Essay by Eric Worrall
How times have changed – a major Californian news outlet publishing a climate skeptic article.
Bjorn Lomborg
Climate change isn’t taking food off your table
No morning ritual is safe from climate alarm. In June, the journal Nature declaredthat coffee is “critically threatened by climate change” and described scientists racing to save your espresso from “extinction.” The New York Times blames sky-high coffee prices on climate-driven supply crunches in Brazil and Vietnam. And your olive oil? CNN and Bloomberg wail about a seemingly permanent “crisis,” with Mediterranean droughts foretelling a future in which an everyday staple vanishes for good.
The message is unmistakable: Global warming is coming for your family’s dinner table, and only sweeping climate policy can save it. The message is also wrong. Cut through the hype and food is both more plentiful and cheaper today, after adjusting for inflation, than it was during almost all of the 20th century.
Start with coffee, supposedly on its deathbed. This year, global coffee production is expected to set yet another record — more than double the world’s output of 50 years ago. Crops on the brink of extinction don’t deliver record harvests. And despite recent price bumps, the real price of coffee has trended downward since 1960. Adjusted for inflation, coffee this century has cost on average half of what it cost in the last century.
How do outlets like the New York Times get it so wrong? By inexcusably ignoring inflation — comparing coffee prices from the 1970s, expressed in the dollars of that day, with prices expressed in today’s dollars. By that standard, everything is at a record high, always.
…
Read more: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2026-07-14/climate-change-food-scarity-facts
The rest of the article is well worth reading – Bjørn Lomborg dissecting the frequently repeated false claim that all the crops are going to die because of a little more warm weather.
But I had to double check which publication I was reading.
I’d love to know the inside story of how this happened, how an outlet like LA Times came to publish something so skeptical. Did LA Times executives notice a sudden outbreak of skepticism amongst their readers? Are they testing the water to see how their readers respond? Has someone in charge finally found the balls to tell the emperor he has no clothes?
If anyone knows what is happening in California please tell us in comments.
Simon says fall down dead from climate caused famine. Simon says get up, that was last week. Simon says why did you unsubscribe?
There was a change in ownership a year or so ago. The new owner vowed to make the paper more neutral (I was skeptical that would happen) and he started by letting go many of the most partisan staffers. Many others just left. I guess were finally seeing the fruits of his labor. Too late for me. I moved from CA to VA this past Spring.
Just in time to see VA go full CA bonkers!
A remarkable development! Hopefully sanity is returning! A warming world produces more arable land with longer growing seasons assisted by CO2 fertilization. Crop doomsters lack basic common sense.
CO2 is way more important than mere fertilizer, the reality is, it’s just as important as water. Hmmm, more arable land and longer growing seasons. Good points, familiar ring to it (-:
“CO2 is way more important than mere fertilizer, the reality is, it’s just as important as water.”
Yes, it makes plants more drought resistant by losing less water.
“If anyone knows what is happening in California …”
You mean the L A Times, right? There are about 39 M people
in California and not one knows what is happening in the State. 🙂
I read somewhere that one of the main reasons for coffee price issues, is that the Chinese youngsters have taken a liking to it. !
That’s has led to a pretty large increase in demand.
First, I greet this event with satisfaction as scientifically ignorant journalists and commentators have constituted the vast majority of those spreading the panic about human caused dangerous global warming.
I wish the senior contributors to WUWT could refrain from the name calling rhetoric where possible. Bjørn Lomborg is a widely regarded voice of reason and has correctly always advocated for adaptation to all consequences of any changes in climate.
I strongly disagree with his acceptance that there is some contribution to the warming from human use of fossil fuel and I expect many who comment here are of the same opinion. I insist that carbon dioxide and water vapour are dependent variables, they do not cause the temperature variations but rather are changed by the changed temperatures. As there is currently no convincing proof either for or against this in theory, we await eventual resolution of the doubt based upon observational evidence.
From the GSM insolation variations and the work of Valentina Zharkova I am expecting a cooling period followed by a resumption after 2035 of the very slow warming out of the latest Ice Age. That will mean human adaptation will be within the conditions of increased carbon dioxide and slightly lower temperatures, conditions which nobody I know are currently studying.
“they do not cause the temperature variations but rather are changed by the changed temperatures”
The rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 is definitely influenced by ocean temperatures……. caused by, harder to prove.
We see the same spike in CO2 rate at El Nino events, and the same step increase in CO2 rate after an El Nino event
It’s nice to see at least one member of the mainstream media coming clean on the facts associated with the non-crisis of climate change. It would be a lot nicer if more such members start presenting such facts as above.
I am in central Vietnam. I’ve been here for 18 months so far. Vietnam is the 2nd largest coffee exporter in the world.
This morning I bought a coffee at my local cafe for about $1.40. My Vietnamese friend scoffed that they saw me coming, and thought I was a tourist.
I understand a coffee in the USA is rather more expensive than that. If so, I would look at minimum wage legislation, import tariffs and so on, as I know that coffee here is pretty cheap and under no climatic pressure.
It is warm here in the tropics though that is BAU 🙂