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.