Tag: U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization

Wrong, Reuters, An Early Champagne Harvest Isn’t Proof of Climate Change

Reuters reports in “Record-early champagne harvest highlights climate change impact on French vineyards” that this year’s record-early Champagne grape harvest demonstrates the impact of climate change on French vineyards and signals a troubling future for the region’s wine industry. This is misleading.

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From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

Reuters reports in “Record-early champagne harvest highlights climate change impact on French vineyards” that this year’s record-early Champagne grape harvest demonstrates the impact of climate change on French vineyards and signals a troubling future for the region’s wine industry. This is misleading. The best available evidence suggests the article mistakes one season’s unusual weather for long-term climate change and presents normal agricultural variability as proof of a climate trend.

One of the oldest rules in climatology is that weather is not climate. Yet Reuters ignores that distinction almost immediately.

An unusually warm spring and summer will accelerate grape development. Cooler, wetter years delay it. Vineyard managers have known this for centuries because their livelihoods depend on understanding exactly how seasonal weather affects vines. Some years, the harvest begins early. Other years, it stretches well into September or October. That is simply how agriculture works.

Reuters treats this year’s harvest date as though it were evidence of climate change rather than evidence that 2026 had an unusually warm growing season. Those are two very different conclusions. The 2026 growing season in France was indeed exceptionally and historically warm, kicked off by the warmest spring recorded since 1900 with an average temperature anomaly of +1.7°C above seasonal norms. So, it’s no surprise that grapes grew faster in the warmer weather.

The article repeatedly links this year’s heat and drought directly to climate change without ever demonstrating that connection. Instead, it strings together observations about warm weather, earlier harvesting, reduced yields, and changing grape chemistry, then simply assumes climate change is the explanation.

Reuters quotes an agroclimatologist saying harvest dates across French vineyards have advanced by roughly three weeks over the past 50 years. Even if that observation is accurate, it does not establish that climate change is solely, or even primarily, responsible.

Viticulture has changed enormously during that same period. Growers have adopted improved grape clones, different rootstocks, modern canopy management, precision irrigation, improved pest control, better disease management, more accurate weather forecasting, and sophisticated monitoring of grape maturity. Harvest decisions have become more precise because growers now monitor sugar content, acidity, and phenolic development with tools that simply did not exist decades ago.

Reuters never asks how much of the changing harvest schedule reflects these advances rather than changes in climate, yet that that omission matters.

The article quotes one winemaker recalling that harvests used to occur after school resumed and that harvesting before mid- August once seemed unimaginable. Those recollections make for colorful journalism, but memories are not climate data. Harvest timing has never been fixed on a date.

Agricultural history is full of unusually early harvests, unusually late harvests, bumper crops, crop failures, droughts, floods, frosts, and heat waves. Farmers have always adapted because weather has always varied from year to year. That variability is precisely why climatologists distinguish weather from climate. Reuters blurs that distinction throughout the article.

The story also ignores a point that cuts against its narrative.

Champagne grapes are harvested when they reach the desired balance of sugar and acidity, not on a fixed calendar date. If weather accelerates ripening in a particular year, growers harvest earlier. If cooler weather delays ripening, they harvest later.

That flexibility is not evidence of climate change affecting the harvest, it is evidence farmers and vintners adapt to weather, exactly as they have since the rise of agriculture.

Perhaps the biggest weakness in Reuters’ reporting is that it never considers alternative explanations. Every observation is viewed through the lens of climate change, even though year-to-year weather variability provides a perfectly reasonable explanation for an unusually early harvest.

This has become a familiar pattern in climate reporting. A hurricane becomes evidence of climate change. A drought becomes evidence of climate change. A flood becomes evidence of climate change. Now an early grape harvest is added to the list.

But isolated events do not establish climate trends. If they did, every unusually late harvest, cool summer, or damaging spring frost would have to be cited as evidence against global warming.

No serious climatologist would make that argument. Reuters should not make the opposite one and they are irresponsible for doing so.

Good journalism requires more than finding an unusual event and attaching the words “climate change” to it. It requires demonstrating, rather than asserting, that climate change is the most likely explanation after considering natural variability and other contributing factors. Of course, that requires research into history and growing cycles, which Reuters never undertakes. Instead, it turns one growing season into another climate morality play, leaving readers with the false impression that a single year’s early Champagne harvest somehow proves a long-term climate crisis.

By the way, even if climate change were resulting in earlier harvests, that wouldn’t necessarily mean disaster or proof of a crisis for the industry. Farmers and vintners regularly adapt to changing conditions. A crisis would be if harvests failed or declined substantially overtime, and data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that that is not the case.  Reuters’ story is advocacy masquerading as reporting. Its readers deserve better.

