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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.
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:
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.
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You do realize that photos like this prove nothing. You just have to choose your moment when to snap your pic. What you need to do is look at field measurements and sequences of satellite images taken regularly, all year round.
When people did that they came up with this: between 1984 and 2011, persistent snow cover extent on Kilimanjaro went down by 73%, which corresponds to a rise in the snow line of 290m.
Nobody can predict precisely when the first picture of a completely snow-free Kilimanjaro will be taken, but it will be soon. But even after that you'll be able to get pictures of a snow-covered mountain. If you google it you can find pictures of snow in Tampa Florida in 1977. It's not proof that Tampa has glaciers.
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