Essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian is calling climate doomsday over a few withered grape vines and a failing organic farm.
It’s too fast, too big’: speed of climate crisis is devastating crops, say farmers
Drought and extreme heat are killing plants, driving up prices while also making some farms economically unviable
Pippa Neill Fri 31 Jul 2026 21.00 AEST
t’s a constant battle,” says Tim Young. He and his family have been tracking the rainfall on their Norfolk farm since 1976, and the data shows the last six years have seen two-thirds the amount of rain compared with previous years. The lack of water has become the number one risk to Young’s business.
This summer has seen record-breaking climate induced heatwaves scorch much of Europe, which combined with droughts and “apocalyptic” wildfireshas made farming virtually impossible. France has faced down fires that its president, Emmanuel Macron, called the worst since the second world war and on Wednesday half of England was declared officially in drought, with July expected to be the driest on record after winter floods, according to the Environment Agency. So how are farmers bearing up under the pressure?
“The vines are dying. The grass is yellow and now we can smell the smoke,” Uyen Do, an organic farmer in the Dordogne region of France says, almost in tears. “It’s already very difficult to survive economically and now with climate change it’s becoming a struggle that I’m not sure we’re capable of going through.”
Do took over the farm in 2018 and adopted organic farming practices in the hope to build resilience against the climate crisis. But with the climate changing much faster than most predicted, Do says her farm is just not able to adapt quickly enough. “It’s too fast. It’s too big,” she says.
…
Prof Pete Falloon, the Met Office’s science lead on food security, who is advising the government on the resilience of our food systems, says a movement to more regenerative approaches, better flood management, water storage and using crop varieties that are more heat or drought tolerant is essential.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/31/speed-of-climate-crisis-devastating-crops-say-farmers
…
There’a a bit to unpack here.
Winter saw floods, but Summer is dry and the farmers have no water for their crops.
I’m pretty sure there is this thing, a reservoir, which can collect water when it rains, then allow that water to be used when the rain stops. Unfortunately Britain doesn’t have enough of them.
Running Dry: How the UK Can Reverse Decades of Underinvestment in Reservoirs
- bluechain
- Mar 18, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: May 19, 2025
The UK’s reservoir infrastructure has seen minimal investment in recent decades. The last significant construction being the Banbury Flood Storage Area, completed in 2012 and you have to go back another two decades to the construction of the Carsington reservoir in 1992 for the previous investment in storage capacity in the UK. This stagnation is concerning, especially considering the National Infrastructure Commission’s projection of a daily supply-demand gap of four billion litres by 2050.
…
Read more: https://www.bluechainconsulting.com/post/running-dry-how-the-uk-can-reverse-decades-of-underinvestment-in-reservoirs
Maybe if the British Government stopped wasting so much money on net zero, they’d be able to address chronic water storage capacity issues.
As for adopting organic farming practices to make the farm more resilient, I’ll leave readers to comment on that absurdity. I’d love to know what the nutrient levels were in that soil which can’t grow crops.
Back in the real world, away from backwards places which place climate zealotry ahead of taking care of food production, crop yields are doing just fine.
But you know, if climate change was no threat to food production the climate zealots wouldn’t have anything to scare people with, so they clutch at straws, play emotional anecdotes rather than big picture facts. And sadly, some of their audience is still falling for their nonsense.
On my little 1 acre, I’m having the best year in the 20 years I’ve been here with my raspberries, blueberries, pears, apples and tomatoes. The raspberries were so good, I invited my neighbor, Big Foot and his girlfriend and dad to stop over and have some. 🙂
Oh, I thought Naomi Oreskes had paid some attention to her hygiene.
Child.
That’s your farm, that’s your “little 1 acre”? It certainly is little, I’ll give you that much!
Is the one on the right you, Joseph?
Also, my tomato plants never looked so good. Usually by now the leaves look damaged, often from too much rain- or numerous insects. Now, the leaves look perfectly healthy. It’s really amazing.
The NSDAP was very heavy into biodynamic agriculture, later misnamed “organic”. Heinrich Himmler was a particular fan.
I hope you don’t like dogs, else I have bad news for you.
That’s all you know, bad news, and it’s not bad because it reports awful things, but because it’s full of lies.
