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Ethiopia's Coffee Is the Latest Victim of Climate Change (theverge.com)
According to a study published today in Nature Plants, by the end of this century, increasing temperatures could make it impossible to grow coffee in about half of Ethiopia's coffee-growing regions. "That's because Arabica coffee trees (which are grown in Ethiopia) require pretty mild temperatures to survive, ideally between 59 to 75 degree Fahrenheit," reports The Verge. "Climate projections show that Ethiopia will generally become warmer and drier, and that means that 40 to 60 percent of areas where coffee is currently grown won't be suitable to grow the beans, the study says." From the report: In fact, climate change is already hurting Ethiopia's coffee growers: days and nights are already warmer, and the weather is more unpredictable and extreme. Hot days are hotter and rainy days are rainier. That leads to more unpredictable harvests and it hurts the local economy. Ethiopia is Africa's biggest coffee producer and the world's fifth largest coffee exporter, with 15 million Ethiopians living off coffee farming. Climate change risks disrupting the country's future. But there is a way Ethiopia can brace for its brewing troubles. The study found that rising temperatures will turn swaths of land at higher elevation into just the right places to grow coffee in the future. In fact, coffee farming could increase four fold if plantations are moved uphill, the study says. But to do that, the country needs to prepare: millions of farmers can't just take their crops and move to land they don't own. You need careful planning.
hurts the local economy.
Coffee production in Vietnam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Vietnam invested in a lot of different farming crops, so did a lot of other nations. A global flood of cheap and quality coffee now exists from many different nations.
Other nations have learned how to do all the different coffee crops and are selling on the open market.
Lots of nations saw coffee prices and helped their farmers into a cash crop. Some made quality, some went for a lot of low cost production.
Consumers want a low cost product too, so costs are been pushed down. A low price still keeps farmers in work so different nations flood the coffee market with well planned plantations.
Other nations did the planning, used their best experts over the years and can now produce at a lower cost.
Its not the weather, its just classic competition and having much better experts.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Imagine what kind of havoc had to have happened for 9/10 of your friends and family to not have descendants. That's serious war and hell, and we see our own human history showing that we're not good at these long term planning challenges. The funny thing is that there were politicians in the Yucatan, in the beginning, that tried to get people to change farming practices to cope with the changing climate, but they were always immediately voted out of office because it would have affected profits.
So laugh and dismiss all you want, but vote for leaders that take this seriously and plan properly.
The study itself says "In fact, coffee farming could increase four fold if plantations are moved uphill, "
FOUR FOLD.
Yet, the headline is about how some coffee fields will be too hot.
Perhaps a more fair headline would be "Climate change displacing Ethiopian Coffee farmers, but will increase their productivity fourfold."?
-Styopa
It's not extrapolation if there is a mechanistic explanation.
In 1900 there was a mechanistic explanation why NYC would have horse manure six feet deep on all the streets.
"Scientists project climate change could increase coffee production in Ethiopia fourfold."
But that probably wouldn't get as many clicks.
I take it you've never been to New York.
This alarmism is based on an extrapolation of current conditions. Extrapolations 80 years into the future have a long history of looking laughably silly in hindsight.
The snow on Kilimanjaro was predicted to disappear by 2015 or thereabouts.
Of course, it actually didn't.
Science is all about forming hypotheses, then making falsifiable predictions.
What testable predictions do we have for Ethiopian coffee? What year will coffee be untenable as a crop?
Wait a couple of years and see if these predictions are correct - sounds like a valid test of climate change.
What's the problem with doing that?
(If you don't like waiting years, then let's look at previous testable predictions and see how well they held up. Anyone have a list of testable predictions?)
Perfect. Then, let's mark the projected date of this coffee calamity on a calendar and see how it plays out.
sig: sauer
we'll be doing something differently by then
Unless we'll be actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it will still be there in 80 years.
You make an excellent point:
un-desertify the Sahara and planted trees throughout the whole thing
There would be people screeching about the damage to the Sahara desert's indigenous flora and fauna.
You're absolutely correct. However here's the problem with trying to get many people to understand this: the vast majority of people have no ability to even understand simple scientific abstracts, or even the news summaries written about them, let alone actually test anything. For many laymen it's a choice between believing what the folks in the white robes using cryptic symbols and vast machines are saying or not. So they make the exact same point you did, which is that this reminds them of the clergy, and as the clergy's clearly spouting bullshit these guys must be too, right?
I was recently trying to explain to someone on facebook why we have clear evidence for the climate warming up. The guy, who obviously didn't have much beyond an elementary school education, kept coming back to "Do you just believe it, or did you check it yourself?" Essentially, his point was that as I haven't gone through the vast majority of the scientific papers involving climate change myself and verified the results of thousands upon thousands of researchers whose skills exceed my own by several orders of magnitude, I have not in fact checked anything and am simply 'taking the scientists on faith.'
Even if I really wanted to, I couldn't do all the math again and check all the models and data used myself, I just don't have the skills (let alone the time and equipment) to do that. So there is a level of faith involved, but there's a clear difference between the kind oi religious faith he was talking about and you mentioned, and the kind of 'faith' most of us have in qualified experts and peer-reviewed research. Most of us who're not medical professionals won't understand the lab results ourselves, we tend to believe the doctor, or if we want to be extra sure we ask for additional information from another expert.