Wrong Again, Grist, Climate Change Is Not Causing Higher Coffee Prices

Grist posted a story blaming climate change for a recent rise in coffee prices. This is false, coffee production and yields have improved amid modest warming. As a result, Grist must seek another cause for higher prices.

Harvesters collecting coffee cherries in a lush coffee plantation, with rows of coffee plants in the background.

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

A cup filled with coffee beans placed on a surface covered in more coffee beans.

Grist posted a story blaming climate change for a recent rise in coffee prices. This is false, coffee production and yields have improved amid modest warming. As a result, Grist must seek another cause for higher prices.

In the story, “Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher,” Grist staff writer, Frida Garza, spends 85 percent of her story describing how the tariffs President Donald Trump is imposing on Vietnam will likely affect a recently developed artisanal coffee company, using organically grown Vietnamese Robusta blends, and then generalizing the claims to the impacts on coffee from other growing regions like Brazil. Note, despite climate change leading in the title, so far, the story only discusses the potential impacts of tariffs on future coffee prices.

Only the last section of the story deals with climate change, and then only to imply that climate change has caused recent droughts that have affected some coffee growers.

“Hartley added that one of the impacts of droughts on coffee growers is that younger farmers worried about the future are considering leaving the business,” writes Garza. “Regardless of whether the U.S. imposes prohibitive tariffs on individual coffee-growing countries, climate change is already taking a toll on this workforce.”

Except in the misleading title of the story, nowhere does Garza specifically argue that climate change has caused droughts, with attendant coffee shortages, resulting in higher prices. Which is good, as far as it goes, since there is no evidence climate change is causing worsening droughts or causing a decline in coffee production or harvests. As such, one can only surmise Garza used “climate change” as a hook to snag readers attention.

Concerning drought, Climate Realism has posted more than 100 stories rebutting false media claims that climate change has made the occurrences of drought more frequent or severe, here, here, and for Brazil, here, for instance.

Garza can’t draw support for her suggestion that climate change is causing worsening drought conditions from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, either. In its most recent report, the 2021 Sixth Assessment report, the IPCC distinguishes four categories of drought: hydrological, meteorological, ecological, and agricultural. The IPCC finds no evidence climate change has increased the number, duration, or intensity of hydrological or meteorological droughts, and it has only medium confidence it has “contributed to changes in agricultural and ecological droughts and has led to an increase in the overall affected land area.”

Even for ecological and agricultural droughts the data is a mixed bag. The IPCC divides the world into 47 separate regions of study when analyzing drought trends, and its data suggest ecological and agricultural drought may have increased during the period of modest warming in 12 of those 47 regions. However, in only two of those regions does the IPCC have even “medium confidence” for any human role in the observed increase. For the remaining regions experiencing a possible increase in droughts, the IPCC has low confidence human activities have had any discernible impact.

Climate change can’t be blamed for causing a phenomenon, increasing drought frequency and severity, that is not happening.

Nor is there evidence in either coffee production data or price data that climate change is causing a crisis.

In response to the Grist article and one from earlier in the year published by the New York Times, climate researcher Bjorn Lomborg posted a short but thorough refutation on X, showing that prices in recent years and decades are neither records, nor even higher than average when compared to the past. (see below)

A tweet from Bjorn Lomborg discussing coffee prices and refuting claims of a climate-related price spike, featuring analyzed data and historical price comparisons.

Lomborg then provided this helpful chart:

Chart showing inflation-adjusted coffee prices from 1960 to 2025, highlighting the impact of climate change on pricing claims.

Dozens of articles posted at Climate Realism examine and debunk previous false claims made in myriad mainstream media stories that climate change has caused a decline in coffee yields and production, resulting in rising prices. Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show relatively steady gains in coffee yields and production in Vietnam, Brazil, and for the world as a whole between 1994 and 2023, with new records for both being set with some regularity. (see the graph below).

A line graph illustrating the coffee production and yield trends for Brazil, Vietnam, and the world from 1994 to 2022. The graph shows a steady increase in production and yield over the years.

Since coffee production and yields have increased dramatically overtime, it is simply false to link higher coffee prices to climate change induced impacts on production. During the recent period of slight global warming, coffee, like almost every other crop, has seen gains due to the fertilization effect of higher CO2 and improved growing conditions. Since climate change isn’t disrupting coffee production, it can’t be blamed for any rise in prices.

