Recent claims by climate alarmists that global warming was threatening the world coffee supply and the jobs of “125 million people” have turned out to be completely unfounded, according to a new study released Monday by a group of researchers from the University of Exeter.
While National Geographic warned that “Fungus, Climate Change Threatening Big Part of Global Coffee Supply,” and the Guardian proclaimed “How Climate Change Will Wipe Out Coffee Crops – and Farmers,” the whole thing turns out to be just one more baseless climate scare.
Media reports, including newspapers such as the New York Times, have linked coffee leaf rust—also known as CLR or roya—with climate change, but the scientists found “no evidence” for this, leading them to “reject the climate change hypothesis.”
The researchers published their findings in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, in which they conclude:
“We find no evidence for an overall trend in disease risk in coffee-growing regions of Colombia from 1990 to 2015, therefore, while weather conditions were more conducive to disease outbreaks from 2008 to 2011, we reject the climate change hypothesis.”
Lead author Dr. Dan Bebber and co-authors Sarah Gurr and Angela Delgado Castillo found that Colombian coffee yields had been highly variable over time due to varying weather, the effects of disease, management and socio-economic factors.
“Therefore, we conclude that while weather conditions in 2008–2011 may have slightly increased the predicted risk of CLR infection, long-term climate change is unlikely to have increased disease risk,” the authors state.
#coffee leaf rust outbreak in Colombia favoured by weather but not climate changehttps://t.co/AXiAslH6bT@UniofExeter @GurrLabExeter
— Dan Bebber (@DanBebber) October 24, 2016
This past summer, a group of scientists found that temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula have been falling steadily for the last 18 years at the rate of nearly one degree Fahrenheit per decade, countering earlier warming trends and completely dismantling one of the most cited cases of rapid climate change.
Writing in Nature, the scientists acknowledged that what was once considered one of the most remarkable cases of accelerated anthropogenic climate warming was not due to human causes at all but rather to natural climate swings.
The scientists observed that despite volumes of literature to the contrary, “both the warming since the 1950s and the cooling since the late 1990s are entirely consistent with natural climate variability.”
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