Bishop Hill Guardian's gargantuan garbage
Jun 10, 2015 Climate: WG2 The Guardian is going full-on bonkers over climate change this morning. Much like most other mornings I suppose.
Today's dose of hysteria is about what climate change is going to do to our weekends, and author Karl Mathiesen insists that beer, chocolate and coffee are all going the way of the dinosaurs and that the weather is going to be rubbish to boot.
OK, pick a claim and fact check it. Let's take the beer:
...42 breweries have weighed in to illuminate us about the true scale of the threat – we might actually run out of beer. From California to the Czech Republic, hop production is being hit by rising temperatures and a lack of water. Beer could also start to taste worse, according to the Czechs, but their beer is rubbish anyway.
The claim that hop production is being hit by rising temperatures and lack of water seems to come from the first link, a press release from a US advocacy group, which says, without citation:
Warmer temperatures and extreme weather events are harming the production of hops, a critical ingredient of beer that grows primarily in the Pacific Northwest. Rising demand and lower yields have driven the price of hops up by more than 250 percent in the past decade. Clean water resources, another key ingredient, are also becoming scarcer in the West as a result of climate-related droughts and reduced snow pack.
The problem with taking your journalism straight from an environmentalist press release is that you end up becoming complicit in their disinformation. If Mathieson had taken a moment to look at the data, he would have discovered that world hop production is up over the last ten years, while acreage is down (Source is the US Hop Growers here; see p.15). That means that yields are up too. More neutral sources put the rise in hop prices purely down to runaway demand and the inability of growers to respond to it quickly.
And the claim that beer will taste worse is equally dubious. The proximal source is an article by Leo Hickman, which is would start alarm bells ringing in most readers' heads, but if you trace back to the original source, you find a paper by Mozny et al which examines Saaz hop yields (a long-term rise but flat in recent decades) and a decline in quality, as measured by the α-acid content. The paper is decidedly iffy, taking a claimed correlation between local temperatures and these two measures and on that basis claiming disaster is going to strike.
But even if you accept the methodology, there's a couple of small problems. As we already know, world hop yields are up. And when you look at α-acid content production as reported by the US Hop Growers (link as before, p.12) you find that that has gone up too. It's up by nearly a half over the last decade.
Another day, another load of Guardian garbage.
Reader Comments (77)
Shall we drink to that?
Have they stopped actually printing news now?
Journalistic sources all seem to be 'You Tube', Tw*tter and 'Farcebook' nowadays.
My brother who is in the wine, beer and liquor business says that beer is the fastest growing product category in his region - Ontario, Canada. Demand and production is apparently exploding for craft beers. We now have two local breweries and one produces beer that is so over-hopped that it really bites. So I am not surprised that overall demand for hops is up.
The Guardian (and others) have adopted a new approach to journalism - why bother paying researchers and journalists to produce serious articles when you can simply print off the latest press release from any campaigning organisation. This wins twice over - firstly it costs nothing to fill up column inches and secondly it doesn't challenge your readership in any way !
Most beer is rubbish. The reason most folk prefer it ice cold is because it dulls their tastebuds enough for them to avoid gagging.
Did article say Czech beer is rubbish? That is rich coming from a British writer. Clueless stuff alright. Perhaps I need a drink like a Staropramen or Pilsener Urquell!
Ulick
I think that was sarcastic!
Ulick
I'll go along with you on the Urquell certainly but there are numerous British beers from local breweries that would give any of the gnats' piss that comes out of the US (JamesG is right) more than a run for their money and even on the commercial front there is not much that match up to Wadworth's Farmers' Glory (three pints of that in Tewkesbury and I was mighty relieved I had the whole width of the Severn to steer on!) or Marston's Pedigree.
The relationship between the Guardian and the gloom- and doom-mongering environmental movement has become symbiotic and signally unhealthy as a result. Instead of being a reasonably reliable newspaper (regardless of its soft-left political editorial stance which has always been well-known) it has decayed into simply being the house magazine for the left-of-centre control freak tendency whose current instrument of torture (for the rest of us) is climate change and all the evils that accompany it.
Any old shite that furthers "the cause" gets a free pass. In 10 years time the same pessimists will be churning out the same rubbish. All the verbs, pronouns and adverbs will be the same. Only the nouns and adjectives will have been replaced to suit the meme of choice for the 2020s.
I'm almost sorry I may not be here to watch the change!
The article confused me when I saw it this morning. It was so one-sided and so clearly rubbish that I couldn't be bothered to comment.
In fact, surely no-one would be bothered with it unless they were true believers. Why preach to the choir?
And how can you get advertising revenue by shrinking your readership down to a tiny minority who are committed to avoiding consumerism anyway?
It was a daft article. But it was an even dafter editorial decision.
The Guardian are just trying to make up for the lack of interest in other papers.
