks survive when the average coffee shop run by a family of post war Italian migrants can do something ten times better?

Re:Already rare

[jrumney]

The article seems a bit wrong. It specifically talks about the Arabica species, and only mentions Robusta in passing as a lesser-used bean

How wrong of them to leave out poor Liberica yet again?

Re:Already rare

[bogjobber]

Because Starbucks doesn't sell coffee. They sell caffeinated milkshakes.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Reformed Lurker]

At least for morning coffee drinkers, It probably has something to do with the caffeine...

And once you start, it easily becomes a habit.

That's terrible!

[danbuter]

Thank God I'll be dead before then. Without coffee, life wouldn't be worth living.

Re:That's terrible!

[Sponge Bath]

Since this article is sensationalist BS, you will still have coffee. Beer isn't going anyplace either. Coffee in the morning, alcohol at night: the yin and yang of existence. Or as they said on Star Trek: "I just got to have a little something to jump-start the morning and a little something else to shut down the night."

Re:That's terrible!

[Jmc23]

How is this sensationalist? Nicaragua has seen a temperature increase of 3 degrees celcius over the last 50 years and they have a very low mountain range, meaning they can't just keep moving up.

Also note, the change in climate has already affected production zones and quantity.

Re:That's terrible!

[reboot246]

I'm 59 soon to be 60. If I'm still around in 2080, I'm not going to be worried about coffee.

Re:That's terrible!

[geoskd]

How is this sensationalist? Nicaragua has seen a temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius over the last 50 years and they have a very low mountain range, meaning they can't just keep moving up.

Also note, the change in climate has already affected production zones and quantity.

Anytime someone makes claims that are designed to create panic, or abnormal behavior without providing immediate evidential support, we call it sensationalism. The entire point of the article was to increase readership, not provide valuable knowledge. The prediction is far more likely to be incorrect than correct, and as such is simply sensationalistic. In my travels, I have never heard anyone provide any compelling evidence to support the idea that a couple of degree average temperature increase would do anything other than cause some extreme weather for a while,

The first question that comes to mind is: Why would a two degree increase in average temperature kill the plants? If they were that sensitive to temperature, a hot summer day would be the end of them right now. Rainfall could be an explanation, but farmers don't rely on rain as much as you might think, and global warming could just as likely lead to an increased rainfall, in any given area, as a decrease. The article mentions the increase in disease and pest trouble, but these days, the best pest and disease protection doesn't come from genetic diversity so much as from Monsanto, so again, the article is left with that ugly sensationalist after-taste.

-=Geoskd

Re:That's terrible!

[Jmc23]

oh stop with your stupid conjecture and actually learn about what is needed to grow coffee. Fricken philosophers incapable of counting teeth.

Re:That's terrible!

[mleugh]

TNG S01E26 "The Neutral Zone"

It's the episode where they find the capsule with the cryonic chambers. Quote is about half way through maybe, spoken by L. Q. "Sonny" Clemmons (the unfrozen musician) to Dr Crusher, in sickbay.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

If you don't drink coffee, you feel the same in the morning as somebody who does drink coffee - after they've had their morning cup.

Finally plausible

[Darri]

At last there's a plausible cause for a zombie apocalypse.

Re:Finally plausible

[ByteSlicer]

Obligatory webcomic reference.

Unlikely

[rossdee]

Even when the climate changes, there will still be some areas suited to the growing of coffee, and since it is popular, people will try to grow it in those locations.
Also there will be incentive to genetically modify it so it can grow in more places.

Of course there may not be enough to go around, but it won't be gone altogether.

OTOH species that live in really cold climates (like polar bears) will go extinct because there won't be any really cold places left.
(And polar bears are not as useful to man as coffee)

Re:Unlikely

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

(And polar bears are not as useful to man as coffee)

Actually they have a very important use. They eat the people who count polar bears and tell us their population is declining.

Re:Unlikely

[PopeRatzo]

Even when the climate changes, there will still be some areas suited to the growing of coffee

That's why Juan Valdez is buying up property in Greenland.

Re:Unlikely

[modmans2ndcoming]

My first thought was "seed bank those suckers". Then when the climate shift causes wile Arabica to go extinct, introduce it to new habitats.

Re:Unlikely

[vvaduva]

Exactly...this has been happening for million of years on this planet. When one area becomes unsuitable, another area becomes perfect. Adapt or die...

Re:Unlikely

[K. S. Kyosuke]

They eat the people who count polar bears and tell us their population is declining.

Well, at least they get to eat cheap fresh meat grown on organic fodder, lucky bastards.

Re:Unlikely

[Mr. Slippery]

Exactly...this has been happening for million of years on this planet.

Not this rapidly, no.

When one area becomes unsuitable, another area becomes perfect.

Species can only adapt at a certain rate. If the environment changes more quickly, they go extinct. It's not like they can pack up the U-haul and quickly and deliberately move to the new spot.

Adapt or die..

Right -- if our civilization does not adapt to the realities of physics and biology, it will die.

Re:Unlikely

[tompaulco]

Even when the climate changes, there will still be some areas suited to the growing of coffee
Somehow it doesn't seem as sensational when you think rationally. Of course, if it is getting to hot to grow coffee in one place, then there is almost certainly a close by climate that is coming into it's own as a good place to grow coffee.
Areas that are desert now were fertile 2,000 years ago, and vice versa. Things change. Areas get hotter, other areas get colder. Some places that used to get lots of rain become more arid, while other arid areas start to get rain.

Re:Unlikely

[hey!]

The problem is *terroir*. Consider a wine grape from Burgundy. Grow it in Sonoma County and it will produce a different wine, albeit with some similarities. Modern oenology allows mass produced wines to achieve consistency even in "bad" years, so climate change is not going to have much effect on a cheap mass produced table wine, short of total collapse in production. Far before your $20 bottle of chardonnay becomes hard to find, many small craft wineries producing maybe 5000 bottles of high end wine will go out of business. The expertise needed to run them won't necessarily migrate to the new ideal areas for cultivation, if they exist, and even if the expertise does move it won't be producing the same wines.

Similarly you aren't going to see any climate driven change in the taste of a cup of Maxwell House, although prices may rise or fall depending on how climate change affects supply. For example if climate change makes growing arabica beans unprofitable in some regions, those regions might start to plant the hardier and cheaper C. robusta. The result may be cheaper supermarket coffee. Or not.

What you are more likely to lose are certain high end varietal coffees like Ethiopian Harrar (my personal favorite) that are grown in areas which are vulnerable to changes in climate. It is possible (although not certain) that ideal conditions for coffee may appear in other places to compensate for the loss of current varietal coffee plantations, but it will take years, possibly decades to find these places and develop an international market and reputation for their product.

Re:Unlikely

[mrmeval]

Even if there are not areas it's like any other food or drug. We will have it and entrepreneurs whether legal or illegal will make it available. Since it's not illegal there is a good chance it won't be adulterated with poisons.

Coffee in Hawaii is already threatened by pests and it will reach 60/lb by 2013 though it may now shoot up higher.

If it goes high enough it will be economical to build greenhouses for it.

This sort of screed is just FUD trying to frighten children into *believing*.

Re:Unlikely

[Muros]

Unfortunately, the uninformed like you have not seen the CRU report that there has been zero warming for the past 16 years. If you consider 16 years to be too short of an interval on which to base the cessation of warming, then it is also too short on which to base that there is warming.

