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)
Oh no! Peak beer.
Apparently, more than 97% of all the beer that's ever been produced has already been consumed!
Alan the Brit 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!
Pitied yes but whatever you do don't try and stop them. The more of this garbage they print, the easier it is for 'ordinary' people to see them for what they really are.
No doubt that after the Paris 'conference' fails they will all get back to wondering why their message isn't getting across to an increasingly 'sceptical' public. (clue : http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm)
Jun 10, 2015 at 5:18 PM Mike Jackson
As a member of the left (lowest rank) I object to being told I have no moral compass.
I honestly do care about the poor and I object to ever-growing inequality on moral grounds. You may disagree with me but that doesn't mean I am without a fixed sense of morality.
The Guardian used to have such a sense also and I lament the change.
Also, I wouldn't engage here or at WUWT (or on the Guardian environment pages) if I wasn't willing to learn from those whom I disagree with.
I concede the overweening self-righteousness though. Fair point.
"overweening self-righteousness"
Can't help thinking of Oliver Letwin.
Oddly enough in the real world beer is undergoing a golden age in the USA. With more brands, more choices, more quality than ever before. And consumption is up as well in the real world.
The climate faithful are once again unbalanced and highly resistant to reality.
Us Kiwis get around a bit, and we also like a good beer, so we can tell you that beer, like beauty, is always in the eye of the beholder (so to speak). Czech beer, as sampled in the Czech Republic, is wonderful.
Many years ago, my mentor through my years in the engineering end of the garment trade, a charming old chap originally from the lace industry in Nottingham, told me that 'there is no such thing as bad beer - there is good beer and there is terrific beer, but no bad beer'.
The miserable Socialist buggers at the Guardian never appear to like anything much.
Mike Jackson on Jun 10, 2015 at 3:14 PM
"One of the reasons (I understand) that they are proliferating on both sides of the pond is that the commercial stuff is so awful."
Some years ago - in fact, many years ago, in Britain, the larger breweries started merging and acquiring each other. There was also the 'good idea' of splitting the breweries from the pubs and hotels. Over the years, the number of breweries reduced, while their size increased. Then, the few that were left were taken over by foreign breweries that had been doing something similar, or went 'international'.
John Smith's taken over by Courage, taken over by Scottish and Newcastle taken over by Heineken and Carlsberg
Tetley taken over by Carlsberg Group
Truman’s taken over by Grand Metropolitan (but now re-invented :) )
Watney Mann taken over by Grand Metropolitan
Grand Metropolitan merged with Guinness to form Diageo, which is in the news:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33045281
This meant that there are, to my knowledge, no mega-breweries based in Britain, but there were many, many, master brewers without a large employer nearby. This encouraged them to start their own micro-breweries.
The rest, as they say, is history.
I listened to a very interesting finance programme on BBC Radio 4, some time ago. It was all about Ice Cream! The plot goes like this:
An enthusiast decides to make some delicious home-made ice cream so they can sell it in their general shop. Eventually, local shops offer to sell it and sales increase, so the operation becomes larger and focuses on producing the product. Shops in the next town offer to sell the product, and the company grows, and grows, until .... the distance from the ice cream factory to the most distant shops become too large for the delicate product to keep its quality. At this point, some owners change their product to be more 'robust' to survive the long journey and handling, and, though their sales increase, it's not the same ice cream as it was before, so another enthusiast decides to make some delicious home-made ice cream ...
I think a similar story could be said to have happened in the brewing industry, with the large quantities involved.
On the other hand Climate Change™ has certainly been a boon for the production of tripe.
Boring Budweiser is a pale British brewed imitation of a pale American imitation of a superb Czech lager from Budvar/Bodowice.
Hick, man!
Well, since I live in Oregon, I decided to poke around and see if I could find out what the hops situation really is.
There was an article in The Oregonian (Oregon's equivalent of The Guardian) in January, claiming that low yields mean greater prices. http://www.oregonlive.com/beer/index.ssf/2015/01/2014_hops_report_low_yields_me.html
They say yield was down in 2014 because of an exceptionally warm July.
