Ski Lifts and Coffee Beans

In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!

Late December tweet from Donald J Trump

You’d think a mentally stable genius who went to the best schools might actually understand why the east coast was slammed over the holidays with some of bitterest cold weather in years as a reflection of global climate change and not as proof that it does not exist. You’d think the photographs of melting polar ice and the opening of the Northwest Passage might have given him a hint of what his own scientists and military intelligence experts are telling him: as the poles heat up from the greenhouse effect, the air “up there” expands. And as it expands, this heated air pushes the west-to-east currents away from the poles.

In the north, as the Gulf Stream comes across the Pacific into Alaska and Canada, that expanding polar air literally pushes that very cold Gulf Stream increasingly southward as it moves across the continent. So temperatures drop accordingly. Hence it is warmer at the ice cap, and a whole lot colder in New York City. We call that phenomenon the “Polar Vortex.” The earth’s average temperatures are still the warmest they have been in recorded history… and rising year-by-year.

I like to look at the “little things” that reflect the bigger picture. Like the impact of climate change on ski resorts. Changes in temperature and precipitation obviously impact snowfall and the attractiveness of mountain resorts for winter sports. And there’s only so much you can do with manmade snow (per the above picture) – assuming it’s cold enough to stay frozen – to make a resort attractive to winter vacationers.

The New York Times (January 10^th) looked at research that suggests that many “snow destinations” that served as prior hosts of the Winter Olympics – notably Sochi (Russia – 2014), Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany – 1936), Vancouver (Canada – 2010), Oslo (Norway – 1952), Chamonix (France – 1924), Innsbruck (Austria – 1964), Grenoble (France – 1968), Sarajevo (Yugoslavia – 1984) and Squaw Valley (United States – 1960) – would not be sufficiently cold enough by mid-century and beyond to be able to host those events again.

“A team of researchers, led by Daniel Scott, a geography professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, came to that conclusion by taking climate data from previous Winter Games locations and applying climate-change models to predict future winter weather conditions… The research, originally published in 2014, was updated this month to include the Pyeongchang Olympics, which begin Feb. 9, and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.

“According to Dr. Scott’s research, using emissions projections in which global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise through midcentury and global temperatures increase by 4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, nine of the host locations will be too hot to handle the Games. But that temperature increase won't be felt equally. Chamonix, France, the site of the first Winter Games, will have winter temperatures 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by midcentury…

“[But what about manmade snow?] Dr. Scott’s model factors in artificial snowmaking, but that has its limits. The technology involves pumping water through small nozzles under high pressure. When the water hits cold air it freezes almost instantly and turns into snow – but only if the air is cold enough… ‘You’re relying on cold air to do the refrigeration for you,’ Dr. Scott said.

“When the temperatures are above freezing, as they were during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, you have to turn to more extreme measures…In Vancouver, which melted under one of its warmest winters on record, organizers brought in 1,000 bales of straw and covered them with a mix of artificial snow and natural snow hauled in from higher elevations to cover the bare ski slopes.” Minor inconvenience reflective of a major shift in the global ecosystem that will impact everyone… very significantly. Can we at least take a break for a moment? Ah, what’s better after a day on the slopes than a warm cup of coffee? What, oh no, not that too!

A University of Vermont Study – “Coupling of pollination services and coffee suitability under climate change” published in the August 10, 2017 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America – has some bad news for coffee drinkers (and farmers in general): “Climate change will cause geographic range shifts for pollinators and major crops, with global implications for food security and rural livelihoods. However, little is known about the potential for coupled impacts of climate change on pollinators and crops. Coffee production exemplifies this issue, because large losses in areas suitable for coffee production have been projected due to climate change and because coffee production is dependent on bee pollination. We modeled the potential distributions of coffee and coffee pollinators under current and future climates in Latin America to understand whether future coffee-suitable areas will also be suitable for pollinators. Our results suggest that coffee-suitable areas will be reduced 73–88% by 2050 across warming scenarios, a decline 46–76% greater than estimated by global assessments. Mean bee richness will decline 8–18% within future coffee-suitable areas, but all are predicted to contain at least 5 bee species, and 46–59% of future coffee-suitable areas will contain 10 or more species. In our models, coffee suitability and bee richness each increase (i.e., positive coupling) in 10–22% of future coffee-suitable areas. Diminished coffee suitability and bee richness (i.e., negative coupling), however, occur in 34–51% of other areas. Finally, in 31–33% of the future coffee distribution areas, bee richness decreases and coffee suitability increases. Assessing coupled effects of climate change on crop suitability and pollination can help target appropriate management practices, including forest conservation, shade adjustment, crop rotation, or status quo, in different regions.”

Crop-growing dynamics will change dramatically for regions that have typically been known for the production of specified crops. As bio-historian, UCLA Professor Jared Diamond, has illustrated in his famous book, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), civilization spread like a belt – east-west and not north-south – because crops do not adjust well to longitudinal movement of more than 500 miles (where temperature and precipitation patterns change dramatically).

That reality is equally applicable where crop production is stationary but climate changes for different reasons. Good news for Canada, Greenland and Russia? Maybe, if their farmers adjust accordingly, but bad news for most of the rest of the earth. So this little story about coffee is just a reflection of the much bigger story of agricultural displacement that will challenge survival for future generations. It’s a bit more than, “Your coffee is going to get very expensive over the years.”

We may have already passed an ecological tipping point beyond which climate with continue to slam us with weather-related anomalies, aggregating to the storm surges, rising tides, droughts, flood and devastating wildfires we call “climate.” And yes, there is a different between “weather” (what’s happen here and now) and “climate” (the macro picture). You’d think we’d at least want to slow the damage down. But then, the self-proclaimed mentally stable genius admittedly does not read and does not believe his cadre of well-educated and experienced experts. You have to wonder why he has to tell you he is a mentally stable genius… why he has to use words to describe what should otherwise be obvious to all who choose to look and listen. Hmmm….

I’m Peter Dekom and “methinks the President doth protest too much.”