Guest essay by Eric Worrall
40 years go, Brazilian coffee growers in Paraná (latitude 24° south) relocated to Minas Gerais (latitude 19° south), after a hard frost devastated their coffee plantations. They thought they were safe.
Coffee bean price spike just a taste of what’s to come with climate change
Global coffee prices forecast to hit $4.44 a kilogram due to Brazilian cold snap following a string of droughts and pandemic supply chain issues
Royce Kurmelovs @RoyceRk2
Thu 30 Sep 2021 19.01 AESTScientists have long warned climate change is coming for our morning coffee and a recent spike in global bean prices could be the first sign it’s actually happening.
Global coffee prices are forecast to jump to $4.44 a kilogram this year, according to IBISWorld, after a July cold snap in a major arabica coffee-producing region of Brazil wiped out a third of the crop.
Tom Baker, the founder of Sydney-based Mr Black Roasters and Distillers, noticed the spike when the first shipment this year arrived with a heavy price tag.
“The feeling was almost despair. We were expecting it because everything’s gone up. All our costs on every line item,” Baker said. “Glass, coffee, paper costs, label costs. It’s all gone up – and not just a small couple of percentages.”
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Farmers in coffee-producing regions of Brazil have been grappling with a string of droughts in recent years and while frosts are common in July and August, the suddenness and severity of the most recent event caught producers by surprise.
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Similar frosts hit farmers in the state of Paraná 40 years ago, forcing many to seek out more stable conditions closer to the equator in Minas Gerais, which is why recent events have come as a shock as the area was thought safe.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/sep/30/coffee-bean-price-spike-just-a-taste-of-whats-to-come-with-climate-change
From July this year;
Frost Hits Brazilian Coffee Lands, Extent of Damage Not Yet Known
Jonas Ferraresso | July 12, 2021
[Editor’s note: Beginning two weeks ago, approximately three nights of frost touched farmlands in Southeastern Brazil, affecting corn, sugarcane, potato and other important food and cash crops.
Frost also touched several key coffee-growing regions — in parts of the states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Paraná — compounding troubles for many producers who were already negatively affected by sustained high temperatures in 2020 and drought conditions earlier this year.
While exact losses to Brazilian coffee production as a direct result of frost exposure may not be known for months, some producers have shared photos of coffee plants with leaves turned brown and black from exposure to freezing temperatures. Reuters recently contacted several Brazilian coffee brokers who were each assessing the damage that one exporting company described as “not negligible.”
What follows is an account of the situation in Brazil, as written by Brazilian agronomist and coffee expert Jonas Ferraresso.]
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Impacts on growing areas
On the morning of July 1, 2021, a huge number of reports from producers, agronomists, and technicians flowed through the internet, and social networks and news channels across the country filled with pictures.
In the state of Minas Gerais, the most affected cities are located in the south of the state. They include Ibiraci, Três Pontas, Monte Santo de Minas, Três Corações and others.
In São Paulo, a large part of the eastern region of the state known as Mogiana — including Franca, the largest coffee producing hub in the state — had affected crops.
In the state of Paraná, frost reached almost 100% of the area, but according to Cocamar, one of the most important cooperatives in the state, only 10% of the crops were severely affected. In Carlópolis, the main producing city in Paraná, some coffee plantations were left with burned leaves and a lot of ice on the ground.
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Read more: https://dailycoffeenews.com/2021/07/12/frost-hits-brazilian-coffee-lands-extent-of-damage-not-yet-known/
The rest of the article above is well worth reading, the author is a Brazilian agronomist and coffee specialist.
I don’t believe the determination to blame any unusual event on CO2 has reached peak absurdity.
In the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, all it took was one child to puncture the mass delusion that the emperor was wearing clothes, when he was actually stark naked. In real life, defenders of the catastrophic global warming narrative are utterly determined to continue, well beyond all reason and evidence.
Costs have gone up due to shipping. It’s about US$10,000 a 40-foot container now. Used to be about $2000.
There’s a huge supply problem happening now and it’s going to get worse. Shipping costs are through the roof. So much so the big US chains are now leasing containers and even ships in order to secure their supply chains.
Covid and the insane reaction to it by politicians (who else) is causing these problems, particularly the differing covid regulations in each country.
It’s not helped by a lack of HGV/truck drivers which means goods cannot be off-loaded in port as quickly as in pre-covid days. This means more and more ships are stuck in ports.
That has a knock on effect as a ship that can’t off-load can’t be on schedule to pick up other cargo. This compounds the supply problem and drives up costs.
Some manufacturers are looking to relocate production back to the West simply because it’s taking too long and costing too much to produce goods in Asia.
We haven’t seen the end of this, not for a long while.