July was warmer than usual, 84F average compared to 80F for a "normal year": https://weatherspark.com/history/30477/2014/Portland-Oregon-United-States
Now the person they quote has a website: http://www.47hops.com/
I couldn't find any direct claim that yields were down because of a hot July. If you looked at that temperature site, you will see that the max temperature for the year was 97F. That is unusual, in most years there are many more days exceeding 100F. From that perspective (max temperatures) it was a rather cool year.
On 47 Hops, you will find that he states that the magic temperature that stops growth is 100F. We came close, for a day or so, but never hit there as we normally do.
If you read his comments (47 Hops) he talks about coming shortages, but those are because of increasing demand and disinterest in investors to increase capacity because of perceived risk, and that the basic hops crop (Alpha) is not being grown because growers can get more for the exotic varieties ... but you still need Alpha varieties as your base...
What no-one mentions is that even if tempeatures did increase a bit, growing could easily shift northward into Canada which has wide open spaces just waiting, but not high enough temperatures...
rga
"The Guardian (...) is kept going by the tens of thousands of copies sold to the BBC"
If it was relying on those copies it would have died long ago.
No, the Scott Trust which owns The Guardian used to also own the hugely profitable Autotrader magazine (the irony) which subsidized the paper for years.
The trust recently sold Autotrader for over half a billion pounds and even The Guardian is going to take a few decades to burn though that lot, even if it never sells another paper.
The shortage of hops is entirely my fault, as I'm on my 5th double IPA of the evening. Cheers, Prost, Slainte, and hic(!).
Oh, also. Sorry!
m courney
You believe in ever-growing inequality.
I don't. I believe we have in Western countries decreased inequality to a level where people of capability are unfairly much required to support those whose situation is worsened by their lack of moral.
Like, those who go and rob my family armedly, get also lots of subsidies from my tax money and are still called the poor whom I should pay more via taxes.
Inequality is a problem in countries like Russia and Nigeria, and care must be taken when someone wants to make that primarily a fault of the Western countries.
Said this, I'm still left-leaning. I think people need to be equal, and at some cases that means more work for all those who are not bound to a wheelchair.
M Courtney
As Bishop Hill's other token lefty, may I disagree with you about the importance of morality as the essential characteristic of the left? (For wherever two or three lefties are gathered together, there will be three of four disputatious factions.)
The trouble with making morality your touchstone is that you label all your opponents as immoral (which they're clearly not) and you end up moralising about Thomas the Tank Engine (see above).
There are good practical arguments to be made for devising a political system which eliminates poverty, and ensures decent living standards for all, but summoning them up requires an intellectual effort which few have shown since the heyday of Marxism (or Social Democracy, as it was once called).
It's so much easier to point fingers at people who take frequent flights, like the author of this article.
There's plenty of us lefties here. We just keep quiet about it to try to keep the haters a bit more quiet. Reflexive loathing of "the Left", as if it was monolithic, is no more sensible than reflexive believing in AGW. That they would follow our host and be on the right without believing everyone else is totally stupid and evil.
Posted in response. It will not last of course
I see the deniers are out in force, and they are all denying, as deniers do. Civilisation as we know it is coming to a catastrophic end, and all those wonderful things we Guardian readers take for granted like fine craft beers, single estate chocolate, good arabica coffee freshly brewed of a morning, orgasms for ladies whenever we want them, gender reassignment operations on demand, independence for Scotland and an immediate and total end to austerity, more money for the BBC and all the art subsidies anyone could dream of, Oh, and full recognition for the great work our hard working local authority staff are doing, well its all going, despite what the denying deniers say.
And why is this? The deniers will never admit this, but it is all going to be down to one simple thing.
We in Britain did not build enough wind turbines!
Its different things in different places. In Malaysia, standing naked on the top of a hill is enough to release catastrophic weather, which is why the law requires you to take the precaution on behalf of society as a whole of being fully clothed when at high elevations. Here its different, the catastrophes which are heading towards us on chocolate and orgasms can only be averted by building enough wind turbines, which we are failing to do.
I salute the Guardian for its heroic efforts on the turbine front, but fear that indifference and denial are dooming us all to a hop free future. What shall we do? Will it wipe out chardonnay too? It is too horrible to think of. Keep up the good work, and kudos to the new Editor for at least giving us a fair warning and time to try to adjust.