In the end, despite the title, Garza’s article is mostly speculation about potential future impacts of the Trump administration’s tariffs on future coffee prices, with a little climate alarm unjustifiably thrown in for no identifiable reason. The story as a whole is pure carnival sideshow prognostication. Will tariffs cause higher coffee prices? Maybe, maybe not. But whatever has contributed to recent increases in coffee prices, prices that are still below historic averages and highs, and there is no evidence whatsoever that climate change has anything to do with it. That is the truth. Based on the evidence of this story, Grist is evidently not in the business of telling the truth.

Wrong, Earth.com, Cocoa Production Is Not ‘Under Extreme Climate Pressure’ It’s Improving

Earth.com published a story claiming climate change is causing cocoa production to fall in West and Central Africa. This is false. Data show that cocoa production has increased during the last few decades of modest warming, rather than falling. Part of the reason for this is improved growing conditions in those regions and carbon dioxide fertilization.

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

Earth.com published a story claiming climate change is causing cocoa production to fall in West and Central Africa. This is false. Data show that cocoa production has increased during the last few decades of modest warming, rather than falling. Part of the reason for this is improved growing conditions in those regions and carbon dioxide fertilization.

In the Earth.com story, “Cocoa production in Africa is under extreme climate pressure,” writer Andrei Ionescu, references a study published in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, which claims that climate change may result in a 50 percent drop in production across West and Central Africa, a region which accounts for 70 percent of global cocoa production. Ionescu goes further claiming, “Climate change is substantially affecting cocoa production in West and Central Africa.” The problem is the data falsifies this claim, and the projections are based on the worst-case scenario projections from flawed climate models.

Climate Realism and Climate at a Glance have written multiple times previously concerning the admission by climate modelers that the models run way to hot. Accordingly, projections of impacts dependent on the models and their high emission scenarios cannot be trusted. Neither scientific research nor public policies should be built upon assumptions and projections that are known to be fatally flawed.

Leaving this aside, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that, like crops everywhere, cocoa production varies from year. But accounting for interannual ups and downs, over the recent period of modest climate change, cocoa production has generally increased in West and Central Africa.

The research in particular focuses on cocoa production in Cameroon, the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire), Ghana, and Nigeria. FAO data for those countries show that since 1990:

  • In Cameroon cocoa bean production has grown by more than 157 percent;
  • In the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) cocoa bean production increased by more than a 194 percent (nearly doubling, and setting a new record in 2023);
  • In Ghana cocoa bean production expanded by just over 122 percent;
  • And in Nigeria cocoa bean production grew by almost 17 percent.

Each of these countries experienced multiple years of record setting production over the past three and a half decades of climate change. (See the figure below).

With these facts in mind, there is no evidence whatsoever that climate change is putting cocoa production under extreme pressure, except perhaps in the imagination of Earth.com’s Ionescu.

Globally carbon dioxide has resulted in a general greening of the Earth with significantly improved crop production. There is good reason to believe that rising carbon dioxide concentrations have significantly contributed to West and Central Africa’s improved cocoa production, as well. There is no good reason found in botany, agronomy, or climatology – outside of climate model projections– for thinking growing conditions in the region will change for the worse.

Even the researchers themselves noted that under the various scenarios they projected, some areas in the region might see little or no change in yields going forward, others might see increased production, and still others decreases. In general, the “[r]esults from the mixed-effects models indicated that effects of climate variability on both and (with and without CO2, for all GCMs [general circulation models]) were not very strong, but that effects depended on the selected climate scenario.”

In fact, the study’s authors honestly admitted that as a result of a number of factors their findings were extremely uncertain. Among those limiting factors were the spatial scale of climate models, a lack of data availability, insufficient knowledge of potential land use changes, unknown interannual climate variability, and more. In addition, they acknowledged that the cocoa simulation model they used “has not been validated in the context of climate change or CO2 rise studies.”

These important admissions were entirely absent from Ionescu’s Earth.com story, which might lead one to believe there is more certainty in the projections than, in fact, there is.

Ionescu noted that the researchers said deforestation due to burgeoning populations expanding into tropical forests and land conversions could also result in a decline in cocoa production. This may be true, it has happened elsewhere for other forest dependent nuts and fruits when land was converted to row crops or urban expansion, but that has nothing to do with climate change.

In the end, the Earth.com story was long on alarming speculation pushing the catastrophic climate change narrative, and short on detailed analysis. The author showed no evidence of reading the report that he cites carefully and in full, or that if he did, that he understood its nuance and caveats related to its results – at least if he did, he didn’t discuss it in his story. There is also no evidence in the story that the writer checked any real-world data before asserting climate change is harming and will threaten cocoa production. That’s sloppy journalism any way you cut it.