We all like dogs more than you like people.
I trust my dog’s opinion on people-he’d bite MUR in a heartbeat.
I’m becoming convinced that Green climate key board warriors, lefties like journalists, liberal lawyers, liberal judges. liberal politicians ie democrats have a deficient left frontal lobe where rationality, judgement and other characteristics exist or there are fried synapses between so rational judgements etc can’t be made. Maybe their observational centers are screwed up also so their observations are the opposite of reality. Also there must be a prevarication center somewhere in the brain that is extremely overdeveloped in these people particularly in democrat politicians, I’m sure You’re are aware of many names. Not talking about so called little white lies but rather gigantic whoppers!
Obviously just speculating no real evidence but fun to think about it.
Yes, rationality and ideology cannot function in the same mind space at the same time.
Maybe its not so much mental deficiencies and misfiring synapses, maybe we could think of this more as a manner of an individuals ability to confront ‘scary things,’ for just a broad term. Like I’m a young-ish Canadian sorta kinda liberal, I like to consider myself educated, informed, I don’t always vote the party line, I vote in the way i think will help the most Canadian’s, help our economy, build and repair our infrastructure. I know there are a number of Republican policy ideas that actually i think are fine, and would help my country, but that’s a conversation for another day, we’re talking about brain dead liberals, of which i do not wholly consider myself apart of.
I came to this site out of fear maybe 7 or 8 years ago. I scare easily. My family knows, my friends know, my neighbours know, I am a real big scaredy cat, I’m a wimp. I was young when RCP8.5 was pushed out into the public, I could even say I am apart of Generation RCP8.5, because my entire childhood and young adulthood, up to just a few months back lets remember, was overwhelmed by an ever impending apocalypse that everyone was telling us was going to happen, that we shouldn’t have been born because we’d be killed in who knows how many years in a ‘climate war’ and that “we can’t do anything, oh wait we can, no wait the entire world needs to work together and they wont, but oh look at how wonderful China is with all their solar” and blah blah blah. And so I came to this site out of fear. I came here because no one here was telling me that my generation and myself were responsible both for ‘crimes against the environment’ and also fixing everything or else we all die.
And working off your “their observations are the opposite of reality” comment, I think its more that we are all dependent on someone else to learn most of anything that is happening anywhere in the world. No matter where anyone places on the political spectrum we are all dependent on journalists and press releases and just a big general someone else to tell us what is happening, because none of us can see everything. And so its people like me who scare easily and see these articles and we get afraid, and we think everyone is going to die because the press has told us for decades we’re all going to die, and anyone who has said “actually its really not that bad” has been branded a heretic.
So i think its that people are afraid, and that the fear has been reinforced from so many different people and institutions. One might almost think of the “Green climate key board warriors” as a people with a family history of an awful disease that are constantly being told “this is the disease you are going to get, this is what it does to people, this is what it will do to you, the only cure will come from every nation on the planet working together which they wont, this is the disease which will certainly kill you, have fun.”
Of course this is all just a defense of the average ‘concerned citizen.’ With politicians, I don’t care the party or the promise, I trust elected officials as far as I can throw them. Journalists i trust even less, and I credit this website for helping me with that.
Well done sir.
The funny thing is that the older Baby Boomers and Gen Xers who grew up during the Cold War, when we were genuinely a couple of buttons being pushed away from annihilation, when at times we went to bed not knowing if there would be any left if/when we woke up, were never anywhere near as paranoid and scared as the younger generations are about a confected financial scam and power grab.
I think of the largest open air nuclear explosion or Pacific islands annihlated by missile tests and wonder eg “what were the negative consequences to someone living in Sweden?”
I remember childhood fun of blowing up small plastic things with firecrackers and thinking “what if I blow something up with _all_ the firecrackers?”, a plan foiled every time by my inability to get multiple, independently fused firecrackers to igninte simultaneously.
Point – I wonder how bad all out 1980’s nuclear Armageddon would have been for an average human at the time. Certainly the millions withing distance of the mushroom clouds would have been toasted.
The scariest “nuclear winter, move to Australia, only cockroaches will survive” stories came from Time magazine articles designed to scare shoppers stuck staring at cover art in supermarket lines. Those stories were based on atmospheric models built before the 286 IBM clone was born.