Thanks for the link. Now we are all informed.

Re:Unlikely

[riverat1]

Unfortunately the uninformed like you do not know how to read data tables. If you do the math you find that the temperature anomaly for the past 10 years has been 0.17C higher than the previous 10 years. Also I find it amusing that you use the CRU report that the vilified Phil Jones is the head of. How about a link to that report so we can evaluate it ourselves rather than depending on your interpretation. Actually I doubt you've read it but rather are depending on what some talking head said about.

Re:Unlikely

[GameboyRMH]

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SkepticsvRealistsv3.gif

Re:Unlikely

[epine]

Ethiopian Harar is a lovely coffee. It's not often found even at the high-end boutique roasters in town. More often I find pricey coffee from the other side of the Bab-el-Mandeb. There is a spectacular variety of coffee in Ethiopia, and small premium growers who know what they've got. Roasters can travel to Ethiopia and buy the coffee. The problem is that it takes a whole different skill set to actually get the coffee out of the country in the prized condition you found it, and this skill is not in the business lexicon of the fair-trade organic save-the-earth types. So much of this coffee goes undiscovered by the rest of the world. On the other side of the Bab-el-Mandeb one conducts business with less grease and more body armour from the stories I've heard (over the last decade this trend has mainly been going in the wrong direction).

While we're here, why don't we debate the earth's biodiversity in the year 2800? It's roughly the same distance away, give or take a fractal coefficient. I guess by 2080 there's somewhat less chance that a five-mile band along all world's coastlines will be World Heritage Parks patrolled by the U.N. Nature Police.

The average person will be brewing yeast-of-Harar in one gallon jugs while using mechanical printers to print disposable micro-osmotic coffee filters. And there will be a thriving commune on Facebook devoted to adding back all the nostalgic imperfections of topside cultivation.

Re:Unlikely

[X0563511]

Aw, that's too bad.

Re:Unlikely

[HornWumpus]

Blind testing says you are wrong.

French wine snobs with educated noses have been caught out more then once. It seems a lot of 'nuance in flavor' is found by reading the label.

Re:Unlikely

[Threni]

Yep. I've seen taste tests where English 'sparkling wine' is confused with, and rated more highly than, Champagne. And white wine with red food colouring confused with 'fruity' red wine. It's very amusing.

Re:Unlikely

[dbIII]

And polar bears are not as useful to man as coffee

All depends upon your drink of choice :)
http://www.bundabergrumcollectors.com/evol.html

Re:Unlikely

[CAIMLAS]

Time to give the polar bears coffee, so that they can be more useful.

Re:Unlikely

[Budenny]

'terroir' is a myth. Its the creation of the European Union in response to die hard resistance to the opening of markets which the EU tried to bring about. This would have abolished the protectionism and mercantilism which the French, for instance, have been famous for. When markets were opened, the next step was to protect, for instance, the various cheeses by saying that they had to actually be made in certain geographical areas. So we now have the claim that the Cornish Pasty must be actually made and baked in Cornwall. That Greek yoghurt must be made physically in Greece. Chanpagne refers only to a sparkling wine made in that specific region of France. 'Italian' olive oil on the other hand can be and is grown anywhere, as long as its packed in Italy. There is no reason to think that sparkling wines made to the same formula using the same grape varieties will be any different if they are made in other parts of the world. There is no reason to think there is anything special about the air in Greece which makes yoghurt made there any different from if its made in Italy, Germany....etc Roquefort cheese can be made equally well in other places than Roquefort. Peking Duck can be cooked in Chinatowns everywhere, not only in Peking, China. The idea is simply to impose protectionism by the back door. As to what will happen to coffee given global warming? Probably nothing. But the last thing we need to worry about is that if the same beans are grown in different parts of the world, they will somehow taste different because they have lost this mystical imaginary property due to something called 'terroir'.

Coffea Arabica?

[aglider]

We only drink coffea robusta, from Brasil!

Re:Coffea Arabica?

[modmans2ndcoming]

nasty nasty nasty plant.

Maybe this is a case where GMO can help.....make Arabica as robust as Robusta or lower the caffeine level of Robusta so it tastes better.

Re:Coffea Arabica?

[modmans2ndcoming]

espresso is a special case and there is a reason you drink it is small amounts.

Re:Coffea Arabica?

[aglider]

espresso is a special case and there is a reason you drink it is small amounts.

I fear the overall amount of caffeine in a single serving of espresso is more or less the same as found in an "american style coffe". It's just more concentrated.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[seven of five]

Amen, brother. Not everyone has the "I love coffee taste" gene.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[thetoadwarrior]

Because getting shit faced at work is generally frowned upon. That and if my beer intake matched my coffee intake I'd probably be fat and have all sorts of health problems.

More over-the-top scare mongering

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus H. Fucking Christ, and we wonder why way too many people pooh-pooh climate change claims.

"Global" temperature has not changed in 15 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

NOAA and other reports have already stated that global temperature has no changed in 15+ years of monitoring. There are some warming trends in the northern hemisphere, but there are cooling trends in the southern hemisphere. Ice levels at the north pole are shrinking, but Antarctic ice levels are setting new records highs. There has been zero net change globally.

Everybody freeze!

[xdor]

"Give us your money or no more Starbucks!"

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[alen]

Coke makes you a fat and disgusting lardass and will destroy your teeth

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Goaway]

Each to their own mate.

I agree: Everyone should drink mate tea, not this coffee or beer nonsense.

Call me when Diet Coke is endangered

[Andy Prough]

then I'll start bicycling to work.

Re:Call me when Diet Coke is endangered

[guises]

As long as that's caffeine free diet coke, you're probably okay.

Re:Call me when Diet Coke is endangered

[Andy Prough]

Diet coke is for fags. So is coke. Stop drinking it fatass.

WTF does Diet Coke have to do with English cigarettes? Are you mental?

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot. Mountain Dew, Cheetos, and some vaguely meat-like substance are the only allowed consumables, except on extended gaming or coding sessions where Taco Bell, pizza, and Red Bull are allowed.

One of the sillier FUD articles

[argStyopa]

Look at a map of the world.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that as agricultural regions shift poleward even slightly, the amount of arable land favorable to crop-growing will greatly increase.

Moreover, I recall from the 1970s concerns that the breadbasket areas of the US were going to be 'exhausted' by the intensive farming (which hasn't happened, but let's go with it)...warming of the climate, shifting optimal growing regions northward in the US will essentially 'open' virgin lands barely farmed for more intensive processes like multiple crops per year. One would suspect that as some particular, marginal soil fades from viability to grow a specific species of coffee, others will be discovered.

To suggest it's going to be "extinct" is just FUD like claiming redheads will be extinct....something so obviously tragic that everyone will be "inspired to action" without really thinking about it.

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[Anonymous Coward]

While I applaud you for not reading the article, as is tradition here, it hurts your argument. The big problem here is that wild (!) coffee won't be around anymore which is necessary for the long-term survival of farmed coffee. Coffee grows within an incredibly narrow band around the equator so it's quite the special case as far as crops go. We won't just "discover" new species of coffee that we haven't yet, I'm not sure where this argument came from. Just because of some misguided alarmist past reporting you are ignoring something that might have merit - that's not how science works.

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[smugfunt]

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that as agricultural regions shift poleward even slightly, the amount of arable land favorable to crop-growing will greatly increase.

