Climate Change and Coffee
If this doesn’t get Americans interested in climate change, nothing will:
A cup of morning coffee could be much harder to find, and much more expensive, before the century is out thanks to climate change and the possible extinction of wild Arabica beans.
That’s the warning behind a new study by U.K. and Ethiopian researchers who say the beans that go into 70 per cent of the world’s coffee could be wiped out by 2080.
Researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew and the Environment and Coffee Forest Forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia looked at how climate change might make some land unsuitable for Arabica plants, which are highly vulnerable to temperature change and other dangers including pests and disease.
They came up with a best-case scenario that predicts a 38 per cent reduction in land capable of yielding Arabica by 2080. The worst-case scenario puts the loss at between 90 per cent and 100 per cent.
There is a “high risk of extinction” says the study, which was published this week in the academic journal Plos One.
I personally think coffee is disgusting. But an old organizing mantra is that you have to meet people where they are at. And a lot of you really like coffee. Coffee is a very sensitive plant. I’ve seen hillsides in Central America where coffee will grow on part of it but not the other part. It needs a very particular climate. That could get much, much harder to find.
DrTimmy:
November 15th, 2012 at 12:10 am
Clearly, the only solution is to turn over the entire Treasury to NASA so that they can find a new planet for our sensitive little plant.
I do not want to live in a world without coffee.
Murc:
November 15th, 2012 at 12:20 am
So basically, we’ll turn into Earth-2 from Fringe, but with less Anna Torv.
Nathan of Perth:
November 15th, 2012 at 12:22 am
“I personally think coffee is disgusting.”
I always knew there was something not quite right about you.
mattc:
November 15th, 2012 at 12:32 am
Time to open a Happicuppa franchise!
DrTimmy:
November 15th, 2012 at 12:49 am
Agreed. Erik will not be invited to colonize our happy new planet.
Jamie:
November 15th, 2012 at 12:52 am
Charlie Stross wrote a short story bout how this ends. very funny. I think it was printed it _Toast_, maybe elsewhere.
I say this as a huge coffee fan. Without a cup or two, I couldn’t find my way to the whiskey. And then where would my department be?
daveNYC:
November 15th, 2012 at 12:56 am
Happy and jittery.
Holden Pattern:
November 15th, 2012 at 12:59 am
So, nothing good happens ever again.
Richard:
November 15th, 2012 at 1:13 am
I can understand not liking coffee but ” disgusting”? Hard to understand that
Aaron B.:
November 15th, 2012 at 1:37 am
For once, I totally agree with Erik.
Aaron B.:
November 15th, 2012 at 1:39 am
I have an extremely low tolerance for bitter flavors. Many people seem to find moderate bitterness enjoyable; I find it abhorrent, and therefore can’t stand coffee.
scott g:
November 15th, 2012 at 1:42 am
well, there’s always hemlock.
mch:
November 15th, 2012 at 2:13 am
How well said! Except, how about a cup or 10?
bph:
November 15th, 2012 at 2:47 am
Erik likes American IPA’s. All I can conclude is that coffee is not bitter enough for him.
Manta:
November 15th, 2012 at 4:42 am
If (when?) the climate changes, wouldn’t appear other places where coffee can grow?
I mean: some land where coffes nows grows will become unsuitiable: but won’t other land where now it does not grow become suitable? Did they address this point?
Tom:
November 15th, 2012 at 5:37 am
This logic is the kind of stupid thing people who don’t care about climate change say all the time.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we just had summer all year long?” says the idiot from Philadelphia.
No. No it would not.
Manta:
November 15th, 2012 at 5:46 am
And yet you did not answer the simple question: did they estimate how much new land would become suitable for coffee?
If you don’t know, please don’t answer with platitudes (I don’t know either, that’s why I am asking).
djw:
November 15th, 2012 at 6:27 am
It’s a good question. I sincerely doubt the study didn’t at least consider the possibility. If I had to guess I’d say it’s because current conditions necessary to grow coffee include both a particular climate and a set of soil conditions. Perhaps those soil conditions aren’t present in the North, and re-creating them isn’t plausible.
blowback:
November 15th, 2012 at 6:29 am
You won’t, the study only concerned native wild Arabica in Ethiopia which in terms of coffee drunk is a very minor concern. However, when it comes to genetic diversity it’s a fucking disaster. What is required is for someone wealthy to decide to fund a genetic survey of Ethiopian wild Arabica coffee which preserves that genetic diversity. And don’t say Starbucks because they would patent it all and at some point their bean counters would decide that the information was worthless and destroy it all.