Fortunately, these days serious journalists are giving most of the alarmist stories a wide berth.
Well, the new editor is called Viner.
Here in Michigan we were hoping that global warming would help our beer and wine production, but instead colder temperatures and frosts are damaging our cherry and apple trees. I think climate alarmists would profit more if they would switch to chicken littling about a coming ice age.
Don't want to put you all in overdrive but a young relative recently applied to get on one of the graduate training courses at the BBC. She succeeded right through to the last round of interviews but wasn't selected so she asked for feedback. And so the telephone call came a few days ago. . . in which she was told that she "needed to read the Guardian more!".
I knew that would put you in overdrive
the end of beer?
this can't be real
I'm over here in US and there is no way we're gonna let you Limeys take our crazy trophy
we can top this
j..j..ust give us a minute
Peak Guardian.
" Beer could also start to taste worse, according to the Czechs , but their
beer is rubbish anyway."
I'm not really particularly a lager drinker but the Czechs make loads of seriously good beer. Lots of local breweries to pick from.
With the aid of the EU you can tax it to destruction as in apples for cider. No need for Climate Bollox
John Smith?
Hang on a minute, lets put a stop to the beer comparisons - there's no point and we are all different.
Here's me, Mr. Sensible................................. one of the worst things you can do is to drink cold beer on an empty stomach after hard exercise on a very warm day, back in the day I played football [amateur] for a Bank and they had a wonderful subsidized sports club and licenced bar, after training on a beautiful summers evening - a cold beer [or two] on the terrace watching the cricketers - ah bliss!
Paul,
I challenge you to read this article for Peak Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/22/thomas-the-tank-engine-children-parents
It's still the best. Whenever the Grauniad has it's people's editor feedback the complaints are always about the Women's pages, the Environment pages, coverage of Israel and then this article is mentioned. Always it comes back to this.
Link here. Enjoy.
They also have a barn-pot mad article on how climate change' has impacted US military security in the Arctic. No, really.
They complain about 'melting Arctic ice' then promptly go on to quote a dopey bird bemoaning the low quality of their ice-breakers!
“Right now we have a fleet, a very small fleet of ageing icebreakers. The Russians and other countries have vastly more ice-breaking capability and other capabilities to be present in the Arctic. We will need to have a greater presence in the Arctic of various types,” she said.
They're absolutely losing the plot.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/10/climate-change-has-left-us-exposed-in-arctic-say-military-experts
" but there are numerous British
beers from local breweries that would give any of the gnats' piss that comes
out of the US "
Mike, how much US beer have you tried? They have about 3000 Microbreweries producing some seriously good stuff. The UK is very much following the US in beer production currently with our own Microbrewery revolution.
When is someone going to take these clueless excuses for journalists to IPSO (who "The Grunaird" have not signed up to- I wonder why? for writing drivel, that is designed for one purpose only, to deceive?
It matters not that the morons that they are deceiving are "Grunaird" readers, because the same c*** is avidly read by the equally moronic reporters at the Biased Broadcasting Cartel and vomited onto a largely ignorant public.
In spite of some late frost this June (warming, my eye!), my hops are doing very well. I'm hoping a bit of 10-4-4 will keep them strong and hardy! I recall that Czech brewers reported a shortage of Žatec (Saaz) hops a few years ago, but that was because they were making more money by selling it abroad.
The Pacific Northwest (USA) snow varies with the Nino ebb and flow. After the record-setting snowfall of the 2010-2011 season, Central Oregon's Mt. Bachelor ski resort had this statement on their website:
"Mt. Bachelor recorded 665 inches [16,89 meters] of snow this La Nina season, besting the previous record of 606 inches set during the similar La Nina winter of 1998-1999."
Blue Moon is my fave, and it comes from the good ol' USA! lol :P
http://www.westword.com/restaurants/five-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-sandlot-brewery-at-coors-field-5733550
Andrew
The problem with taking your journalism straight from an environmentalist press release is that you end up becoming complicit in their disinformation.
Feature, not bug.
Rob Burton
I should have made it clear that nothing I say refers to microbreweries wherever they are. One of the reasons (I understand) that they are proliferating on both sides of the pond is that the commercial stuff is so awful.
"Lager" (note the inverted commas) has taken over the world, mainly because it so cheap and easy to make in bulk and is heavily promoted. But, as Athelstan says, it comes down to a matter of taste.
If you want to understand what is wrong with the world, the Grauniad is very educational, though not necessarily quite in the way it was intended to be.
MCourtney, loved that article!
This is still my favourite Guardian article ...
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations
I live in Washington State. Hops (& wine grapes) are big items just to the south of where we live. Awhile back the hops folks had an issue with disease – now history. Production is up.
The proliferation of “craft beers” has increased the demand for hops. How that is a problem is a mystery.