That seems rather a complacent assumption to me (I am not a rocket scientist). While northern lands may warm up there is no guarantee that rainfall patterns there/then will be conducive to agriculture. There is also the effect of day lengths on some species to consider. Probably a bunch of other variables too (I am not a botanist). We may well end up with a cornflake glut but no coffee or orange juice to drink with them. The bad possibilities outnumber the good, it seems to me.

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[Guppy]

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that as agricultural regions shift poleward even slightly, the amount of arable land favorable to crop-growing will greatly increase.

Cylindrical map projections can be deceiving, those high-latitude areas aren't as big as they look. In addition, the expanding areas are largely dominated by a few relatively well-industrialized nations, while some lower-latitude agricultural regions will shrink; causes would include excessive heat, changes in precipitation, inundation or salt-water infiltration of low-lying land (especially fertile delta areas) or disturbances of flow in glacier-fed rivers (some glaciers will actually grow, but again mostly in upper latitudes).

On the plus side, one of the lower-latitude areas that might benefit would be Saharan Africa, as changing weather patterns may restart the ancient monsoons that once made the desert green. It's not clear whether the net change in arable cropland and production will be positive or not, as it will increase or decrease depending on the degree of warming.

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[istartedi]

I recall from the 1970s concerns that the breadbasket areas of the US were going to be 'exhausted' by the intensive farming (which hasn't happened, but let's go with it)

Google for "california central valley" and "salination". Get back to us.

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[Sponge Bath]

I recall from the 1970s concerns that the breadbasket areas of the US were going to be 'exhausted'...

Watch the movie Soylent Green for a taste of the hysteria. See old men weep at the sight of shriveled vegetables and scabby scraps of beef. See detectives shake down hookers for a spoon full of jam.

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[seyyah]

Moreover, I recall from the 1970s concerns that the breadbasket areas of the US were going to be 'exhausted' by the intensive farming (which hasn't happened, but let's go with it)...warming of the climate, shifting optimal growing regions northward in the US will essentially 'open' virgin lands barely farmed for more intensive processes like multiple crops per year. One would suspect that as some particular, marginal soil fades from viability to grow a specific species of coffee, others will be discovered.

I guess you are expecting farmers to move to the virgin lands of Alaska? Because north of the 'breadbasket' areas of the US are the heavily farmed 'breakbasket' areas of Canada.

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[MarkRose]

You do realize that some of the best grain growing areas in North America are in the Peace Region of northern Alberta? It's situated about 500 miles north of the US border.

West of Ontario it's not all trees, rocks, and water.

Even in the Canadian Sheild there are pockets of amazing top soil that are currently unusable because the growing season is too short, such as the Clay Belt in the Cochrane District of Ontario.

The shift northward is happening. Ontario and Manitoba are having record corn harvests. The corn belt has shifted.

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[squiggleslash]

I see... so you're saying we'll see land shifting (perhaps some kinda of movement of tectonic plates) as well as temperature and weather pattern shifting, thus all balancing everything out? How does that work then, does the tectonic plate system integrate with the climate, or are we expecting hurricanes to just blow the land to the "right" places? Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[argStyopa]

I googled, and all I found was that California's central valley is a shitty barren wasteland that was compelled to be agricultural land (as, I understand, is possible with pretty much any desert of you add enough water) by politicians diverting water to enrich some of their buddies in the land-speculation business.

Was that what you were talking about?
So you're saying to fear that the barren wasteland is going back to what it really is?

Not really relevant.

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[istartedi]

I don't know where you googled, but the western part or the central valley was not salinated until two things happend:

1. Irrigation saturated the soil and caused salt to be drawn up from lower strata via osmosis.

2. Water pumped through massive engineering projects was slightly saline due to salt water intrusion into the over-subscribed delta, which added to the salt load.

It's particularly bad for almonds. Maybe that would have helped the search.

Never mind the central valley though, I could have just cited the original dust bowl. Salination is more disturbing though. The dust bowl could be solved by better plowing practices, crop rotation, etc. Salt intrusion is much trickier.

As for what the central valley was before farming, AFAIK it was grasslands and marshes. The whole thing could even get quite marshy during heavy rains. Managed properly, that's hardly a wasteland. If anything, we made it a wasteland by diverting water from rivers, some of which were dried up all the way and became OHV trails!

Re:One of the sillier FUD articles

[istartedi]

Please stop pretending that California is the entire world, you make the rest of the states look bad.

Strawman much?

If you go by receipts as opposed to volume of a handfull of basic commodities, then California is no. 1.

I can see how you might make this mistake though. The other states produce vast ammounts of GMO corn and soy that gets fed to livestock. California has a much more diverse agricultural output. Trust me. You'd miss it. No, it's not a "bread" basket in the literal sense, but when the strawberry jam is off your toast, there are no nuts in the fall, no fresh cherries, etc., then all of the sudden the amber waves of grain are just a big blob of plain gruel with no variety. Not much wine either.

Requisite Dilbert cartoon

[cinghiale]

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-06-19/

Re:Requisite Dilbert cartoon

[Anonymous Coward]

Disgruntled employee did this at a tech firm where I worked. His office was across from the break room and he would fill the regular pots with decaf and vice versa. If finally stopped when one 50+ employee was taken to the hospital with heart palpitations after downing two cups of what he thought was decaf late in the afternoon.

On the other hand, people's behavior in the early morning without the usual caffeine crutch was hilarious. Donuts at a meeting without caffeinated coffee resulted in mass catatonia.

Re:Requisite Dilbert cartoon

[magic maverick]

http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2003-06-19/
Fast, it's for people who know about shit. Shit like Unix/Linux. seriously.

Most Popular?

[wisnoskij]

Most cheap is more likely.

Re:Most Popular?

[modmans2ndcoming]

huh? the other coffee species is Robusta and it is a lower quality and tastes nasty.

there are no other species.

Solution: technological progress

[nomad-9]

About disappearing stuff, like oil, coffee, etc. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the necessity to have something in place of what is poised to disappear, will drive new technological breakthroughs to meet market need.

By 2080, we'll probably have the technology to mass-produce artificial coffee, as no serious entrepreneur will ignore the potential for profit with the millions of caffeine-starved coffee drinkers looking for a substitute beverage.

Of course, before that, the increasing rarity of coffee will drive prices high, natural coffee will become a luxury, and some will make big bucks.

As for other things still found in the wild right now, natural coffee will be a thing of the past. The following generations will have no notion of it. Eating & drinking entirely artificially-produced products will be the definition of normality, Sad but true. As for coffee lovers like myself, there's a bright side: most of us will be dead by 2080.

Re:Solution: technological progress

[ByteSlicer]

As for coffee lovers like myself, there's a bright side: most of us will be dead by 2080.

I'm going to upload my brain to the cloud, you insensitive clod!

Re:Solution: technological progress

[n6kuy]

By 2080, the Coffee plant will have been GMO'd to grow even in the harshest of environments, and produce it's coffee beans already ground and roasted.

Re:Solution: technological progress

[cdrguru]

I would think we would have mastered genetics sufficiently so that when you want a cup of hot coffee you go over to the coffee plant and squeeze some out into your cup. Hot and steaming, fresh from the plant.

Re:Solution: technological progress

[budgenator]

By 2080 we'll have gone through Global Warming to Coming Iceage and back to Global Warming scare-mongering; our global climate has displayed a quasi-periodic cycle of 60 years from warming spell to cooling spells. Also by reading the paper or at least the absrtact of the paper, you'll realize that the problem isn't that the coffee dosn't grow when it's warmer but that it grows to well and that coffee like wine grapes produce the most desirable flavors when grown slowly in sub-optimal conditions.