Marek:
November 15th, 2012 at 6:32 am
What the hell do you drink before beer o’clock, Erik?
Dave:
November 15th, 2012 at 6:40 am
a) almost none, because b) other things need to be grown there to KEEP PEOPLE ALIVE, and c) since we already use all the best soils [which have taken thousands of years of geological processes to develop], have effectively consumed the historical stock of natural phosphate fertilizers, and are about to run out of oil-based ones, ANY shift in growing zones will be disastrous, not least because d) it pushes ‘temperate’ climate towards the poles [if you're lucky] where there are hard physical limits on available daylight well beyond the tolerances of most staple food-crops.
Your question is thus mind-numbingly short-sighted. OK?
Manta:
November 15th, 2012 at 6:41 am
The coffee plant was introduced quite late outside East Africa: First cultivation in Europe (also first cultivation outside of east Africa/Arabia): 1616
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_bean
Manta:
November 15th, 2012 at 6:56 am
Point b) applies equally well now: based on your logic, there would be no coffee NOW because we need the soil to grow food.
Point d) has nothing to do with coffee cultivation, and c) has nothing to do with climate change.
Point a) is an attempt at answer, but it’s wholly unsupported (which does not mean it may not be true).
Again: if you don’t know what you are talking about, please refrain from answering.
Tom:
November 15th, 2012 at 7:10 am
It may, theoretically on some rich guy’s villa in California, be possible in the future to grow coffee. But as Dave points out, there’s a whole host of environmental and ecological reasons this is going to be difficult if not impossible on a large scale. (And yes, not all of them are strictly related to climate change, as we are facing many environmental problems not directly related to climate change. They all exist together.)
The reason your question sounded short-sighted is that agricultural production is enormously complicated and SO MANY things are going to be fucked up by climate change that there is essentially no reason to believe that we can just start growing certain types of crops in a more northern locale and assume it’ll work out. This is what I mean when I make fun of people who think global warming consists of little more than things getting generally warmer for them. No, it means ecological catastrophe. Coupled, of course, with political catastrophe. (Even if we could start to grow coffee in the U.S., what does this do to the agricultural economies of Central and South America?)
Rarely Posts:
November 15th, 2012 at 7:16 am
I don’t know the answers with respect to coffee specifically. However, from my initial review of the literature, it’s unlikely that we’ll simply see shifts in climate where the lost agriculturally productive areas will be offset by newer, more agriculturally productive areas. See Climate Change 2007, the Physical Science Basis, produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Although a handful of regions will become more agriculturally productive, it seems likely that more regions will be rendered less agriculturally productive. A lot of that is actually due to changes in precipitation levels than just temperature specifically (we’re going to see more arid lands and currently arid lands will get worse). It also looked, based on my initial review, like the climate areas where coffee thrives (such as Central America) may be the least likely to re-develop elsewhere. It looked like grains were going to be easier to find replacement land for, though I honestly am mostly speculating at that level, because it was just an initial review of the material.
Also, we likely will have to devote more agricultural land to necessary foodstuffs because ocean acidification and overfishing are going to reduce the productivity of the oceans. So, it is actually true that we will probably need to devote more soil to growing food than we do now. And, of course, growing world population is part of the challenge there.
newsouthzach:
November 15th, 2012 at 7:47 am
Well, maybe the coffee-drinking intellectuals in San Francisco will care — but the red-blooded, Budweiser-swilling Real Americans couldn’t care less, am I right?
Manta:
November 15th, 2012 at 7:49 am
Thank you, Rarely.
