Tag: Crops

China’s Record Harvest Embarrasses Climate Crisis Movement

On September 23, the autumnal equinox, villagers in Dongjiao, a farming community on the edge of Xiangyang in central China, set out crayfish, peaches, and banquet bowls for the country’s ninth Farmers’ Harvest Festival. They had earned the feast.
But where are the headlines? Had the harvest fallen by a few percentage points, a dozen stories would have linked the decline to a “climate breakdown.”

A festive harvest scene featuring a table filled with crops, including lobsters and apples, with farmers and children enjoying the bounty. Two large harvesters work in the background under a banner celebrating the harvest festival.
AI generation by Meta

From CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

This fall China celebrated a harvest festival against the backdrop of record summer grain output of more than 150 million metric tons, although this notable accomplishment did not make most news.

A harvest of such unprecedented size by the world’s most populous grain producer does not fit the fable of a dying planet. Crisis merchants dominating the media have invested decades in a story of scorched fields and starving millions. A nation of farmers celebrating abundance is an embarrassment. Here’s the truth:

On September 23, the autumnal equinox, villagers in Dongjiao, a farming community on the edge of Xiangyang in central China, set out crayfish, peaches, and banquet bowls for the country’s ninth Farmers’ Harvest Festival. They had earned the feast.

With more than a fifth of the autumn crop area already harvested, Agriculture Minister Zhang Zhu said the country was on track for another bumper harvest for the full year. In 2025, annual grain production exceeded 700 million tons for a second straight year, giving every Chinese citizen more than 500 kilograms of grain, well above a benchmark for food security.

The science behind the harvest is not mysterious. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the raw material of photosynthesis. Wheat and rice, the staples of China, respond positively to elevated CO2.NASA reports that up to half of Earth’s vegetated lands greened significantly over a 35-year period, with 70% of that greening attributed to rising atmospheric CO2 acting as a plant fertilizer. Another NASA analysis showed that China and India dominate this planetary greening. China alone accounts for a quarter of the global increase in leaf area despite covering but a fraction of the world’s vegetated land.

Warmth has helped, too. Longer frost-free seasons in the northeast have allowed rice and corn to spread across Heilongjiang, China’s largest grain-producing province. It is fitting that three driverless harvesters opened this year’s festival in Harbin, the provincial capital. China saw more flooding than drought this year, with the worst confined to local pockets, but overall conditions favored farming.

But where are the headlines? Had the harvest fallen by a few percentage points, a dozen stories would have linked the decline to a “climate breakdown.” Positive reports get a shrug. The industrial emissions of carbon dioxide elevating the gas’s atmospheric concentration are producing undeniable benefits that those demonizing CO2 refuse to acknowledge.

The human consequence of this agricultural ascent should end claims of a planet in terminal decline. China’s per capita food supply rose from 2,328 kilocalories a day in 1980 to 3,029 in 2000, a 30% jump, with average intake near 2,830 kilocalories by the early 2010s. Meat consumption quadrupled between 1980 and 2009, from 14.6 kilograms to 58.2 kilograms per person.

Behind those rising calories stands affordable energy. About 70% of the ammonia produced from natural gas and coal is used to make fertilizers that help to make possible China’s crop yields. Tractors, pumps, and combines run on diesel. This is the production chain the net-zero lobby and crisis propagandists pretend does not exist.

Western lenders and diplomats addled by climate dogma are urging governments of developing nations to reduce the use of fertilizers and fossil fuels. Sri Lanka tried a version of this when it banned synthetic fertilizers in 2021. Rice output collapsed within a season, and the country slid into economic crisis. China took the opposite road and now celebrates record harvests.

The media’s silent treatment of these facts is a necessary tactic of keeping alive the apocalyptic climate narrative. Every acre of global greening, every rising calorie, every record harvest chips away at the claim that humanity faces a climate emergency requiring the surrender of affordable energy and industrial agriculture.

The climate industrial complex depends on the specter of a failing biosphere and is threatened by grain-production records and thriving ecosystems. So, editors skip the hopeful stories and gin up ones about receding glaciers that have been melting since the end of the last great glacial advance more than 10,000 years ago.

Originally published at American Thinker, October 19th, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.

PBS News Is Wrong, Climate Change Is Not Causing Georgia’s Drought

A recent PBS News report, “Farmers struggle with crops as climate change makes weather less predictable,” claims that droughts and flooding in parts of the United States, particularly the Southeast, are due to climate change, and are becoming more frequent and extreme. This is false, particularly for Georgia, the area PBS highlights in the story.