Re:Solution: technological progress

[32771]

This would be awesome! Also we might be able to make something like soy sauce from the beans, caffeinated soy sauce. Hmm, caffeinated soy sauce on blowfish sushi, that is also GMO'ed to produce caffeine. Hihi, hyper fishies!

Yet another stupid global warming prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, how many of these lame predictions do people come up with? Now they're at least getting smarter and putting the timeline out 60 years so we'll all be dead before we can call their BS.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[MrHanky]

That's why you post as Anonymous Coward, whereas he is whoring for karma with a first post about beer.

// posted while having a coffee break from sanitising bottles for my homebrewed beer.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Coke makes you a fat and disgusting lardass and will destroy your teeth

Yeah so?

No coffee? Brawndo!

[TimHunter]

But we know what plants crave. Brawndo. It's got electrolytes.'

'...Okay - what are electrolytes? Do you know?'

'Yeah. It's what they use to make Brawndo.'

'But why do they use them in Bawndo? What do they do?'

'They're part of what plants crave.'

'But why do plants crave them?'

'Because plants crave Brawndo, and Brawndo has electrolytes.'

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because spreading FUD on a Saturday morning to beer drinkers is a waste of time - they're still passed out.

Greenhouse Bananas in Winter

[Anonymous Coward]

If weed can be grown indoors, supposedly even in Antartica, then cofee could be grown in a covered area of the yard / roof ... whatever. Let alone a reformed warehouse - or something. Detroit is available, and relatively unoccupied, it would seem?

Just fanning the flames

[LeopardMechanic]

Did it really never occur to this guy that as temperate regions become to warm, colder regions will be temperate? I’m just as concerned about global warming as the next guy but such obvious attempts to panic the people into buying Prius’s only hurts the cause. Just like the deceitful, discredited tools at the CRU – they shoot themselves in the foot and we take the ricochet. Keep it real or keep it shut.

Re:Just fanning the flames

[32771]

Just let me ask you a simple question, if you compare two equally wide bands around our globe one higher, one lower in latitude, which covers the larger area, and which receives more sunlight per square-meter (alright square foot if you like)?

Coffee prices fall 30% in last year

[BobK65]

Just more expensive FUD produced by modelers. Wholesale prices have fallen by 30% in the last year and Brazilian coffee growers expect a record coffee crop this year. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/coffee-prices-fall-but-not-at-starbucks-2012-11-08

Re:Coffee prices fall 30% in last year

[modmans2ndcoming]

And Gas was 79 cents per gallon in 1996....

Re:Coffee prices fall 30% in last year

[modmans2ndcoming]

Weather? we are talking about CLIMATE....that is different than weather.

Re:Coffee prices fall 30% in last year

[93 Escort Wagon]

And the reason coffee prices were so high previously was Brazil's coffee-producing region experienced a four year drought.

Arguing based on a single data point while ignoring its context is silly. It's like people who've claimed Hurricane Sandy proves (or disproves) global warming.

Forget about it

[PopeRatzo]

You can have my Hummer when you wrest it from my cold dead hands.

Anyway, this is why God made FourLoko.

Yeah, that doesn't work for me.

[Andy Prough]

Where's that stupid bike now? Doesn't anyone ever clean this stinkin garage??

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[modmans2ndcoming]

Yerba Mate will put you into Liver Failure if you drink too much

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[modmans2ndcoming]

but not the first 10 or so mornings after you start to drink coffee in the morning....

best part about coffee? If you abstain for a few months you get that kick in the rear when you start drinking it again.

Don't worry... vertical agriculture -

[Andy Prough]

...with vertical agriculture you won't need much arable land: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/11/05/2115238/singapore-builds-first-vertical-vegetable-farm. This form of farming is " 5 to 10 times more productive than traditional farms."

Luckly

[Exitar]

I will be dead long before.

excuse for ...

[3seas]

... raising the price of coffee.

Wild arabica was always rare

[G3ckoG33k]

"Wild arabica is already quite rare."

Wild arabica was always rare. :)

This is why it took until the last centuries until we had a global production of coffee even if it has been known for millennia.

Will the climate change make it dissappear? Probably not, but at least make it rare enough to preclude further harvesting.

Here's a link to the paper

[pnot]

Here's the paper. What's the fucking point in open access if nobody bothers linking or reading the research?

Five links in the summary, NOT ONE OF THEM TO THE FUCKING PAPER THAT REPORTED THE RESEARCH. Naturally the Telegraph article doesn't link to it either. Apologies for shouting, but this really fucks me off. Yeah, I know, if I hit the fourth link in the summary, there's another link three screens down that page which would take me to the article. Whoopee.

Would it have killed The Telegraph, Hugh Pickens, or Timothy to do us this small courtesy? As it is, the Telegraph sensationalizes the abstract, Slashdot sensationalizes the inaccurate Telegraph article, and 1000 idiots then argue about completely irrelevant points suggested by free-association from the title, because they couldn't be arsed to read the summary.

Henceforth I shall be tagging these stories "wheresthefuckingpaper".

Sorry I'm so grumpy folks, haven't had my coffee yet :-). I'm off to read the paper now -- why not join me?

Re:Here's a link to the paper

[Frosty Piss]

Would it have killed The Telegraph, Hugh Pickens, or Timothy to do us this small courtesy?

Hugh Pickens is the reincarnated Roland Piquepaille , and as "old-timers" know, Roland was primarily interested in pimping his blog, as is Hugh. A linky to the actual paper would drop that click-through, and thus blog popularity and profit.

Re:Here's a link to the paper

[14erCleaner]

I doubt if more caffeine is what you need right now.

Re:Here's a link to the paper

[blind biker]

Would it have killed The Telegraph, Hugh Pickens, or Timothy to do us this small courtesy? As it is, the Telegraph sensationalizes the abstract, Slashdot sensationalizes the inaccurate Telegraph article, and 1000 idiots then argue about completely irrelevant points suggested by free-association from the title, because they couldn't be arsed to read the summary.

And that is exactly what is going on. Some of the up-modded comments are true groaners.

Yet another religious nutcase

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody who says global warming (oops, it's climate change now, right?) is "science, not religion" needs a good hard kick in their worldview. And all the while they'll be yelling, "I'm not biased! This is SCIENCE and LOGIC!"

Dark Ages

[rsilvergun]

Thousand years of no progress. Those of us who were paying attention to human nature a are a little worried. For the most part the rich and powerful kinda like technology at the moment. But then I'm here in the USA and we've managed to make 'progressive' a bad word. At the risk of getting into politics, conservatives worry me. A lot. Most of them are either poor and terrified to lose what little they have or really really rich and can't imagine it getting any better.

Plus, A lot of the really rich ones aren't trying to create new wealth, they're trying to monopolize the old wealth. When Bain Capital shuts down a profitable factory in the States you'd think somebody would come along, say hey, I can make money doing that! and reopen it. They don't. That's because the guys at the top all just sorta agree not to step on each other's toes (aka compete)...

Re:Dark Ages

[khallow]

But then I'm here in the USA and we've managed to make 'progressive' a bad word.

Who is being progressive?

At the risk of getting into politics, conservatives worry me. A lot.

The fight in the US is over centuries and millennia old ideas. Not my idea of progressive, especially when some of the more radical and fresh ideas come from the nominally conservative side.