Incontinentia Buttocks:
November 15th, 2012 at 8:19 am
Remember, Erik, “coffee-drinking” was one of the epithets of elitism that the unskewed crowd threw at Nate Silver’s fanbase in the run-up to Romney’s
victory(well, defeat) in recent weeks. Maybe real Americans once drank coffee, but your failure to see that coffee is now as Americn as endive, windsurfing, anything other than cheese whiz on a Philly cheese steak, and opposing secession makes you seem very French…if you know what I mean!Observer:
November 15th, 2012 at 8:24 am
You beat me to it.
sparks:
November 15th, 2012 at 8:28 am
They want an L.A. summer all year. They’ll get a NYC summer all year.
scott:
November 15th, 2012 at 8:30 am
No shit. That single statement warrants discounting everything he says, including “the sky is blue,” by at least 50%. When the conservative nutjobs were skewering Silver, wasn’t one of their all-purpose diatribes that he was part of that elite, snooty, liberal coffee-drinking crowd? Is Erik going fascist on us? Inquiring minds want to know!
Malaclypse:
November 15th, 2012 at 8:31 am
Starbucks… their bean counters
I see what you did there.
Barry Freed:
November 15th, 2012 at 8:51 am
It’s one of the tell tale signs of being a Communist.
tt:
November 15th, 2012 at 8:54 am
Here is the paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0047981#s1
The methods used in this study actually naturally allow an answer to your question, but the authors, for reasons they justify in the discussion, choose as explicit assumption that there will be no range expansion even where their model says the new climate would be suitable for cultivation. You can decide for yourself whether you agree or disagree with their reasoning.
Jameson Quinn:
November 15th, 2012 at 9:15 am
Loomis, please revise the post to reflect this. I knew something was wrong; there is no fucking way any commercial variety of coffee is going to go extinct, but it wouldn’t surprise me if wild coffee did.
cpinva:
November 15th, 2012 at 9:18 am
it’s always 5pm somewhere in the world.
that said, coffee, nectar of the gods. gets me conscious in the morning, and a fresh brewed cup goes really nicely with capt. morgan’s spiced rum. made going trick or treating so much easier, when my children were young.
Jameson Quinn:
November 15th, 2012 at 9:21 am
See above. The article is about native coffee growing wild.
I live in Guatemala and drink coffee that my brother-in-law picked. Looking at this country alone, I’d estimate that with a 2-3 degree temperature rise, the amount of land suitable for commercial coffee would shrink, but not disappear. But again, this post is misleading; the study says nothing about commercial coffee.
Manta:
November 15th, 2012 at 9:23 am
Thank you very much: it also addresses a point I did not understand.
As stated, the article deals with the distribution of WILD coffee plants:
” As part of a future-proofing resource, and especially for providing genetic potential for mitigating climate change, indigenous populations are perceived as a key resource for the medium- to long-term sustainability of Arabica production”
And I find their reasons quite convincing:
“The likelihood of migration and establishment by Arabica is assumed to be extremely limited based on insubstantial dispersal and colonization ability, especially in stressed environments.”, etc.
blowback:
November 15th, 2012 at 9:33 am
Sorry, I know it should have been beneath me but……………
Western Dave:
November 15th, 2012 at 9:35 am
It is perfectly acceptable to put provolone on a cheese steak. Swiss, however, is disgusting.
cpinva:
November 15th, 2012 at 9:35 am
that, i think, is the kind of answer manta was looking for, not to suggest that climate change was necessarily a good thing, clearly it isn’t.
you made a comment though:
it would seem to me (and i’m just guessing here) that the various adverse affects of climate change, especially on food production, would militate a decrease in world population, not an increase. specifically, in those areas where food production capacity is reduced, and the ability to augment food stocks with imports is also reduced. there is some scientific evidence, based on archeological data, that women in highly stressed, malnourished states tend to be less fecund than their less stressed, well nourished counterparts.
and no, this is not a “the body has a magical mechanism for shutting that down” kind of stupid assertion. this is based on science. females, of any species, require a minimum level of nourishment, to maintain fertility, during their child bearing years, starvation tends to not be good for that sort of thing.
not that this is good way to reduce the world’s population, just wondering if this will be one of the results of decreased food production, as a consequence of climate change?
Manta:
November 15th, 2012 at 9:37 am
Fully agree, Quinn.
Brandon C.:
November 15th, 2012 at 9:56 am
If there is no coffee left that’ll do for me.