Science itself is a method, but there is such a thing as scientific consensus, which unlike religious consensus is subject to change. I'm not a cancer researcher for example nor can I claim to have the skills to understand and critique the papers written on the connections between say smoking and cancer, but I have enough 'faith' in the institution of modern medicine to believe, with a very very high certainty, that the expert opinion is correct and smoking causes cancer. Would I go as far as to say I know this to be true? Yes, yes I would because I trust the source, in this case the consensus of the relevant fields that's been refined over the decades.
Knowledge requires belief because knowledge is a subset of belief. Knowledge is the type of belief which is justified by evidence. Science is the tool used by experts to gather said evidence and the best tool we have devised to separate false beliefs from justified, true beliefs. Those of us who have a scientific view of the world (which I think here on /. constitutes most if not all of us) still believe things without understanding all the evidence personally, but that's because we believe the scientists. Not individual scientists mind you, but the community.
When phrases like "X doesn't believe in science" are used, they refer to people like the guy I was talking to who cannot understand any evidence to begin with because they do not even want to. It doesn't matter how many articles and different expert opinions you hand him, since it doesn't make any sense for him and in his head he thinks it's all just a cult that needs to be taken on 'faith' he will ignore them and keep occupying his own reality.
'
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Actually, you've got the wrong end of the stick here when you're talking about "extrapolation". If you look at the instrumental record from the 1940s to the mid 70s, the world actually cooled.
This was because of industrial sulfate aerosol emissions, which increases the Earth's albedo. This effect was understood in the 1950s, which was why scientists expected the Earth to continue cooling. Arrhenius's CO2 driven warming theories had been discredited for over half a century because of two mistaken beliefs: (1) that CO2's IR absorption band was the same as water vapor's, so that it coud not materially affect temperature and (2) atmospheric CO2 was in equilibrium with ocean CO2. Both these beliefs were proven false in the late 50s, so from 1967 until 1980 or so the question was whether CO2 driven warming or sulfate driven cooling would predominate.
Until the mid 70s sulfates prevailed, however two additional developments caused a shift in the scientific consensus. First, much more data was collected about the Earth's atmosphere. Second, the availability of computers allowed us to actually calculate the relative effects of CO2 and sulfates, and they predicted an imminent reversal in the temperature trends of the past three decades.
This is as good as scientific confirmation of a theory gets: a counter-intuitive prediction that proves to be true. This is why by the 90s the overwhelming majority of climate scientists had confidence in at least the broad picture the models were predicting.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
After three attempt to get various palms and fruit trees to grow on my property I've given up and gone back to cold tolerant varieties.
I too am growing pineapples, but only because they grow fast and can be done so in a pot, which I cart into a heated garage during the winter.
More processing power, models refined over the decades for more accurate forecasting.
...And they *STILL* can't get the computer climate models to even somewhat-accurately track *PAST* climate changes!
WTF makes anyone think that their predictions about *future* climate changes are any more reliable?
Strat
For anyone wanting something more than the parent's word on this, the IPCC backs him up on it in their 5th assessment report you can read about here:
For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
One of the referenced papers comments on the reason tuning is desirable:
The choices we make naturally depend on our preconceptions, preferences and objectives. We choose to tune our model because the alternatives - to either drift away from the known climate state, or to introduce flux-corrections - are less attractive. Within the foreseeable future climate model tuning will continue to be necessary as the prospects of constraining the relevant unresolved processes with sufficient precision are not good.
So, our inherent understanding of some processes is still not accurate enough for the job and tuning is a necessary evil. Regrettably, the corrections we tune for are bad enough that they are "essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state".
The challenges still faced from tuning are outlined in another of the referenced papers:
CM3w predicts the most realistic 20th century warming. However, this is achieved with a small and less desirable threshold radius of 6.0 m for the onset of precipitation. Conversely, CM3c uses a more desirable value of 10.6 m but produces a very unrealistic 20th century temperature evolution.
So the tuning process means using less realistic values for parameters just to make sure the TOA energy balances.
That same paper ends with the following note:
Furthermore, in order to predict a realistic evolution of the 20th century, models must balance radiative forcing and climate sensitivity, resulting in a well-documented inverse correlation between forcing and sensitivity [Schwartz etal. 2007; Kiehl, 2007; Andrews etal. 2012]. This inverse correlation is consistent with an intercomparison-driven model selection process in which “climate models’ ability to simulate the 20th century temperature increase with fidelity has become something of a show-stopper as a model unable to reproduce the 20th century would probably not see publication
So, as even the IPCC and many jumping on after me here will be liable to observe, the published climate models out there all more or less are able to recreate the historical temperature record. Of course, as noted this isn't necessarily a comment on inherent merit to the models as the authors note their own model tuning meant the choice between picking a parameter value that better fit the known data, or the parameter that would yield a better hindcast and unless you choose the hindcast you don't get published. If the only models that can get published are tuned for hindcasts, it's less surprising that a sampling of published models manages to do that. The question of HOW they manage to hindcast is key, and the inability to properly control TOA energy without hand balling things is huge.
"The presence of 120,000 horses in New York City, wrote one 1908 authority for example, is “an economic burden, an affront to cleanliness, and a terrible tax upon human life.”
http://www.banhdc.org/archives...
Population growth is leveling off. Release of fossil carbon isn't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes