I drink a lot of coffee, and I’ve been drinking it since I was six. I’ve told the story before. Both parents recovered alcoholics who helped alcoholics recover. Lots of AA meetings. Smoky rooms, free-flowing java from stainless steel industrial tanks (they look big when you’re six), with too much cream and sugar.
I am told I was a hyper kid before the coffee. Energetic. I can’t imagine the coffee helped. We didn’t have decaf back then. Not really. What they did try was awful. Chicory? Seriously? It’s gotten better, but coffee doesn’t grow that way, and caffeine has been credited with reducing the risk of dementia.
Maybe not Starbucks in a Subaru with a Ukraine flag hanging from the rearview and stickers on the back promoting Human Rights Campaign and the one that’s half-peeled off about freeing Kilmar Abrego Garcia. There’s a Defund ICE sticker covering part of it next to ‘Be Good,’ which is laugh-out-loud funny, parked near a protest for the latest thing.
I like coffee a lot. I drink too many cups a day. GraniteGrok.com runs on it, and maybe a few IPAs after dark. So, the cost of coffee (and IPAs) is a matter of both concern and interest to this internet publisher. It didn’t stop me from thinking the Tariff dashboard would work. That was the experts telling me it would be a disaster. They tend to be wrong a lot more than right, so being contrary is the best first place to start, as long as you do the research and remain open to facts as they come in. Don’t get EDS. Expert derangement syndrome. The same applies to Israel or Jews (IDS of JDS or JWDDS), Public Health (PHDS), and the rest.
All things in moderation, including moderation, except perhaps for coffee, which has come under fire from the Climate Cult in a strained effort to get Subaru Driving Starbucks customers to embrace it as the latest outrage. “Climate change affecting global coffee production, study finds.” You don’t have to read it, but you can. It’s about as credible as The Science® during COVID. “A study from Climate Central revealed that climate change is making coffee production more challenging and expensive, affecting the flavor and availability of coffee worldwide.”
It’s not weird how untrue that is. It’s like apples, maple syrup, or tourism in New Hampshire. The left scribbles hearts next to pictures of windmills and solar farms in the margins of their notebooks during their civil rights and social justice class, while Coffee production is up everywhere they grow coffee. It’s probably due to rising CO2 and post-Little Ice Age warming.
Data from the FAO show that during the twenty-first century, the period that has supposedly been the warmest in recent history, coffee production has increased substantially, globally, and in each of the five countries WTAE highlighted in its story: Brazil, Columbia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Vietnam. From 1995 to 2024, the most recent year for which data is available:
- Global coffee production has more than doubled, increasing by more than 104 percent, with the most recent record for production coming in 2024;
- Coffee production in Brazil has escalated more than 264 percent;
- Coffee production in Columbia has grown a relatively modest 2 percent;
- Coffee production in Ethiopia has been boosted approximately 156 percent;
- Coffee production in Indonesia expanded 76.4 percent; and
- Coffee production in Vietnam increased an astounding 824 percent.
Some of that could be due to expanded planting, more farms, improved loss prevention, or they got Juan Valdez a better burro. Some of that may be investments, as growing conditions have improved.
Having written more than a few posts about how climate has had zero effect on Maple Syrup production in New Hampshire and everywhere else people tap trees, I can tell you that. More taps in a warm or early Spring can offset per-tap production loss. You need all the data, and you need current data.
Inflation, tariffs, transportation costs, the stability of the government where you grow it, how much it interferes in your operation, investor interest, and coffee is a lot more expensive than it used to be for many reasons, but it is currently near its 52-week low. That’s unlikely if there are persistent climate stresses – and you don’t expand production in inhospitable circumstances. You move it. North or south, where the average temps are that degree or two cooler, assuming the “research” paid for by the climate cult org is telling any truths at all.
Interesting aside. The corporations that run these operations pay good money for reliable long-range climate forecasts by people who don’t play games with the weather to advance political priorities.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, produces research because it is concerned about its funding, not the climate, and no one whose business requires real research pays them any mind. And it is wrong about so many things, but it is wrong with excellent form, and it never needs to stick the landing. There are plenty of Marxists doing business as Democrats who will take the glossy fear-mongering and use it to grow government power at the expense of individual liberty.
WTAE ABC, Pittsburgh, published a story titled, “Climate change affecting global coffee production, study finds.” The study is false, perpetrated by a climate activist group called Climate Central, and uncritically echoed by WTAE meteorologist Jill Szwed. Had Szwed or WTAE fact-checked Climate Central’s claims against real world data, they would have found coffee production has increased dramatically around the world amid the modest recent warming, including in each of the countries cited in WTAE’s story.
WTAE can be credited with sharing the incomplete story perpetrated by a special interest with a financial stake because that is also what WTAE is. That’s what we all are, really, but when your industry has lost most, if not all of its credibility, what do you have to lose? It’s a $ 486 billion-a-year operation. Ubiquitous. 66% of adults drink it daily. Even skeptics and cynics will click on that.
