{"id":288801,"date":"2023-11-27T10:13:16","date_gmt":"2023-11-27T09:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=288801"},"modified":"2023-11-27T10:13:19","modified_gmt":"2023-11-27T09:13:19","slug":"wrong-abc-news-climate-change-isnt-a-threat-to-thanksgiving-dinner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=288801","title":{"rendered":"Wrong, ABC News, Climate Change Isn\u2019t a Threat to Thanksgiving Dinner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Linnea Lueken<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An article by ABC News, \u201cClimate change could soon make these staple Thanksgiving dishes more scarce<\/a>,\u201d claims that foods like cranberries, sweet potatoes, and turkey, among others popular at Thanksgiving dinner, are threatened by climate change. This is false. Except for recent declines in cranberry production, these foods have not seen negative trends over the past hundred-plus years of modest warming, and there is little reason to believe those trends will reverse any time soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ABC News claims that Thanksgiving itself \u201ccould soon become another victim of climate change as rising temperatures threaten the abundance and quality of the ingredients used to make traditional dishes,\u201d quoting in support of this statement the CEO of a company that claims to be able to accurately predict future produce yields using climate and weather modelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Himanshu Gupta, CEO of ClimateAi, told ABC News that harvest yields of sweet potatoes and cranberries have decreased \u201csignificantly\u201d due to climate change. While neither ABC nor Gupta cite a study that shows this, Gupta nonetheless claims that ClimateAi determined that cranberry yields will \u201cdecrease by at least 5% by 2070,\u201d and the quality of the fruit will also decline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skepticism is warranted right away, because as Climate Realism<\/em> has noted dozens of times<\/a>, this kind of computer and AI-driven forecasting, built on notably inaccurate climate models, is unreliable, especially when attempting to link it to particular effects like agricultural yields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agriculture is much more complex than Gupta and ABC News suggest. For example, despite decades of warming which in theory might impact cold-weather crops like cranberries, the fruits saw a steady gain in production and yield until 2016, after which there is a decline, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data. (See Figure below)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Still, since 1961 overall cranberries in the United States saw:<\/p>\n\n\n\n