From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

A recent PBS News report, “Farmers struggle with crops as climate change makes weather less predictable,” claims that droughts and flooding in parts of the United States, particularly the Southeast, are due to climate change, and are becoming more frequent and extreme. This is false, particularly for Georgia, the area PBS highlights in the story.

PBS reports:

“More than half of the continental U.S. is facing drought conditions. But other parts of the country are facing the opposite problem. Extreme weather conditions can have major impacts on farmers and their crops at a time when they’re already facing high production costs. Paul Solman recently traveled to southern Georgia to hear from some of those farmers. “

Extreme weather being different, and even alternating, in different parts of the country is not unusual or new. The “weather whiplash” phenomena is an artifact of news coverage, not a real thing. Flooding often follows after a period of drought dries and hardens or compacts the soil, preventing water from soaking into the soil as a result making runoff more severe. This is a known, natural feature of recovery from drought that PBS vaguely admits later in the coverage.

The state that PBS focuses on in the piece is Georgia. Their reporter, Paul Solman, interviews farmers who supposedly lived on their land for generations, and each of them insists that this year’s drought conditions are unprecedented.

In answer to Solman’s question about whether one farmer has ever experienced drought like this year’s before, the farmer said that he hadn’t in his entire lifetime, and that he “never heard of stories of a drought this bad either.”

Another farmer says her crops suffered when rain finally came, and asserts that “we’re seeing wetter wets and drier dries.”

A climate scientist is interviewed next, who asserts that “[c]limate change is making these [droughts and deluge cycles] more frequent,” making it harder for farmers to predict when to plant crops.

Data disagree with both farmers as well as the climate scientist.

Drought data from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental information show that not only is the current drought in Georgia not unprecedented, but major prolonged droughts that were even more severe have occurred in the state several times in just the past few decades, as well as much longer ago. Drought conditions in 2011-2012 and the mid-1950s were worse than today. The most severe drought occurred in 1925, more than 100 years of global warming ago, when temperatures and carbon dioxide levels were lower. (See figure below).

Figure 1: NOAA National Centers for Environmental information, Climate at a Glance: Statewide Time Series, published June 2026, retrieved on June 26, 2026 from https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/statewide/time-series

Data show the particular county that the first and second farmers interviewed by PBS are from, Long County, saw a bad drought as recently as the summer of 2012, when the entire county suffered D3 “extreme drought” conditions. The 2010-2012 drought was far more severe than this one and lasted longer. Other worse and more prolonged droughts occurred in 2007, 2002, 1990, 1981, 1954, and further back, with the worst sustained drought occurring in the 1930s. (See figure below)

The figure above also shows the periods of wet conditions. It is clear that there are many years going back to 1900 that saw even more severe swings to overabundance of rain.

Data show no long term trend towards an increase in extreme short-term precipitation events in Georgia, either. (See figure below).

Figure 2: Chart source: Frankson, R., K.E. Kunkel, L.E. Stevens, B.C. Stewart, W. Sweet, B. Murphey, and S. Rayne, 2022: Georgia State Climate Summary 2022. NOAA Technical Report NESDIS 150-GA. NOAA/NESDIS, Silver Spring, MD, 5 pp.

One should not blame the farmers for feeling like this year was particularly bad for drought in Georgia. The news, for one, has been claiming as much, as discussed in the post “Sorry, Los Angeles Times, Climate Change Isn’t Driving Georgia’s Wildfires,” where the media were trying to blame some wildfires this summer on the same conditions, falsely linked to climate trends. Human beings are pretty bad at recalling the full context of past years’ weather conditions off the top of their heads, we often tend to feel that nothing was ever worse than what we are currently experiencing, unless the difference was really stark.

The PBS “journalists” should be ashamed of the slant of this coverage. They offered no pushback whatsoever on the suggestion that Georgia’s drought was unprecedented or part of a pattern of worsening drought, which it is not. The data are publicly available and easily found for any intrepid reporter to discover. It seems that PBS was far more interested in using a tough year for farmers as part of a larger climate alarmist narrative push, than actually digging into the truth.

The Social Cost of Carbon figures were all wildly wrong: One recalculation wipes half the cost or more.

Every ton of carbon dioxide we emit is supposedly going to cause $220 USD in losses in the future, which justifies throwing lots of money at efforts to reduce emissions — like subsidizing EVs and solar panels, and inventing cricket burgers. This is called the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC).

