Good
morning, and happy fall to you all.
Earlier
today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest
report, a meta review of 30,000 climate change studies that offers an
comprehensive and extremely credible view of what lies ahead in our planet’s
response (or lack thereof) to this problem.
You should certainly read today’s New
York Times article on this work, and if your time permits, also the IPCC’s policymakersummary.
We
have an election on Tuesday, and I hope you will take the views of your
candidates on these very important issues into account when you make your
choices at the ballot box. We are
running out of time in continuing to elect people to office who conclude that
global warming is a liberal hoax.
As
I try to make sense of why we appear to make so damn little progress in
confronting climate change, I keep hearing that conservative politicians won’t
really wake up and smell the coffee (as it were) until the effects of global
warming become real to them. Apparently
extreme draught, bizarre storm activity, disappearing glaciers and failing global
agriculture isn’t that convincing.
A
small but meaningful example of the reality of climate change is in the world
of coffee (and the 25 million coffee farmer families around the world who
support our habit). Here’s a quote from
the spring 2014 findings of the IPCC:
"The overall predictions are for a reduction in area
suitable for coffee production by 2050 in all countries studied.”
And another quote: “In
many cases, the area suitable for production would decrease considerably with
increases of temperature of only 2.0-2.5C."
Here’s
a great video on the manifestation of this problem in Ethiopia from Kew Gardens, a
global plant research institution based in the UK (their full research report is
linked at the end of the post.