When Bain Capital shuts down a profitable factory in the States

Bain Capital would never get involved with a profitable business. Their niche is recycling failed ones and making a profit in the process.

Re:Dark Ages

[khallow]

Thousand years of no progress. Those of us who were paying attention to human nature a are a little worried.

I guess I see more wrong here. "Paying attention to human nature" means you've been ignoring what's going on. When the massive changes in us and our societies, the empowerments that we've made through technology and knowledge can be dismissed as "no progress", it calls into question what in the world you mean by "progressive". Because you are ignoring the most profound progress out there.

Plus, A lot of the really rich ones aren't trying to create new wealth, they're trying to monopolize the old wealth.

"A lot" is not the same as "most". At some point, we really need to recognize that most people, rich and poor create wealth. I see no reason not to include Bain Capital as a wealth creator.

There are even examples of the most corrupt businesses creating value because their self-interest is to improve the value of their holdings. A good example of this was the Russian Oligarchs of the early 90s. They got massive parts of Russian oil producing infrastructure on the cheap. They then proceeded to improve those holdings, in the process improving the economy of Russia and the livelihoods of average Russians even though they had no interest in doing so.

In my view, the term "progressive" is a lie. It means these days a person who wants to return us to an ancient beliefs. What works for a few dozen people in a tribe, just doesn't work so well in a society of hundreds of millions of people.

For example, the belief that society is a zero-sum game is one such example. As is the belief that we all have a common interest in seeing certain things come about.

Finally, there's a potentially lethal blindness to unintended consequences. When we have the power to take from those that have and give to those who do not, that power naturally extends to taking from those who have and giving to those that have more. Or for using that power to increase one's own power. Corruption and division are common traits of "progressive" policies IMHO.

Re:Dark Ages

[rmstar]

especially when some of the more radical and fresh ideas come from the nominally conservative side.

Radical and fresh bullshit - I agree. Or do you have an example of a good idea comming from the conservatives? "Let the market fix healthcare" wouldn't count, for example.

Re:Dark Ages

[cdrguru]

A lot of the really rich ones aren't trying to create new wealth, they're trying to monopolize the old wealth. When Bain Capital shuts down a profitable factory in the States you'd think somebody would come along, say hey, I can make money doing that! and reopen it. They don't. That's because the guys at the top all just sorta agree not to step on each other's toes (aka compete)...

It has little to do with competing and a lot to do with ROI. A huge problem with the US today is that we have a lot of the economy structured around a low cost of labor but in fact have a very high cost of labor. This means that in order for things to work it is necessary to find someplace where the cost of labor is low - or we have to restructure the economy.

This means that once the production from a factory has moved to a lower-wage location it isn't coming back. Sure, it might be possible with enough government tariffs and protection to squeeze some local profits out of a factory staffed with high-wage workers but it can't compete economically on a global scale with the low-wage version that has already been set up. This means there is no possibility of success for building a factory in the US these days except in very specialized areas. It isn't a matter of competition, it is a matter of economic sense. People that invest to build a factory will only do so if they have an expectation of making a return on their investment. Today not even the government can guarantee there will be market for expensive goods made in the US when the same item is available cheaper from offshore.

Rich people are that way because they invest in things that pay off in the end. If they don't do that, they will not be rich long and there are many examples of that happening. I suppose the government could try to resurrect the factory economy in the US, but it would only work with both lots of government spending and military force - we would need to blockade the ports to prevent smugglers from bringing in the goods that US citizens would want at cheaper prices. And the blockade runners would have a huge economic incentive to deliver the goods people want. It would be an amazing time for some people.

Another huge problem that we have yet to face is what to do with the current labor pool of unskilled labor. The idea (rather wrongheaded) was that it would be possible to retrain unskilled laborers into high-skill technology jobs. Dockworkers into programmers, if you like. This has been found to not be terribly successful so we are left with a large number of unemployed unskilled laborers. They are never going to get their old jobs back because the economy will not support paying them high wages when low wages can be paid elsewhere just as easily.

Every year a new crop of unskilled folks comes into the labor market and they are finding it harder and harder to find work. Looking at the unemployment statistics will show that young people without high-tech skills are having about as tough a time as people over 50. What exactly are we going to do with these people if the jobs have moved on?

Re:Dark Ages

[khallow]

"Let the market fix healthcare" wouldn't count, for example.

Bingo. There's a good idea right there. I didn't even need to come up with it. You did.

Re:Dark Ages

[rmstar]

"Let the market fix healthcare" wouldn't count, for example.

Bingo. There's a good idea right there. I didn't even need to come up with it. You did.

Brushing aside the obvious doubts on your reading comprehension skills: Do you really believe that? Nobody who takes evidence seriously does. What else do you believe? That Ayn Rand was a great writer and philosopher? That Ludwig "Praxeology" van Mises was a lucid thinker?

So if by "radical and fresh ideas" you mean "radical, stale, and stupid right wing cliche" - then yes, I agree, that's what conservatives have specialized in. That won't save wild type Arabica.

Re:Dark Ages

[khallow]

So if by "radical and fresh ideas" you mean "radical, stale, and stupid right wing cliche"

Well, yes. You do seem to be ahead of me in figuring out what my argument is going to go. Makes me wonder why you bother to have a different opinion.

That won't save wild type Arabica.

You mean like using conservation land trusts to set aside land for wild Arabica? That's a typical market approach. I think it would work.

Lol

[TemperedAlchemist]

2081: Grad student enrollment drops to dangerously low levels.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[darjen]

I used to not drink coffee that much in the morning. Now I have two young kids who are constantly up at at all hours of the night. Since then I have been about three cups after getting to work. Can't get enough of it.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Anonymous Coward]

best part about coffee? If you abstain for a few months you get that kick in the rear when you start drinking it again.

Just like heroin. The first time you try it after abstaining you will get a big surprise in the rear!

Re:MWP

[modmans2ndcoming]

and we have already surpassed the warmth of the MWP....at the beginning of last decade.

Glob^WClimate Cha^H^H^HDisruption

[Anynomous Coward]

Is there anything it cannot cause ?

We could use tea as a replacement

[prefec2]

The IT industry, teachers, researchers and may more depend on their morning dose of coffee. When that is gone, this will be the end of the Western civilization. However, we could adapt to tea. Tea has a wider range of flavors than coffee so it is not necessary to invent all these untasteful coffee mixtures, which only exist to give people who have not to make many decisions every day, a chance to do so, by answering 5 questions to get a coffee. However, we still have subway and can make seven decisions until we get to the food.

However, we most likely do not need any coffee by 2080, because our industry will be crashed for good, as they do not want to adapt to the necessities of reality. Then we will all sit at home without jobs. I do not need coffee to cry in my pillow. It is contra-productive to drink coffee and stay in bed. So, no big deal when there is no coffee anymore.

Re:We could use tea as a replacement

[Anubis IV]

Yeah, if coffee crashes, it'll just be an excuse to learn to love tea. I had to learn to love coffee in the first place since it wasn't exactly God's gift to my tastebuds the very first time I tried it. I still remember going to coffee shops in college and trying one of everything until I eventually had a sense of what the varieties were and what I preferred. Prior to that, my experience with it was mostly of the percolated variety (ugh!), which is roughly analogous to the quality of most of the tea that I've ever had. And even then, I find it pleasing enough. I'm sure that if I gave tea its fair shake I'd eventually hone in on specifically which varieties I preferred and what the different options were out there.