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Nearly every plea for carbon subsidies depends on “the Social Cost of Carbon”, and it’s wrong

Every ton of carbon dioxide we emit is supposedly going to cause $220 USD in losses in the future, which justifies throwing lots of money at efforts to reduce emissions — like subsidizing EVs and solar panels, and inventing cricket burgers. This is called the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC). But half of that imaginary cost was the devastation higher temperatures would theoretically wreak on agriculture — which doesn’t make sense given that plants eat CO2 for breakfast. But for years bureaucrats and scientists have been telling us the damage in crops was going to cost $102USD per ton of carbon, and investors and politicians have been feeding that into their cash registers, and it’s all wrong.

Ten years ago, Challinor et al did a big meta-review of crop changes with temperature, using 1,722 records, but many of these records had no figures for CO2 itself. And the whole point of calculating the social cost of carbon really depends on calculating what happens when CO2 rises and supposedly causes temperatures to rise too. In 2017 Moore et al took those numbers and simulated them into gloom and doom scenarios which the Biden team converted into a fivefold increase in the “cost of carbon”. So, Ross McKitrick took the same data from 2014 and then used an estimate of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) of about 3 °C which is the standard IPCC type figure and filled in a lot of the missing figures. After recalculating the crop yields at higher temperatures and higher CO2, he found that the benefits of the extra CO2 outdid any downsides of warmer temperatures.

Ross McKitrick shows that even in the unlikely (unbelievable) event that CO2 causes five degrees of warming — it is not going to reduce crop yields.

Billions of dollars have been spent based on the idea that all CO2 emissions are bad, and there is a “social cost of carbon”, but if CO2 increases crops (and farmers already pump it into greenhouses because it does) — then there goes half the “social cost of CO2”. Indeed, increasing crops must add wealth, pushing the net cost figures down even further.

Indeed, if we could arrange another degree or two of warming, we could increase corn, rice and wheat by 5 or 10%. It is inhumane to deny the hungry people of the world, so obviously, any responsible civilization should be emitting more CO2. Go forth and drive your pick-up truck, buy that SUV, the boat and the private jet. Do it for the children. ☺

McKitrick (2025). “Extended crop yield meta-analysis data do not support upward SCC revision”. Sci Rep 15, 5575.  Edits were made to the heading by me.

C3 crops like wheat, soybeans and rice ought to benefit the most from extra CO2. C4 crops, like corn and sorghum (top left graph) have evolved to make the most of lower CO2 levels already so will get less of an advantage if CO2 returns to it’s former higher levels. The newer C4 pathways give such a growth advantage, allowing plants to thrive in hotter and drier environments, that they independently evolved at least 45 times in the last 15 to 30 million years. The reason the C4 plants didn’t take over the world is that they need more sunlight and don’t thrive in cooler or shadier areas.

Willie Soon, Ronan and Michael Connolly discuss McKitricks paper below in the video. See also Vijay Jayaraj  at the Daily Signal.

REFERENCES

McKitrick (2025). “Extended crop yield meta-analysis data do not support upward SCC revision”. Sci Rep 15, 5575.

Challinor, A. J. et al. A meta-analysis of crop yield under climate change and adaptation. Nat. Clim Change 4(4), 287 (2014).

Moore, F. C., Baldos, U., Hertel, T. & Diaz, D. New science of climate change impacts on agriculture implies higher social cost of carbon. Nat. Commun. 8, 1607. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01792-x (2017).

Record Setting Crops Are Good News, Bloomberg, Thanks for Reporting It

Human Progress excerpted a paywalled article from Bloomberg discussing the fact that major crops are expected to continue to set records in the 2024/2025 crop year. This good news is not unexpected for anyone who understands agronomy and botany or who regularly reads Climate Realism. It reflects the long-term trend for most crops during the period of modest warming and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations. Sadly, Bloomberg’s story ignores the proven and significant role rising CO2 levels are playing in improved crop yields and production.

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

Human Progress excerpted a paywalled article from Bloomberg discussing the fact that major crops are expected to continue to set records in the 2024/2025 crop year. This good news is not unexpected for anyone who understands agronomy and botany or who regularly reads Climate Realism. It reflects the long-term trend for most crops during the period of modest warming and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations. Sadly, Bloomberg’s story ignores the proven and significant role rising CO2 levels are playing in improved crop yields and production.