Sev:
November 15th, 2012 at 10:02 am
Coffee Consuming Cultural Partisan. I always wondered what those letters stood for.
Sev:
November 15th, 2012 at 10:06 am
Arabica is mountain grown. Mountains are cone shaped. Think about the area available as you move up the cone. Many endangered species are in the same predicament.
Uncle Kvetch:
November 15th, 2012 at 10:16 am
a NYC summer all year
My vision of hell on earth.
Aaron B.:
November 15th, 2012 at 10:16 am
Okay, fair. I also can’t stand most beers.
Anonymous:
November 15th, 2012 at 10:26 am
I don’t think this observation renders the post obviously wrong in any meaningful way, although it is an important caveat. The growing conditions necessary for different varietels of arabica beans are more similar than different, and arabica accounts for ~85% of coffee in the world.
rm:
November 15th, 2012 at 11:33 am
So what I’ve learned from LGM today is that we can try to address climate change and save our supply of coffee, maple syrup, and, like, food, or else we can embrace neoliberal union-busting “free”-market ideology and save our supply of Twinkies.
Someday there will be an armed compound in the Yukon where the world’s last billionaire protects the world’s last hoard of Twinkies.
Barry:
November 15th, 2012 at 11:37 am
But lots of Soylent Green!
Manta:
November 15th, 2012 at 11:51 am
Anonymous, substitute “coffee” with “mais”, and you will see where the problem with Erik’s description lies.
Mind you, the scientific paper does emphasize that wild coffee varieties are important for the viability of cultivated coffee (maybe in ways that wild mais is not for cultivated one?).
shah8:
November 15th, 2012 at 11:54 am
I have piles of puerh tea,lifetimes of it! And puerh tea gets better as it ages through the decades! (certain restrictions may apply) *My* source of caffeine is in no danger of being interrupted.
Aaron B. might like the old tea, much of it is nonbitter in its psychoactive glory, but young tea can be very bitter, which is why it’s aged.
Richard:
November 15th, 2012 at 12:05 pm
I understand hating coffee because of your taste preferences. I dont understand how Erik (and maybe you) can find it disgusting.
MikeJake:
November 15th, 2012 at 1:13 pm
It may come as a shock to the non-coffee-drinking LGM types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis., but without my morning coffee I’d be taking huge dumps at irregular times during the day.
ajay:
November 15th, 2012 at 1:18 pm
On the contrary. Modern capitalism was born in coffee. Lloyd’s of London! The Bank of England! The London Stock Exchange! All coffeehouses. Coffee’s a cheap drink grown by poorly-paid labour, exported vast distances, and sold at a tremendous markup by huge multinational corporations, to people who drink it so they can work harder. It’s capitalism in liquid form.
Now tea, that’s what your commie drinks. Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Nepalese… tea drinkers all the way.
FLRealist:
November 15th, 2012 at 6:36 pm
The standing joke at our house is that if I am cranky, my hubby and boys tell each other to check to see if Mom’s caffiene level is too low. Losing coffee would not be a good thing for the sake of my relationships.
Bill Murray:
November 15th, 2012 at 7:10 pm
and Yankee games
Linnaeus:
November 15th, 2012 at 8:17 pm
And British imperialists.
Linnaeus:
November 15th, 2012 at 8:20 pm
I generally prefer provolone to Whiz on a cheesesteak. Agree on the Swiss.
Barry Freed:
November 15th, 2012 at 11:06 pm
We’re not disagreeing. My meaning was that coffee abstention is a sure sign that you’re dealing a some full-fledged genuine dyed-in-the-wool, Uncle Joe lovin’ Chairman Mao spouting, hard-core Communist cadre
ajay:
November 16th, 2012 at 7:03 am
Ah, sorry, I was disagreeing with Sev, who thought that coffee was Communist.
Linnaeus: not at all; your actual imperialist – the chap who’s out there grinding the faces of the dusky native beneath the heel of his jungle boot – drinks gin and tonic, thus protecting himself from malaria (tonic) while remaining indolent and aggressive (gin). The people back at home are the ones drinking the tea – and, not coincidentally, sitting up late in the British Museum Reading Room writing manifestos.