Re:We could use tea as a replacement

[prefec2]

I wrote my master thesis on black tea, because the office coffee machine produced some sort of acid liquid.

Gas in Texas hasn't been 79 cents since 1979.

[Andy Prough]

Although the adjusted for inflation number (since 1979) shows that it's still only $1.00: http://www.randomuseless.info/gasprice/gasprice.html

Re:Gas in Texas hasn't been 79 cents since 1979.

[modmans2ndcoming]

did you miss this comment: "The following plots show how much I paid for each gallon of gas I bought over the past 33 years or so"...

Another problem is that it is only since 1979.

Here is a better article to read....BTW... Gas is expensive historically.

http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/Gasoline_Inflation.asp

Re:Gas in Texas hasn't been 79 cents since 1979.

[Andy Prough]

Yeah, but the chart I linked to from randomuselessinfo also included a third line (faintly drawn) that showed average price from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (US City Average line) - and it matched his own personal costs almost point for point for the 33-year period.

Re:Gas in Texas hasn't been 79 cents since 1979.

[modmans2ndcoming]

and mine covers gasoline statistics since 1918 adjusted for inflation....so it is better.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Anarki2004]

Some if us are still going strong.....drug free(ish) mind you....

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[tompaulco]

Why don't you drink more beer?
Because American beer is crap and imported beer is expensive, and to me, at least, tastes like more expensive crap. I don't want coffee, either. I have had one decent tasting cup of coffee in my life, in Honduras, and when I went back years later and had another cup, it tasted awful. Give me soda.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[budgenator]

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, Coffee is proof he wants us to be productive and have enough money to buy more beer.

Bullshit alert

[Hentes]

Any prediction of more than five years from now should be treated with a grain of salt. This one is not even worthy of consideration.

Not Really: New Areas?

[Roger W Moore]

One of the things that the article does not seem to mention is any study of areas which will become suitable for growing Arabica beans. All they seem to study are the existing locations. As the climate shifts new areas will open up. For example vineyards are becoming more feasible in the south of England due to climate change. So before I'll believe that coffee is endangered I'd want to see a study confirming that there will be no new areas that are becoming more suitable for coffee growing.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[Zagnar]

Hey, this is an alarmist article. You're supposed to be scared, not use rational thought.

What are you, Canadian?

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[ColdWetDog]

What are you, Canadian?

Probably, that's why he's looking forward to the Great Warmup. Coffee plantations in Calgary. Maple flavored coffee.

NHL players on coffee instead of beer. Careful what you ask for.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[phantomfive]

What are you, Canadian?

The most fun people to talk to about global warming are Russians. It's hilarious. First they (in general) impassionately deny that it's happening, that it's a conspiracy, etc. As you rationally show the scientific evidence, they get more and more animated and excited about the topic, to the point where they say, "I don't care if global warming is happening, I want a warmer Russia!!"

Living in the frigid north does things to you.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[cheesybagel]

The Portuguese brought sugar cane production from the southern Iberian Peninsula to Madeira island and later on to Brazil. Why is there no sugar cane production in southern Portugal today? Because sugar cane used to be planted during the Medieval Warm period and as climate got cooler the sugar cane didn't have the proper conditions anymore.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[Eunuchswear]

You think southern Portugal is cool?

Wow.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we can forget about maple anything if you have coffee plantations in Calgary.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[Joce640k]

Why is there no sugar cane production in southern Portugal today?

I thought it was because cane sugar production couldn't compete with sugar-beets.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[cheesybagel]

It is cooler than it used to be back then.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[HiThere]

Well, for one thing it's hard to predict what the new weather patterns will be. It's one thing to say it will be hotter, but will it be wetter or dryer? And even hotter won't work everywhere. Sorry, but climate is complex. Saying "it's going to change!" is relatively simple. Saying precisely HOW it's going to change is much trickier.

E.g.: Will or will not global warming cause a mini-iceage in Europe? Think it's a silly question? Look up the Younger Dryas. (It's such a magnificent example that since I heard about it yesterday [well, heard in a bit of detail] I'm mentioned it more than once.) Sure it will cause a mini-ice age? Look up the Older Dryas.

Now I'll grant that one of these episodes takes awhile to start, but as Greenland has started melting, we could already be well into the start. Or maybe not. (I said it was complex. Greenland isn't melting suddenly, so it's not quite the same as a lake of glacial melt water spilling. But is that important? I sure don't know.)

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[dbIII]

It's not just climate. There's places in Australia that can grow tea and coffee, but the majority of it is pretty awful to even the casual drinker that just wants something warm and wet. A co-worker from Sri Lanka watches in horror as we drink Australian grown tea. Some of the coffee is OK, but that seems to have been a labour of love by a family of growers for decades with changes to roasting methods etc.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[Mindcontrolled]

alarmist (adjective): result of a scientific study conflicting with my ideology.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[Genda]

The fact that regions north or south of existing regions may open up as viable climates doesn't mean that they will become home to new coffee plantations. Differences in soil, and a wide host of conditions, not to mention a likely lose of growing skill could seriously jeopardize crop migration. Face it, a lot of things are going to go extinct this century. Show your kids elephants, and lions, tigers, giraffes, hippos, cheetahs, polar bears, in fact all the big mammals. So they can tell their kids what they used to look like. We're up to about 2,000 species a year going extinct every year but that number will climb sharply after mid century.

America will cease to be the bread basket, which will move to Canada. Scotland will either have lovely wine or if the North Atlantic current shuts off nobody in western Europe will grow wine, it'll be too cold. That's why nobody calls it global warming, the system is far too complex, you can't easily predict the impacts some of which are synergistic and others which will be completely counter intuitive.

Part of the problem is that coffee needs heavy rain along with warmer climate is coming drier climate which will impinge on both arabica and robustus. Arabica is the most sensitive, and will therefore be the most endangered. In any case the price of coffee will soar.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[Genda]

Here you goacceleration of Greenland's melting is unprecedented with some of the fastest melting ever seen in history happen just this last July. Large discharges of fresh water are already impacting the north Atlantic currents and folks are watching the haline cycle closely. As you say average temperature rising doesn't translate into a smooth increase and n fact a more energetic system tend to have wider variation with some places being colder than ever.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[HiThere]

That's not the same, though. The Younger Dryas is believed to have been caused when a large LAKE of already melted glacial water spilled into the North Atlantic. In comparison with that, Greenland is melting relatively slowly. So the effect might be very different. (More mixing along the gradients, e.g., leading to a less sharp boundary, leading to a thermocline that wasn't as strong.) It might be the same, but it might be very different. Then, too, that's long enough ago the the continents were in significantly different places. Perhaps that matters?

So it's an interesting analogy, but it's a long way short of proof. I'd rather trust a climate model...IF they've factored in Greenland melting.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[BeaverCleaver]

Nerada bag tea is grown in Australia, and it's not too bad for tea that comes in bags. Their leaf tea (according to the label) is blended from Australian and imported teas.

I'm trying to cut my food miles, and imported tea and coffee is an easy way to do that. I guess the side effect is that I am contributing less to the climate change that might ruin the coffee.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[Roger W Moore]

What are you, Canadian?

No, but I live there and I am in the process of becoming one. Clearly it seems to be working! ;-)

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[Roger W Moore]

The fact that regions north or south of existing regions may open up as viable climates doesn't mean that they will become home to new coffee plantations. Differences in soil...

