{"id":390849,"date":"2025-07-26T13:27:17","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T11:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=390849"},"modified":"2025-07-26T13:27:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T11:27:30","slug":"climate-change-is-reducing-not-increasing-food-costs-mainstream-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=390849","title":{"rendered":"Climate Change Is Reducing, Not Increasing Food Costs, Mainstream Media"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From ClimateRealism<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Linnea Lueken<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A flurry of mainstream media reports, from Bloomberg<\/a>, The Guardian<\/a>, Financial Times<\/a>, and CNN<\/a>, among other outlets, claim that climate change is causing rising food prices \u201cworldwide,\u201d based on a single new study. This is false. Bad weather has always impacted crop production, and there is no actual evidence that extreme weather is increasing. Globalization of media coverage is simply making it easier to hear about bad weather elsewhere in the world, meanwhile crop production and yields globally continue to set records<\/a> \u2013 a fact the same media outlets largely ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Focusing on the coverage by Bloomberg, in an article titled \u201cHow Climate Change Is Raising Your Grocery Bill<\/a>,\u201d Bloomberg writers report on a study from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the European Central Bank, which claims price jumps in certain food products are due to \u201cextreme weather they say is linked to climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomberg claims that consumers around the world \u201csay they are feeling the effects of climate change on their grocery bills, making food unaffordable for some and <\/strong>posing a challenge for central bankers trying to tame inflation.\u201d If true at all, this almost certainly the effect of media coverage like Bloomberg\u2019s insisting that climate change is responsible, instead of observational evidence of crop production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is worth noting that the study<\/a> uses the term \u201cunprecedented\u201d eight times in the mere four pages of content. To justify their use of the term unprecedented to describe global weather events in the last few years they reference ERA5 surface temperature data going back to 1940, and the standardized precipitation index from CRU going back to 1901. The reason why this is non-scientific and misleading will become clear when we go over the weather events they claim were so \u201cunprecedented.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomberg discussed a few of the weather events mentioned in the study linking them to increases in the price for specific crops. They first highlighted increases in lettuce and vegetable prices in the United States, driven by droughts in California and Arizona, the former of which Bloomberg claims saw the \u201cdriest three-year period ever recorded.\u201d Also mentioned was hurricane Ian. The problem, of course, is that California\u2019s drought was anything but unprecedented. As discussed in the post \u201cMega-droughts and Mega-floods in the West All Occurred Well Before \u2018climate change\u2019 Was Blamed for Every Weather Event,\u201d <\/a> historical data and proxies show that California has experienced far more widespread and severe periods of drought in the past, some of which lasted as long as two hundred years.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Asia, Bloomberg says a heatwave impacted South Korean cabbage production. While UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data<\/a> indicate that cabbage production has been slowly declining after a massive spike in the 1970s, yields have remained stable or increased since 2000. This suggests that economic considerations or political decisions made about the relative benefits of growing cabbage versus other crops that could be grown, or uses the land could be put too, rather than climate, are responsible for changes in production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Australia also saw high lettuce costs due to flooding in the eastern part of the country in recent years, but the year Bloomberg and the study highlight, 2022, was not unprecedented as they implied. In fact<\/a>, 2022 was only the sixth \u201cwettest\u201d year on available Australian rainfall records, the wettest year on record was in 1950.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 1: Australian rainfall records, chart from Jennifer Marohasy: https:\/\/jennifermarohasy.com\/2023\/01\/fear-flooding-forecasting-australias-2022-official-rainfall-statistics\/<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Bloomberg goes on to explain how the study allegedly \u201cfound that heat, drought and floods were occurring at an increased intensity and frequency,\u201d which is at odds with available data and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change\u2019s 6th<\/sup> assessment report<\/a>, which though it claims an increase in extreme heat has been detected, finds no emergence of increased flooding or drought in the current historical period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short, Bloomberg, and the other mainstream media outlets hyping the BSC report, failed to do any fact checking, failed to examine crop trends, and illegitimately linked individual weather events to long-term climate change, despite such events being common in history and there being no discernable trend in an increase in such events amid the slight warming that has occurred in recent years. To be clear, weather is not climate<\/a> and, despite what unscientific attribution studies<\/a> claims, no specific weather event can be tied to long-term climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short, none of the weather events Bloomberg referred to as unprecedented was in fact unique or even rare historically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Concerning the crops, BSC and the media focuses on the most, lettuce and cabbage, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that between 1993 and 2023 (the most recent 30-year period of climate change for which we have available data):<\/p>\n\n\n\n