Swedes might have done okay.
I completely identify with your comment! I do not know how old you are, but judging from the picture you paint of the fears that drive your generation, I would assume that you must be between 25 and 37 years old. I was born in 1999 (I am approaching my 27th birthday), and I heard exactly the same things as you for months and years, echoed by the media, journalists, politicians, and activists, to the point that it was considered ideologically criminal to contradict them, or even simply to question them. These apocalyptic predictions only began to seriously worry me a few months ago. I thought it would cost me nothing to look into what climate skeptics (whom I now prefer to simply call realists) had to say. I thoroughly researched the climate issue, read articles and books, watched interviews, and I came to the same conclusion as you (which would make me a “denier” in the eyes of some people).
I am just as distrustful of politicians as you are. As for journalists, in France we have an expression that you may know: “A journalist today is either a wh*re or unemployed.” It is said rather harshly, but it is very true when you see the self-righteous crowd that rises up against all opinions labeled as “far right,” even though most of them are simply a matter of common sense when it comes to environmental management or territorial control.
They’re following the agenda set forth.
The vines are dying. … Uyen Do, an organic farmer in the Dordogne
Irrigation in French vineyards is restricted and debated. Only about 20%; new plants yes, older vines no. Everything about vines, grapes, and wine in France is extremely complicated — so, that’s all, folks.
“The first known irrigation systems began in ancient Mesopotamia around 6000 BCE, featuring basic canals, dikes, and hand-carried water buckets. Early farmers built these earthworks to direct water from major rivers to dry crop fields.”
What year did Do start growing vines? Were there successfully growing vines in that exact location earlier?
Fun relevant factoids.
There are 6 basic types of commercially valuable wheat. All 6 benefited from Norman Borlaug’s ‘green revolution’—dwarfing to increase grain to stem (straw) ratio given inputs, and rust resistance.
For these 6, there are globally now about 30000 locally adapted cultivars.
Climate induced food crisis? Nope.
“speed of climate crisis”
Are there any other examples of things that don’t exist having a speed?
What we have is a Climate Fool’s Crisis.
Bought a farm, converted it to organic, and it’s not turned out so well.
In either case, she’d rather blame the climate than her ineptitude.
I owned a largish working dairy farm from 1985 to very recently. ‘Organic’ means no synthetic fertilizer and no pesticides. Crop rotation can help with nitrogen but not phosphorus and potash depletion that manure spreading alone cannot make up. No pesticides means significantly reduced crop yields. Organic dairy farming is a non-starter. I think an organic vineyard would likely be even more difficult, as Do has now found out in France.
A warming world produces more arable land with longer growing seasons assisted by CO2 fertilization in the modern era due to our emissions, That might be the greatest symbiotic gift humans have ever given nature. Climate zombies gave up reason for ideological chains.
All of the studies I read claiming harm to crops ignored mitigation. Farmers know that plants need more fertilizer when they grow bigger and more water when it’s hot. They can also use different seed varieties tuned for local conditions.
During the PETM our monkey ancestors first appeared in the fossil record. They spread all the way to Greenland, until the encroaching cold drove them out of their new homes.
https://news.umich.edu/ancient-global-warming-drove-early-primates-dispersal/
If a bunch of monkeys with brains the size of walnuts thrived in conditions 7c hotter than today, no plausible amount of global warming can threaten our survival or prosperity.
Oh the coral survived as well.
All I ever get is crickets or denier shaming when I reference the geologic record in response to the ridiculous 1.5C tipping point. Primitive humans thrived in much warmer climates that the worst model projections.
As a side note, only because it’s interesting, olive trees grew in Germany until-if I remember correctly from a long forgotten class-the LIA. So to shut the alarmists up when necessary, tell them that.
This is happening in the UK because they are no longer producing enough local CO2 😉 😉
The humans in the UK exhale 70 millions kgs of CO2 everyday. To this should be added all the the CO2 exhaled by all the domestic animals ranging from cattle to canaries. There is additional CO2 from baking and brewing. There is plenty of CO2 being released out there.
In OZ, human exhale 28 million kgs of CO2 everyday. Add the CO2 exhaled by 69 million sheep, 30 million cattle and 1 million camels.
