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. …
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. …
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.
Even Nature’s own reporting on coffee undercuts its ominous headline detailing “how scientists are fighting to save it from extinction.” Ethiopia keeps more than 12,000 arabica plants in living gene banks for breeding heat- and drought-tolerant varieties.
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“I believe we have enough gene pool to fight climate change,” Kassahun Tesfaye, the Ethiopian plant geneticist leading the effort, says. … That isn’t extinction. It is what agriculture has always been: adaptation and improvement.