I think you are correct.
On top of the supply-chain problem, we now have China, and the UK, and the EU, having power generation problems which will affect the world economy detrimentally.
World politicians have a cargo cult mentality. They think you just buy stuff in shops and they have little understanding of logistics.
Add to it the fact that California pollution restrictions prevent older trucks from entering the Los Angles basin. Most of the independent haulers have older truck and don’t want to spend the money to upgrade/replace a perfectly functional truck. Sometime they use newer trucks to move the loads out of the restricted area where they are transferred to an older truck. This is something I have known about for a few years as we rent to independent truckers.
Maersk is investing in renewable fuels to both reduce GHG emissions and to use cleaner burning fuels to reduce PM/NOx emissions. This will add further costs to shipping and do nothing for the environment as essentially all ship emissions are far out to sea with no impact on society. But the push to lower emissions of all kinds continues unabated.
Shipping costs go up, harvests are reduced by bad weather, inflation is everywhere – yep, we’re doomed!
It is not any kind of isolated event: corn prices this year are $5.65 to $5.75 per bushel, up 60% from last year. That’s from world grain dot com.
Why is that important? Corn is livestock feed, as well as one source of alcohol for the fuel industry and grain-based products in the food industry. Wheat, soybeans, oats, corn, and basically anything that can be ground to flour or distilled into alcohol and used in the food and fuels industry is part of this. High fructose corn, for example, is used to make alcohol for fuels like gasoline, among other things. If you have a bad year with the corn crop, the price of everything from the grocery shelves to the gas pump goes up.
So this rise in the price of coffee is no surprise. It is a real pity that a spell of really bad weather hit those people at a time like this.
We must never forget, of course, that it is no longer possible that there should be any sort of ‘Global Cooling’ and any damage to any crop anywhere (including Brazil) is obviously caused by ‘Global Warming’ which is widely acknowledged causes approved ‘global cooling’, where applicable, but is not in any way related to ‘Global Cooling’.
Forget the terms Global cooling (as It officially never existed),
global warming (it is so 80ies)
climate change (overused,no dramatic message )
climatedisruption and climate chaos are the way to go.
Disruption and chaos have a much huger fearporn impact on a cowards mind than cooling,warming and change;
and they help us to even misuse the cooling that proves our warming scam wrong for our purpose.
We simply call the real cooling trend climate chaos,ad on a regular basis a few fake warming records to the narrative and our climate minions will follow us like Lemmings
and will believe that life is hell ,while we have the best climate mankind has experienced in the last 500 years (no more millions of victims as result of famines and floods,the only mass killings that happened were result of the wars created by the same entities that wanna save humanity with co2 taxes and vaccines)
Vaccines have saved humanity. (Snipped the rest of the completely off topic comment about Vaccines and stuff)
(I removed THIRTEEN off topic comments that has NOTHING to do with the Topic about Coffee and weather, stop the threadjacking people!) SUNMOD
So you prefer to be injected with whole dead viruses or disabled viruses rather than a single gene that produces a benign protein
Stop hijacking the thread with anti-vaxxer bullshit
And if they get their Day After Tomorrow will they finally be happy that the World cooled or will they immediately demand government action against the cooling by burning fossil fuels?????🤔🤔
“We must never forget, of course, that it is no longer possible that there should be any sort of ‘Global Cooling’ and any damage to any crop anywhere (including Brazil) is obviously caused by ‘Global Warming’”
The alarmists and the know-nothings have to try to connect CO2 to everything that occurs. Somehow, CO2 caused this, in their minds. Because CO2.
Global warming causes global cooling, finch’s know?
Consequently, global warming causes everything that is bad in the universe.
True Believerism at work.
Wow.
A cold snap.
Must be unprecedented.
And all prices shootin up.
That’ll be unprecedented too.
Nothing to do with all that money printing.
Good to see that all those fearless “scientists” who have been predicting doom for so long can claim that, actually they were correct for one year at least, eventually.
No need to mention that they predicted hot, not cold.
Wouldn’t be polite.
Genesis 41:25-36
They had Climate Change back then?
The bloody Pharaohs driving around in their gas guzzling SUVs, for sure.
Nice to see the Grauniad is so much quicker off the mark than those fuddy duddy old Bible scribes. Didn’t have to wait seven years before they set to with their shroud waving.
Mind you, those scribes didn’t have the brown envelopes from Vlad the Bad to encourage them.
You have to admire the alarmists efforts to find new words to advance the climate crisis, as they want to declare it.
I like the Guardian’s, Climate Chaos effort, It takes over from the all embracing Climate Change. In places such as Canada for instance, Climate change might be perceived as a positive thing especially when you are struggling to get warm at minus forty C.