MCourtney
In my youth the one area of British life known for its moral compass was the traditional Left, born mainly out of the Non-conformists, Methodists especially and including my grandparents!
So I'm not trying to tar you all with the same brush.
All I'm saying is that what might be called the mainstream activist left these days is where the moral compass seems to have been wavering a bit in recent years.
I am not of the left but, as I have said to geoffchambers before now, I suspect there are many more things that unite us than divide us. The trouble is that in these days of sound bite politics and blogs like this one tends to take a broad brush approach which can sometimes be dangerous.
I know who I mean when I talk about "lefties" or "eco-warriors" or "enviro-mentalists". I don't think that includes you — though if we got onto other aspects of party politics, it might! ☺
Robert Christopher
I remember when Newcastle Brown was brewed just next to Haymarket bus station. Lovely smell. And that was Newcastle Breweries, none of this S&N rubbish. And before there was Scottish Breweries there was Usher-Vaux and before that there was Ushers and there was Vaux.
Did you know that McEwan put up the cash to build Edinburgh University's McEwan Hall and his main competitor was so pissed off at being upstaged that he promptly gave Edinburgh Corporation the money for a similar building a couple of hundred yards away and the Usher Hall has been one of Scotland's major concert halls ever since?
Oh, a mine of useless information, me!
artwest the Scot Trust manages all its money through 'off shore tax regimes ' yes the very same ones the Guardian attacks others for using. Although oddly not one of the many authors who have written these attack articles thought it was worth while mentioning this nor have any Guardian journalists taken any principle stance by asking their pay masters how they justify this , odd that !
By the way one very good way to get your post deleted on CIF is to mention the manner in which the papers owners run their own tax affairs .
Mike Jackson, thank you for replying to me. Last night had been a long day and I may have taken umbrage too easily, my apologies.
Interestingly, my part of the left is that of a practising Methodist who attends church weekly and tries to be moderate in drinking (if not temperate). Perhaps that is why morality drives my political views.
By which I mean personal morality rather than judgements on differing opinions.
And I don't mind disagreements.
I dare to be open about my leftiness here on a sceptic blog. That's not always conducive to a friendly atmosphere. But it's better here in the UK than on WUWT.
Caring about inequality is a leftist platitude.
The Left doesn't know what it stands for.
Being of the Left used to imply a belief in state ownership of the means of production and distribution but I can’t imagine any sane person advocating that nowadays.
Mooloo
I agree about the reflexive loathing. I avoid discussions which involve accusations aimed at “leftist scum”, of which there are more and more, unfortunately, but here Mike Jackson and MCourtney were having a useful exchange. Mike Jackson has expressed admiration for Dennis Skinner MP, possibly the last socialist in the British Labour Party.
Ideology has a peculiar circular fusion and dynamic. It's difficult to characterize in words, but the extremes of Left and Right(and is that East or West, North or South?), meet in a totalitarianism which is indistinguishable by source, being both equally evil and practically identical in most respects.
Most conservatives I've met on the internet would have been called liberal a half a century ago. The shift in popular attitude and in terminology has made hazy the shift of liberalism, through progressivism, toward totalitarianism.
I still have much respect for the self-described 'leftists' here who still sound like liberals. That was, note the tense, an admirable moniker, once upon a long ago.
==============
I had a soft spot (in the head, probably) for Tony Benn as well!
I'm no longer sure that the terms "left" and "right" have any real meaning. What kim says is correct, that you can't put a cigarette paper between Hitler and Stalin. The philosophy was near-identical even if the words tended to be different. One reason why the extreme left and the extreme right are at each other's throats so viciously has usually been that their political views are so close to each other. Basically they're fighting for the same ground.
Whether Skinner is actually a socialist depends on how you define Socialism. His presence in the HoC suggests a support for parliamentary democracy which the radical 'left', who claim to be true socialists, despise.
It's all very confusing ...
Perhaps we ought to stick to the simple things in life, like climate change and decent beer!
RC
"An enthusiast decides to make some delicious home-made ice cream.."
It is, too. We bought an ice-cream maker a few years ago and the end product is dramatically better than any commercial ice-cream I've tried. It probably doesn't keep or travel, but it never has to!
Best kitchen gadget ever.
He lost the arguement when he stated that czech beer is rubbish
Budvar anyone?