Human Progress writes:

Compared with a decade ago, the world will harvest in 2024-25 about 10% more wheat, about 15% more corn, nearly 30% more soybeans, and about 10% more rice. Except for corn, all the other three key food commodities will enjoy a record high production.

[T]he US Department of Agriculture said it anticipates American farmers will reap record yields for two key food commodities: on average, 183.1 bushels per acre of corn, and 53.2 bushels per acre of soybeans…

Two decades ago, US corn farmers were harvesting about 150 bushels per acre; in the mid-1980s, the number was closer to 110 bushels.

This good news further confirms what Climate Realism has long pointed out. Modestly warmer weather and higher CO2 levels are good for plants in general, leading to a net greening of the earth and boosting yields and production of crops. In fact, the most recent data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that globally the yield and production of cereal crops (the crop segment that makes up the majority of the calorie intake each day, often referred to as staple foods, rice, wheat, rye, oats, barley, millet, and maize, for example), have increased dramatically over the recent period slight warming. Between 1990 and 2022, the most recent year for which the FAO has data:

  • Cereal yields have increased nearly 52 percent, with the most recent record for yield set in 2022; and
  • Cereal production grew by approximately 57 percent. (see the chart, below)

Unfortunately, Bloomberg downplays or ignores entirely the role warming and rising CO2 have played in record crop yields and production, attributing the record setting crop production to expanded irrigation and better technologies like improved combines and tractors. Although improved technologies and wider access to them has undoubtedly contributed to the increase in crop production, research thoroughly demonstrates that so to have CO2 increases. Indeed, higher CO2 levels may have been the most significant factor driving crop increases in recent decades.

As has been discussed in more than 200 articles on Climate Realism, what is true of global cereal production, is true for most crops, like fruits, legumes, tubers, and vegetables, in most countries around the world. Yields have set records repeatedly during the recent period of climate change, food security has increased, and hunger and malnutrition have fallen.

Agronomy and Botany explain why crop production and yields have increased amidst global warming, and the same sciences explain why the world should likely expect crop production gains to continue. Modest warming has brought slightly higher rainfall totals, and a modestly longer growing season with fewer crop-killing late-season frosts. In addition, crops are benefitting from higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, which any greenhouse operator will tell you is plant fertilizer, contributing to plants growing larger, faster, and using water more efficiently.

Thousands of real-world field and greenhouse experiments summarized at CO2 Science document the beneficial effect on higher CO2 concentrations on plant growth and crop production. Even NASA has acknowledged this point, writing:

Studies have shown that higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide affect crops in two important ways: they boost crop yields by increasing the rate of photosynthesis, which spurs growth, and they reduce the amount of water crops lose through transpiration. Plants transpire through their leaves, which contain tiny pores called stomata that open and collect carbon dioxide molecules for photosynthesis. During that process they release water vapor. As carbon dioxide concentrations increase, the pores don’t open as wide, resulting in lower levels of transpiration by plants and thus increased water-use efficiency.

Specifically, research cited in the journal Environmental Economics and Policy Studies found:

[S]atellite-based studies have yielded compelling evidence of stronger general growth effects than were anticipated in the 1990s. Zhu et al (2016) published a comprehensive study on greening and human activity from 1982 to 2009. The ratio of land areas that became greener, as opposed to browner, was approximately 9 to 1. The increase in atmospheric CO2 was just under 15% over the interval but was found to be responsible for approximately 70% of the observed greening, followed by the deposition of airborne nitrogen compounds (9%) from the combustion of coal and deflation of nitrate-containing agricultural fertilizers, lengthening growing seasons (8%), and land cover changes (4%), mainly reforestation of regions such as southeastern North America.

It is refreshing to see a major media outlet, like Bloomberg, publish some good news about crop production amid the near constant drum beat of false “climate change induced crop failure” stories put out by the mainstream media. One can only speculate why its writers ignored the firmly established roles that modest warming and more CO2 have played over the decades and continue to play in the increase in food production.

Wrong John Kerry and MSNBC, Climate Change Is Not Destroying Crops or Killing People

A Fox News article, titled “Climate czar John Kerry says extreme storms caused by climate change will ‘rip’ crops away and ‘destroy homes’” quotes Kerry saying that climate change is devastating crops, destroying homes, and killing people, problems that Kerry claims will only become worse in the future.