Climate Chaos is far more spooky. No room for optimism in that one.
“Man Made Climate Chaos”. I can see the headline now, in double bold top of the Guardian front page, the day before COP 26 opens up.
I bet they are praying Joe doesn’t go off on one again, or that another of those pesky Volcanoes doesn’t grab the world’s attention.
“. In places such as Canada for instance, Climate change might be perceived as a positive thing…”
You’d think so but Canadians get their information from the government run CBC and so are as climate idiotic as everywhere else.
I have seen reports that appeared to be legitimate that say 80% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border with the US. A warmer climate would definitely be a positive thing for Canadians.
And a bunch of them are climate refugees every winter, heading for the US South where they might not freeze to death.
Every winter, well not last winter and likely not this one either due to some virus. So we’re happy to have a very unusual week, 31C two days in a row and continuing warm temperatures for another week at least. The -40 won’t seem as bad when (if) it comes later. The one 31 day set a record only slightly above the same day in late 1800’s, you know when those terrible SUV’s were running amok.
Elite Made Mass Mental Chaos
Oh that wicked CO2, it’s warming on hot days and cooling on frosty days. You just can’t rely on it!
Hot air rises forcing cold heavy air to sink, freezing us to death. Isn’t that how alarmists say it works?
“Isn’t that how alarmists say it works?”
Alarmists are a little vague on how all that works.
Alarmists are good at making unsubstantiated claims, but not good at all at providing any evidence for how any of this is connected to CO2.
Is the date of the first article quoted supposed to be 40 years ago?
Royce Kurmelovs @RoyceRk2
Thu 30 Sep 2021 19.01 AEST
It’s getting colder.
How can anyone with a brain still believe such BS ?
Simon, Griff, Lloydo, Ghalfrunt…duh
(Stop posting names of people who are not in the thread and then insult them, stay with the topic instead!) SUNMOD
“How can anyone with a brain still believe such BS ?”
Alarmists will grasp at any straw to keep their Human-caused Climate Change narrative going.
As long as they are not plastic straws.
I can’t keep up with the cognitive dissonance required to be a water melon, these days.
That’s why Orwell coined the term Memory hole
Meanwhile back in the UK:
Surprise, surprise, who would have know it.
“The poorest households are at risk of suffering the most if Britain hikes gas bills to fund its switch to green power, a government infrastructure tsar has warned, as energy prices surge to record highs.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/09/30/poorest-must-not-bear-brunt-green-energy-transition-costs/
I read somewhere that “Green” Taxes are going be moved from electricity charges where they are used to subsidize renewables to gas where they will be used to subsidize renewables and to make “renewable” electricity more attractive, but still expensive.
It’s what subsidies and tariffs do make everything more expensive
““The poorest households are at risk of suffering the most”
Michael Mann and his cronies must be so proud.
Oh, so they’re going back to when Henry II forbade the peasants from cutting wood in HIS forests, and didn’t know or care or give a hoot if they froze to death?
So history does repeat itself, after all.
But, but the thermageddonists kept telling us wind and solar power was going to be free?
It’s beyond comedy
No problems with my supplies of Lavazza
Yet
buy an extra couple per shopping trip as the vac packs have a 2 yr lifespan and longer if you freeze them, i admit to normally having a 4mth backup bought whenever I find it at half price specials etc
Occasionally there is a pack that has lost its vacuum. Use that first.
I have it on a regular order at the lowest price available.
Alternative header for the Guardian:
‘Frost in Brazil proves that the Ice Queen really, really exists.’
It’s a miracle! Now any weather event of any kind is political currency for the Khmer Vert. A brilliantly executed power grab.
Quote:”40 years go, Brazilian coffee growers in Paraná (latitude 24° south) relocated to Minas Gerais (latitude 19° south), after a hard frost devastated their coffee plantations. They thought they were safe.”
Metinkx they protest their innocence a little too strongly. Can anyone here really see that happening.
Someone, presumably a large-ish estate or coffee operation ‘fouled up’ their fields/farm or their business operation or were simply bought out by someone/anyone with a phat wodge of $$$$. For houses, industry, retail parks, oil wellings, new motorway whatever whatever
It had perfectly nothing to do with ‘Climate’ and in any case, surely Shirley, they’d have moved the opposite direction if it was (a warming) climate wot diddit.
You’d never convince anyone would ya… that in many ways what is being observed inside ‘climate’ is in fact ‘Warming does equal Cooling‘
You know me, I endlessly rail about soil erosion, so what we’re witnessing with their frosts can be nothing less.
Coffee plantations are monocultures, pampered, weeded, sprayed and fertilised thus, nothing else can be happening under them than: Soil Erosion.