World wide humans humans exhale 8 billion kgs of CO2 everyday.
However most of the CO2 is released everyday is absorbed by the oceans.
Chuckle.. you do realise I was having a go at their Net-Zero idiocy, don’t you 🙂
Did the government ever say what emission rate per year of CO2 constitute “Net Zero”?
BTW: What is the chance of One Nation forming a majority government?
Oceans do absorb some, based on a variety of factors including temperature, partial pressure, and current concentrations.
Most of the CO2 is absorbed by plants, and that does include ocean plants such as algae.
There is nothing people won’t complain about except crappy government which could fix most of this if only they would get out of the way.
You can fool some of the people all of the time. Climate alarmism rests on this.
People who read The Guardian must be really depressed!
The people who run the Guardian are probably not quite as depressed:
Anna Bateson as the Chief Executive Officer of Guardian Media Group and Katharine Viner as the Editor-in-Chief. Bateson’s annual salary is £700,000, and Viner’s salary is £600,000.
I would suggest that they would have to be depressed, masochistic and just plane mentally degraded, to even think about reading it. !
I’ll act deranged for £600,000
Those poor literarture degree holders they employ for peanuts while they wait for AI to replace them – that’s where depression lives.
When I was in college my roommate got the Washington Post delivered every day. So I would pick it up and read it. I soon discovered that the world was a pesthole and people were getting screwed every single day! I felt sad. Then, somehow, I figured that reading the Post was the cause of my misery. I finally figured out I could just stop reading the Post. It’s amazing how much the world improved!
Readers of the Grauniad please take note.
Can a business so totally dedicated to serving an exaggerated POV moderate its product if its leadership finds that proponents of its POV have become too rare to support its business?
A not-applicable analolgy would ask “what can lemmings in front do if the army of lemmings behind them keep pushing toward the cliff?”
An applicable not-analogy would ask “what can lemmings in front do if there is no army of lemmings behind them?”
Imagine working for years to get to the front of a bison herd, then looking over your shoulder and seeing the rest of the bison have stopped to chew grass – some of them years ago. Maybe some of the other bison have even been yelling “look out, there’s a cliff up there!”
“France has faced down fires that its president, Emmanuel Macron, called the worst since the second world war”
Maybe if France had decided to fight, instead of surrender, the fires wouldn’t have been so bad.
Haven’t both the UN and the FAO released numbers that show a steady increase in record-breaking yields for cereal crops? And if climate change has been causing such problems for global agriculture, why aren’t there reports of increasing levels of famine resulting in a decline of total populations worldwide? In addition, shouldn’t malnutrition be causing lower life expectancies and higher rates of infant mortality as well as greater susceptibility to diseases in general. Next to none of this is happening except in the wishful thinking of the eco-alarmists—as long as they and their families aren’t affected.
It’s the young generation wots not getting pissed and having sex enough that’s the root of the problem-
Australia’s once‑booming wine industry is on its knees and Gen Z drinkers are to blame
Well that and the usual suspects but they’re always poor miserable beggars at the best of times.
Gen Z don’t drink or smoke, although their smoking rates are increasing, because of the never ending demonization of alcohol and tobacco.
Instead they are well and truly into the hard drugs because of the never ending normalization of them, with pill testing at festivals and the constant push to either decriminalize them or even legalize them.
In USA:
“Federal taxes charge $13.50 per proof gallon for liquor, $1.07 to $3.40 per gallon for wine, and about $18.00 per barrel for beer.”
“Cigarettes are not taxed as a flat percentage of their retail price; instead, governments charge a fixed dollar amount per pack (a unit excise tax) plus general sales taxes. In the United States, taxes make up an estimated 42.5% of a pack’s total cost on average”
Drinking, smoking, gambling… net payers of income and wealth taxes are underrepresented in these three.
(unless you count stock market as gambling)
I watched a weed growing 0.5 inch per hour a couple of days ago.
I looked again this morning and it was up 18 inches.
While it is true that the UK has not added any significant water storage for decades while allowing in millions of immigrants to increase the demand, it is also true that the English and Welsh water companies allow enough treated water to leak away to provide an annual supply to Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, London and Manchester combined. This equates to a fifth of the water they treat but shamefully this is cheaper than fixing the leaks.