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

A Fox News article, titled “Climate czar John Kerry says extreme storms caused by climate change will ‘rip’ crops away and ‘destroy homes’” quotes Kerry saying that climate change is devastating crops, destroying homes, and killing people, problems that Kerry claims will only become worse in the future.

The article cites an interview with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, reporting:

The former Democratic candidate told Psaki 15 million people die every year because of bad air quality, and another 10 million people die because of extreme heat, as “it’s getting hotter.”

Kerry also said there are going to be more intensive weather events that will cost the country “an awful lot more money.”

“So, as that happens, as people see their farms, you know, their crops ripped away, or their homes destroyed, you watch the pressure grow,” Kerry said. “I believe we’re in a transformational moment. I think this will be one of, if not the, but it will be one of the top three issues in the ‘24 presidential election. No question in my mind.”

Kerry’s claims concerning storms and crops are provably wrong.

Hard data show storms are not getting worse as Kerry claims. Violent storms that spawn tornadoes have declined as discussed in Climate at a Glance: Tornadoes.

The number of tornadoes in the United States, as well as in other countries, has been slowly declining for the past 45 years. At the same time, the number of strong to violent tornadoes, EF3 or higher, have dramatically declined over the past 45 years. (See Figure 1.)

In fact, the United States set a record in 2017–18 for the longest period in recorded history without a tornado death, and it set a record for the longest period in history (306 days) without an EF3 or stronger tornado. The two record-low years for tornado strikes in the United States both occurred this past decade, in 2014 and 2018.

Figure 1. This figure shows the frequency of strong to violent tornadoes (tornadoes registering EF3 or stronger) has been declining since the early 1970s. Sources: Graph by Anthony Watts using official NOAA/Storm Prediction Center data.

Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has acknowledged, “[t]here is low confidence in observed trends in small spatial-scale phenomena such as tornadoes.

Likewise, data shows hurricanes have also not increased as the planet has modestly warmed. The United States recently went through its longest period in recorded history without a major hurricane strike.

The IPCC largely agrees with this view. In its 2018 interim report, the IPCC stated there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.” Similarly, in the IPCC’s AR6 WG1 report, released in August 2021, the IPCC noted,

“Identifying past trends in TC [tropical storm] metrics remains a challenge,” a statement that essentially admits scientists have yet to identify a solid measurable upward trend in the data.

The other crop-destroying weather issue facing farmers is floods, and those are decreasing as well.

The IPCC reports it has “low confidence” climate change is impacting flooding. The U.N. IPCC admits having “low confidence” in even the “sign” of any changes—in other words, it is just as likely that climate change is making floods less frequent and less severe.

Of course, with data showing less severe weather in the form of floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, it almost goes without saying that damage losses to homes and businesses, when adjusted for economic growth and inflation, have also significantly declined.

Kerry’s concerns about agriculture are equally misplaced. If he were correct, surely with climate change running unchecked for 30 plus years it would have had some deleterious effect on food production, but none can be found. Rather, crop production has significantly improved during the recent period of modest warming. Data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show the global production of the world’s most important crops continued to set records amid modest warming over the past few decades, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2. FAO graph showing staple crops have risen significantly during the period of the Earth’s modest warming.

As my colleague Linnea Luken explains in an article on Climate Realism,

As has been discussed in more than 150 articles on Climate Realism, what is true of global cereal production is true for most crops, like fruits, legumes, tubers, and vegetables, in most countries around the world. Yields have set records repeatedly during the recent period of climate change, food security has increased, and hunger and malnutrition have fallen.

To sum up, the data clearly shows that Kerry’s statements about crops and severe weather are false.

Finally, there’s this from the article.

She [Jen Psaki] asked Kerry if he could make the case for climate change to be the most important issue, instead of the fifth most important issue.

“It is an existential issue,” Kerry said. “It is an issue where people today are dying.”

The former Democratic candidate told Psaki 15 million people die every year because of bad air quality, and another 10 million people die because of extreme heat, as “it’s getting hotter.”

Once again, data debunks Kerry’s claims that climate change is causing more deaths. Real-world data show temperature and weather related deaths have declined dramatically, over the past century.

Multiple lines of evidence prove Kerry is wrong on all counts. If, evidence to the contrary, Kerry believes everything he says, perhaps it is time he retires. Armed with bad information and easily falsified opinions, it is dangerous for him to be wielding power and influence over public policy. Kerry’s unjustified fearmongering is more dangerous than climate change itself.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.

Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts.

He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.

He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.