(Hence ‘the move’ mentioned in the opening paragraph)
Soil erosion is= The Creation of Desert. nothing more nothing less
Thus the difficulty is in convincing everyone that deserts are Cold Places (no stored heat energy)
The obvious flak you’d get is that deserts are Hot Places because ‘Deserts have high temperatures’
Where we’d all agree is that deserts have wild and unpredictable climates, especially concerning temperature excursions
Thus we confront The Actual Train Wreck that is = Climate Science – the confusion of heat and temperature
But then what, Warmists tell you that The Heat is trapped in the atmosphere ..
Well OK, it may be although such an idea totally trashes the 2nd Law and Entropy but that is not the point.
The Heat should be ‘trapped’ in the water contained in the soil/dirt beneath all ours feet – or – under the coffee trees.
And it ain’t is it, That Is Why They Froze
(Also the French grape bushes earlier this year)
And because soil/dirt/water can store (trap) vastly more heat energy that the atmosphere ever can, we can only conclude..
Earth is Cooling
What they’re all really worried about here is the continued supply of a mind-bending substance (caffeine) but if me/you/anyone pointed that out we’d get beaten up.
As any UK copper on a Friday Saturday night shift will tell you, mix caffeine with alcohol and the results are truly frightening. (Red Bull mixers…..)
Red Bull and Jaegerbombs. Fighting juice.
It’s NOT the soil, Peta. How do we know for absolute sure? Parana produces very large amounts of soybeans, maize, wheat, sugarcane, cassava, beans, tomatoes, oranges, and yerba mate. In addition it produces oats, barley, peaches, tangerines, and strawberries. Oh, and it still produces coffee. You could have looked it up in less than a minute before you succumbed to your insane soil erosion fixation but you didn’t put in even a minute to avoid beclowning yourself again.
Oh, and deserts have a wide temperature range from hot during the day to cold at night NOT for the reason you falsely claim but because they are regions of low humidity. Warer is the top greenhouse gas. Deserts gain heat faster and lose heat at night faster because they’re dry. They’re dry because air moving on the prevailing winds has rained out its water over rising topography before it reaches the desert.
Move on.
Brazilian frosts – yet more evidence that we have passed the tipping point and now have a warming climate crisis.
“I don’t understand – you said the globe was warming?”
“Are you irredeemably stupid? Freezing IS Warming!!!”
“Oh…”
The panic buyers will be out in force again. First it was toilet roll, then it was pasta, now it’s petrol/diesel and soon to be coffee.
I’m just glad it’s not tea so far. Tea and Diet Coke and popcorn. Gotta have something to live on.
It’s got to be Fat Coke for me. I like the feeling when it sticks to my teeth.
“climate chaos” the latest lie.
The other one is “climate breakdown “.
When you thought climate hysteria could not get past 11, now we have had 12…13…and possibly 14?
When all ya got is lies gots to keep ‘freshen them up so as folks don’t catch on.
Chaos, huh. They finally come to terms with what we don’t know, can’t calculate, and, perhaps, the natural order of sex, conception, and babies.
And there was me thinking global warming meant less frost.
Obviously I’ve got it all wrong. Next time the ice in my GnT is melting I’ll slam it in the oven for a bit – that’ll get the ice cubes back.
Unprecedented, no. Unanticipated, yes. Such is the risk posed by irregular, recurring natural processes and phenomena, where mitigation strategies are driven through a reconciliation of risk and benefit.
And now you know why global warming was tactically changed to climate change. It was to make the Climate Crusades more resilient under pressure from skeptics, facts, weather, and the general population, aka hoards with pitchforks.
It’s a griffin derecho with whipped cream.
That damned heat is hiding in the deep ocean, again.
Climate Chaos is the scientific name for weather.
Where is Griff the coffee expert., aka Juan Valdez Griff?
Looks to me as if the large weather systems in the Southern Hemisphere drove the polar vortex over the south pole away from the pole and toward Tropic of Capricorn. Looks like the Andes Mountains kept the cold air in place.
Frank Sinatra — The Coffee Song (They’ve Got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil) (78 rpm Version) 1946
I still remember in the 1970ies the high coffee prices because of frost damages in Brazil. But that was during the cooling scare. Despite high oil prices in the Swedish trade balance at the time we paid more for coffee than for oil. Coffee frost damage in Brazil, frost damage of wine harvest in France, snowstorm in Madrid and the big freeze in Texas this year. I see a pattern here.
My father was a coffee grower in Papua New Guinea in the 50’s and ’60’s. All the growers would pray for a frost in Brazil so prices would jump. Seems that very little has changed, including the incidence of frost in Brazil.