Water supply in the region is low this year. Late season water is from snow melt and this past winter did not have much – but the reservoirs started out full. So not much to worry about for hops this year.
Some think the El Niño pattern could last through next winter and that next year might also be a low water year. Maybe so. Maybe not so.
Anyway, here is the link to the most recent report:
http://www.usahops.org/userfiles/image/1421356603_2014%20Stat%20Pack.pdf
Cheers.
@ Ben Pile: "This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University..............".
Says it all really! The more bizarre the calim the more we know they are losing the battle big time, & are simply clutching at any straw they can think of to induce fear, with ever more silly scarey stories! It's very sad really & they should be pittied!
The Guardian has lost two billion pounds over twenty years and is kept going by the tens of thousands of copies sold to the BBC with the license payer funding it. The standard of the journalists is going down and the circulation is falling, it cannot go on much longer. The BBC is taking up the baton unfortunately but unsurprisingly.
Actually, this article is the one that really showed the decline in the Guardian. It's not funny.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/27/peter-gleick-heartland-institute-lie
Without a moral compass the Left has nothing left. I support the Left but can't support complete moral relativism. It permits anything.
The first thing the new Labour leader needs to do is try to save the Guardian from itself.
MCourtney
I wonder how long before Garvey cringes with embarrassment at that article.
There is never any moral justification for lying and this article demonstrates in a nutshell why that is the case. Even assuming Gleick had succeeded in properly identifying Heartland's funding sources he is no nearer establishing whether those sources influenced the Institute's stance on climate or anything else or whether it was their climate position that persuaded the donors to write cheques.
So we're no further forward.
And this lack of moral compass appears, regrettably, to be one of the defining characteristics of the Modernist Left along with an overweening self-righteousness and a refusal to countenance any views but their own. (Sorry, MC, but I call it as I see it). There may well be those, like Cameron, that are essentially 'useful idiots' or catspaws, but the drive for 'the end justifies the means' in the 21st century world is coming from the radical left and their supporters will come to rue the day.
As interesting as the content of this article is the chatty style. Out go the ponderous sermons by Moonbat or Hickman's nervous pleas for ethical bicycle maintenance. Here's part of the author's CV:
No, surely not. He can't mean...?Not only more neutral sources, but rather, anybody who has the faintest idea about the subject. Guardian's writers know about farming about as much as nothing. That is also the amount of information they know about science. It's pretty rare to see an MSM journalist being capable of dividing a trillion with a million and ending up in the locally correct solution.
And that would be trivial, after all. Climate change is not.
I hate to say this, but since Rusbridger retired it has gone even more bonkers. Expect it to carry on getting increasingly inane until the inevitable compromise ( sell out ) at Paris. Oh joy.
Suzanne Goldenberg also has another press-release straight from Greenpeace. Do a little searching and you'd discover how deeply in-bed the Guardian is with Greenpeace (article sources, spokespersons, quotes etc) without applying any critical faculties as to what they are fed and very rarely any fact-checking or counter-opinions aired. I'm half expecting Alan Rusbridger to turn up on Greenpeace's board of directors at some point during his retirement.
geoffchambers, unfortunately no faking fraudulent psychos ave been put on trial recently. Some of their work has, it failed, despite ringing endorsements from the Grauniad.
http://vhemt.org/
Check this out is it supposed to be a joke.
Ironic how "vhemt" give an interview in the Big Issue about euthanizing the burdening over population, suppose they can always start with getting rid of the homeless.
Meltemian's excellent question re news:
The Guardian stopped printing news ages ago
Grauniad, Greenpeace etc
In order to cut losses, Rushbridger sub contracted to Greenpeace and co. Why the new editor bothers paying any of the journalists for their 5* copy and paste skills is not clear, it could be part of the Green Jobs propaganda, but it is good to know that the BBC TV Licence fee is part of the post-Grauniad work and retire plan. At least it is not completely wasted, like some BBC and Grauniad employees.
I guess no one at the Guardian drinks beer anyway with all those polluting CO2 bubbles it gives off
BLACK PEARL, if you were to read the Grauniad you would know that CO2 is not just a pollutant, it is highly toxic to all forms of life on earth. UNLESS dissolved in drink.
No one ever complained about Coca colas carbon footprint, or Dom Perig
"I think that was sarcastic!"
It's the Grauniad, Bish - how would anyone know..?
One of my favourite Graun articles is this one, about the evil of cupcakes (or "butter-iced snares of self-loathing"):
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/18/trouble-with-cupcakes
Let's face it though, if the Guardian closed down, I think we'd miss it.
Guardian is gargantuan garbage
To je dobré pivo. cheers
sorry, the post is in the czech
And here's the facts about coffee!!
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/kew-use-coffee-scare-to-drum-up-more-funding/
I recently saw that English hop growers had stop supplying them for beer because the market was over subscribed and the price had fallen below what was commercially viable.