All true but my point was simply that if you are going to claim the near extinction of coffee you had better have done your homework first and confirmed that no other areas will become viable for coffee plantations due to climate change. Failing to do something obvious like that means that your claims will look foolish and premature.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[dbIII]

Food miles gets to be a bit of a poor measure in some cases - for instance less energy to produce cheese in NZ and ship it to the UK than their local stuff (something to do with heating costs in dairy farms in the UK), or much less energy to ship kiwifruit (Chinese Gooseberry) from NZ to Beijing than trucking it in from another part of China! It's just a bit too simplistic to use flat distances, and the distances to draw the line vary too much with the type of transport (eg. trains can shift a lot for very low energy so something from 1000km away may as well have been trucked in from 100km).
I was a bit too hard on Nerada and drink it myself at times, but the Sri Lankan guy has higher standards than me so that bit was accurate.

Re:Not Really: New Areas?

[BeaverCleaver]

Yeah, and I don't have the fanciest tastes either... I drink VB and cask wine:-)

You're right about food miles... like any attempt to get a simple metric to quantify a complex system, it's not 100% perfect. Treat food miles as one more tool in a kit of many tools.... The same way that recycling in general is "a good thing" but if the recycled paper you buy is made from material that's collected in Australia, shipped to China for processing, then shipped back to .au, then you'd have a lower footprint just using new paper, made domestically from plantation timber.

Don't worry - when the ice age hits

[Andy Prough]

you'll have plenty of cold places for the polar bears.

Marketing meeting

[englishstudent]

"How can we make people interested in climate change???"

Peak Coffee

[Local ID10T]

We live in the time of Peak Coffee production. It is all downhill from here. The world has a finite supply, and we are pumping it at unprecedented levels. Levels which cannot be sustained indefinitely. In fact, we may have to introduce artificial controls to limit how may pounds per day are sold on the global market. We are not trying to artificially inflate the price to make ourselves richer, we are just looking out for your future... /parody

Re:Peak Coffee

[32771]

I didn't read the article but, I think it is possible that certain plants couldn't produce a good harvest when grown at higher latitudes. No matter what the temperatures are higher north under global warming conditions, you still won't have enough sunlight.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Zagnar]

I could argue that but then, there's probably some scientific study somewhere.

There is another reason to drink coffee in the mornings, however; once the caffeine wears off, I become tremendously relaxed and have an easy time falling asleep. Coffee helps with insomnia in it's delightful little way.

Blindingly obvious solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Change the area they're grown in.

If it's getting hoter everywhere, just transplant the trees to places that were too cold before.

Then grow other things that will survive where coffee was grown.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[pclminion]

I agree that mass produced American beer is crap, but that goes for every country. Where do you live? There are good American beers, you just need to find where they are being sold.

Re:"Global" temperature has not changed in 15 year

[Elbelow]

Ice levels at the north pole are shrinking, but Antarctic ice levels are setting new records highs. There has been zero net change globally.

Glaciologists appear to disagree: http://climatecrocks.com/2012/11/08/new-video-antarctic-versus-arctic-ice-apples-and-oranges/.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[ColdWetDog]

And the rest of us feel very sorry for you all.

** Without Chemicals Life Would Not Be Possible **

Coffee extinct?

[GNious]

WUHU!

That foul-tasting things going extinct will be one of the best things to happen.

Now we just need to teach people to be a bit more civilized and enjoy a nice cup of thee.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[fm6]

Regular coke destroys my brain with all the sugar. Diet coke tastes like a failed chemistry experiment.

wine

[kenorland]

With the climate greatly warming over the past 20000 years, all those nice wine growing regions around the Mediterranean became so hot and dry that grapes just wouldn't grow there anymore! And now? Hardly anybody produces wine anymore! It's a disaster! (Rolls eyes.)

Re:Not Really: EVOLUTION???

[BoRegardless]

Wild weather and climate changes have occurred on regular long term glaciation cycles for over 2.5 million years and somehow species adapted and survived. Coffee plants didn't arise spontaneously after the last ice age, so they must have survived somehow through wild climate changes.

This article is just more alarmist propaganda by what I know from paleogeologist's work.

The purpose of "coffee" is to convey Caffeine.

[couchslug]

Synthetic caffeine solves that problem.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Luckyo]

Worst part about coffee? If you stop drinking it after the first 10 or so, your mornings are sleepy hell before you get your dose.

Re:Not Really: EVOLUTION???

[Belial6]

This article and the fact that it is at best a half truth, like so many others feeds both ends. Those that are convinced of AGW will latch on to it as proof that the end of the world is coming and anyone denying it is a 'Denialist'. While on the other side, those that are convinced that there is no AGW will latch on to it as proof that those 'experts' issuing studies are dishonest and you can't trust them and those claiming AGW are 'Alarmists'.

No biggie

[John Jorsett]

Even if everything in this is true, by 2080, we'll be capable of synthesizing most anything we want. Bonus: no vast tracts of land devoted to the production of a nonessential agricultural product.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[demonlapin]

Only if you drink a nice hot cup of something else. I'm not much of a coffee drinker but it's hard to beat getting warmed up from the inside on a chilly winter morning.

Re:Not Really: EVOLUTION???

[riverat1]

There's a difference between surviving through a glacial cycle and producing the volume of beans that human consumption demands.

Re:"Global" temperature has not changed in 15 year

[riverat1]

If you bothered to dig a little deeper you'd find that the increase in Antarctic sea ice is partially a result of global warming and partly a result of the Antarctic ozone hole. Meanwhile Antarctic land ice volume is still dropping.

Re:"Global" temperature has not changed in 15 year

[terpri]

Not true; the NOAA says global average temperature is rising: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/indicators/

Re:"Global" temperature has not changed in 15 year

[rastos1]

There are some warming trends in the northern hemisphere, but there are cooling trends in the southern hemisphere.

So you are fine with having no steak as long as I have two to balance out the average?

Taste of Coffee

[geekmux]

"...The taste of coffee, a beverage of choice among Slashdot readers, will change in future decades.

Oh, so climate change will be to blame for the change in coffee taste? Gee, and here I thought it was the double-mocha-pumpkin-spiced-triple-vanilla-chai shit that everyone pays Starbucks $5 for that might have something to do with it.

The few who know and respect the actual flavor of coffee will likely go unaffected by this, other than perhaps higher prices paid, which is the standard cost for rarity (look what bean aficionados pay today for rare varieties). The rest of the "coffee" drinking world will somehow learn to adapt...when the next seasonal flavor comes out.

Re:Taste of Coffee

[avandesande]

French roasting pretty much assures that any thing resembling taste has been destroyed in the coffee

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Joce640k]

best part about coffee? If you abstain for a few months you get that kick in the rear when you start drinking it again.

Does the "kick in the rear" compensate for all the mornings you felt lousy due to caffeine withdrawal? And the intense, caffeine-withdrawal headaches? Does it make up for them? Seems to me like a continual up-down cycle is the worst of both worlds.

omg, the price of coffee is going to be rising!!!

[Nyder]

Don't let Starbucks find out about this, or your $5 espressos will become $10.

 

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Joce640k]

After the first week your "high" is just what the rest of us call 'normal'.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Joce640k]

I agree that mass produced American beer is crap, but that goes for every country.

Guinness isn't mass produced...? It's a darn sight tastier than Bud or Miller.

