Bloomberg’s news agency recently published a story claiming that climate change has caused rising food prices, a problem that will only get worse in the future. This is false. Data clearly show that world food production has dramatically increased as carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have increased and the Earth has modestly warmed. Growing conditions have improved as has plant health, and flawed climate models’ forecasts aside, there is no meteorological or biological reason for believing such conditions will worsen in the future.
The Bloomberg story, “What Climate Change Costs You at the Checkout,” begins by listing a variety of factors, from the COVID lockdown to the Iran war, that have spiked food prices periodically over the years, complete with a graphic detailing geopolitical events that caused price spikes and the subsequent equally sharp declines once the various crises were over. So far, so good. Then the story goes off the rails.
“[A] less obvious force is also ratcheting up prices, but its effects risk lasting longer and being harder to predict,” claims Bloomberg. “Climate change is turning one-off weather shocks into more regular events that can decimate harvests and strain supply chains.
“As their effects compound, extreme heat and droughts threaten to make climate inflation an economic fixture,” the Bloomberg story continues. “Economists predict that the higher temperatures climb, the more bloated household costs like groceries may become.”
Those paragraphs are replete with false claims about both worsening weather and worsening crop production.
First, data debunk claims that climate change is making heatwaves and extreme weather more frequent or extreme. As detailed in dozens of stories at Climate Realism, neither droughts, nor floods, nor the number and temperatures of extremely hot days have increased or become more severe. In fact, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports it has “low confidence” climate change has had a measurable impact on flooding, in the process admitting that climate change is as likely to have reduced flooding as it is to have made flooding events more common. The IPCC has also been unable to identify any clear global trend in worsening drought, much less any trend in worsening drought that can be scientifically attributed to human greenhouse gas emissions.
Second, if supposed human caused climate change isn’t making the weather conditions which affect farming worse, how is it boosting crop prices, as the title of the story says it is? It isn’t!
No claim has been refuted more at Climate Realism, than that climate change is harming crop yields and/or production. Climate Realism has responded to more than 260 media reports bemoaning climate induced harms to agriculture, refuting each and every story with hard data, mostly from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, showing that the media’s claims to the contrary, crop production and yields have continued to regularly set records during the modern period of modest warming, largely due to the beneficial affects of increased CO2 on plant productivity and health, and improved growing conditions.
Global warming lengthens growing seasons, reduces frost events, and makes more land suitable for crop production. Also, carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. These factors have resulted in the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, and starvation in human history.
Whether one examines the production and yield of staple cereal grains, fruits and nuts, legumes, or less critical but still widely consumed crops like coffee and cocoa, the story is the same around the globe: increased yields and production
Previous Climate Realism posts show agricultural productivity has increased dramatically, for example, in Africa, here, here, and here; in the Middle East, here and here; in Latin America, here, here, and here; in Asia, here, here, and here, and in North America, here, here, here, here, and here.
This increase in food production has occurred even as the number of people and the amount of land devoted to growing crops has declined. Fewer people, farming less land, producing higher yields reflects increasing rather than declining productivity.
Because of the growing food abundance, in part climate change driven, the United Nations reports the number of hungry people has declined by two billion people during the past 30 plus years of global warming, since 1990.
So Bloomberg is wrong about climate change causing food shortages and thus higher prices now but what about its predictions, based on climate model projections, about the future. Bloomberg claims “[e]xtreme heat alone could raise global inflation by 0.3 percentage points to 1.2 percentage points a year starting in 2035, according to one study.”
Even if one could trust climate models to accurately portray future climate conditions, which we can’t since they don’t portray past or present conditions accurately without significant “tuning,” botany and agronomy suggests that what rising CO2 has done for crops up until now, should continue into the foreseeable future. The addition of approximately 140 parts per million of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by humans has helped dramatically reduce hunger, by increasing the photosynthetic productivity and improving the water use of plants. Thousands of field and laboratory experiments confirm this basic truth. The result, research shows there is now 17 percent more food available per person than there was three decades ago. There is no biological basis for believing any reasonably expected future levels of CO2 would reverse crop productivity or trends.
In the end, Bloomberg did what other mainstream media outlets have done previously — cite a single alarming study grounded in unrealistic climate model projections, along with quoting select “experts” predisposed to predict climate change doom, to push the narrative that human caused climate change is dooming food production. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s time for Bloomberg to join the increasing number of media outlets that are reducing their alarming climate coverage, at least in part, in response to climate facts finally getting out and the public’s increasing skepticism or apathy regarding alarming climate claims, especially those that have been discredited multiple times in the past.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.