(nb. I'm not saying Guinness is the best beer ever, I'm saying it's not bad for a mass produced one...)

Re:MWP

[ghostdoc]

nope we haven't actually. Get some facts

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Coffee would be grown in new areas, just like wine grapes are no longer grown in Sweden.

Costco Coffee

[EmagGeek]

I went to Costco today, and they were cleaned out of coffee. Now I know why. The preppers must be prepping for The End of the Coffee as we know it.

Re:Big Deal

[32771]

>Try Ilex vomitoria instead, American coffee was never that great anyway.

Right, let me lend my comment more Kharma.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[HornWumpus]

Can't find a link. But IIRC current estimates of 'Jamaica Blue Mountain' sales indicate that the region is unreasonably productive. You're almost certainly being robbed. How much per pound? And you expect no-one to import CostaRican and re-label? You could make money importing Kona (if you can find the genuine article) and relabeling that. The Japanese are serious about getting the real thing. Buyers in Jamaica. Pretentious label chasers.

No late night coding session is complete without a talk to the bong (or two).

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[SomePgmr]

I can't figure out why anyone would ever stop.

And with regard to the summary title... this climate change shit just got real.

Re:No such thing as 'climate change'

[32771]

It is too late anyway, feel free to remain ignorant. Personally I'm getting some popcorn watching the world hit the wall of the Petri dish - Bing!

There is something good about being able to appreciate what is happening though, it is almost like performing crash tests and betting successfully on whether your model was better than the next guys. The downside is that you are in the car.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[thegarbz]

For me it's the taste. I love the taste of coffee.

Caffeine is the reason I don't ever drink more than 3 cups a day.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[fleeped]

Bullshit. I drink enough coffee (4-5 mugs per day), but my 'morning cup' is 3h after I wake up. And I can function just fine. I'm sure I'm not that special.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[HornWumpus]

You keep repeating that, but it's not true. Coffee's/caffeine's half life is short. The crash is not tomorrow, it's in 4 hours. Post a cite or shutup. Are you a Mormon?

Oh the irony...

[Dahamma]

...that the #1 world commodity may lead to the extinction of the #2.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[UltraZelda64]

Try a real beer, not that "lite" artificially carbonated piss water or the so-called "normal" beer offerings from the mega swill breweries (Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors Brewing Company, SABMiller, etc.). The poor quality of the crap they sell is reflected by their all-encompassing target audience and massive marketing budgets.

http://patto1ro.home.xs4all.nl/beertemp.htm
[The most relevant parts begin with the section titled "The real trouble starts", though the whole article is interesting...]

Re:MWP

[modmans2ndcoming]

Fuck you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

Coffee is not the "world's favorite beverage

[cinereaste]

Hugh Pickens wrote incorrect information in his lede sentence there. Tea is the second most widely consumed beverage in the world after plain water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Stewie241]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Addiction_and_tolerance
"With repetitive use, physical dependence or addiction are likely to occur. Also, the stimulatory effects of caffeine are substantially reduced over time, a phenomenon known as a tolerance."

Also: http://www.caffeinedependence.org/caffeine_dependence.html
"Tolerance refers to a decrease in responsiveness to a drug after repeated drug exposure. High doses of caffeine (750 to 1200 mg/day spread throughout the day) administered daily, have been shown to produce "complete" tolerance (i.e., caffeine effects are no longer different from baseline or placebo) to some, but not all of the effects of caffeine. However, lower or typical dietary doses of caffeine produce incomplete tolerance. For example, sleep may continue to be disrupted in regular caffeine users."

Re:"Global" temperature has not changed in 15 year

[mixed_signal]

References or sources?? Looking at the NOAA reports, there is certainly continuing increase past the year 2000. For example: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201201-201209.gif and http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/lo-hem/201201-201209.gif from: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/9.

fneh

[Tastecicles]

I'll be 105 in 2080, so I don't give a fuck. I'll keep drinking coffee until I drown.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[MaskedSlacker]

So will beer. What's your point?

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[dbIII]

And that little nitrogen foam widget in the Guinness cans is definitely news for nerds :)
It normally takes me about as long to drink one Guinness or Kilkenny as it takes to drink three lagers so not as expensive a night out as it looks from the price per beer.

Incorrect

[dbIII]

It requires huge amounts of water to grow in bulk so it likes large flood plains in wet areas. In short, once easier places to grow sugar were found the stuff was planted there in high density plantations instead of the low density ones requiring a lot more manual work that they would have had in Portugal. It's got nothing to do with climate and everything to do with exploration and global trade. Sugar cane will grow there, but you can farm it far more easily in Jamaica.

Not about coffee production - wild Arabica plants

[illtud]

I'm late to the story, I know, but the point of this isn't about coffee production - despite the FA. The radio programme that I heard had proper information, and it's about the effect of climate change on wild arabica coffee plants (already endangered). The programme explains why This Is Bad.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nq7dd

Good riddance to those monsters

[rve]

OTOH species that live in really cold climates (like polar bears) will go extinct because there won't be any really cold places left.
(And polar bears are not as useful to man as coffee)

And nothing of value was lost that day. I hate polar bears, those ugly, blood thirsty monsters. After what they've done, I don't expect anyone will miss them. Good riddance.

After the incident, I can't believe there are still some polar bear sympathizers around. Sickening.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[Mindcontrolled]

For sure, Guinness is a damn lot better than Bud, no question about that. And indeed not bad for a mass produced one. But if you ever had a high-end stout from some craft brewery, well, you'll see the difference. If you get your hands on some BrewDog stuff... try it.

Re:Not Really: EVOLUTION???

[Mindcontrolled]

It's not about producing the volume for human consumption anyway - it is about the wild coffee plants. I do like my wild Ethiopean coffees, though...

Re:Not Really: EVOLUTION???

[Genda]

Yes, but even wild natural swings still take centuries. More than enough time plants and animals to migrate naturally. Human induced change is happening 10 to 20 times faster, leaving insufficient time for natural solutions to the problem.

Re:Not Really: EVOLUTION???

[Genda]

I'm sorry, would you be so good as to point out the half truths. Changing climate has ALREADY impacted the growing conditions of Coffee Beans, this is not some distant someday effect. Just as it is not a someday effect that plants in the United Stated bloom weeks earlier for spring than they used to in 1960. Its a well known phenomenon, every gardener older than 10 is familiar with it. The problem is with the wild beans. They have the majority of the genetic diversity and are essential to breed new strains of coffee resistant to pests and will be needed for migration. We will lose the wild coffee before the end of the century, and with that the cultivated bean soon after. Whats left will be hothouse coffee and it will be a beverage for the wealthy.

As for the problem with the alarmists and the denialists, both people defending ideological turf instead of just getting ahead of the facts to get an idea of what is actually happening. The world is changing and we have a growing arsenal of responses to assure a happy and healthy future, we just need to act now.

Regarding Bain

[rsilvergun]

That's just not true. One of their core businesses is to buy a successful business, borrow tons of money on it's good name, and pay themselves bonuses from the debt. Then move it to a cheap labor country.

As for progressive, my point wasn't that one side or the other is stopping progress, it was that 'progressive' has taken on negative connotations. Progressive == liberal == socialist == communist == bad. Whether you believe in a small government or an active government progress, meaning things getting better in general, should be something we all can agree on. Put another way, even the Amish use modern health care.

Re:Why coffee? Why not beer?

[HornWumpus]

Neither say what the GP was claiming.