{"id":398447,"date":"2025-08-28T14:08:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T12:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=398447"},"modified":"2025-08-28T14:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T12:08:09","slug":"wrong-time-magazine-climate-change-isnt-dooming-your-bananas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=398447","title":{"rendered":"Wrong, TIME Magazine, Climate Change Isn\u2019t Dooming Your Bananas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From ClimateRealism<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Heartland Institute<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By Anthony Watts and H. Sterling Burnett <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A recent article in TIME Magazine, \u201cClimate Change is Coming for Your Bananas<\/a>,\u201d claims that a warming planet is threatening global banana production, portending shortages and higher prices. This is false. Data and the history of banana cultivation all tell a different story, with yields and production numbers from the regions highlighted in the story setting new record highs in recent years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TIME dramatically blames climate change for banana yield loss and diseases:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in a world that is getting warmer and more chaotic, climate change is already threatening the future of bananas, the world\u2019s most popular fruit. Extreme weather events, shifting rainfall patterns, and rising temperatures are causing yields to fall and diseases to spread in banana-growing regions from Central America to Africa to Southeast Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not the first time Climate Realism<\/a> has had to debunk a story by TIME claiming that climate change was causing crop declines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bananas are not delicate climate \u201ccanaries in the coal mine<\/a>,\u201d perched on the edge of collapse due to a degree or two of global warming. Bananas are a remarkably robust tropical crop, grown in more than 150 countries<\/a> across an immense range of temperatures (though mostly hot), humidity, rainfall, and elevation. While most commercial exports come from equatorial regions, bananas are grown from the humid lowlands of Central America to the hilly, cooler regions of Africa and Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key point is that bananas have persisted through centuries of variable weather, global warming and cooling episodes, and even El Ni\u00f1o cycles more dramatic than anything seen in the past few decades. If bananas were as sensitive as TIME claims, we wouldn\u2019t see them thriving from Uganda to India, from Brazil to the Philippines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, according to the\u00a0UN\u2019s Food and Agriculture Organization<\/a>\u00a0(FAO), world banana production has more than an 8-fold increase since 1961, rising from about 22 million tons to over 129 million tons in 2023. As the FAO chart below illustrates, there has never been a period of sustained collapse. Instead, the data show robust growth\u2014despite \u201cshifting climate patterns.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Line<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Examining the banana growing regions TIME particularly identified as having their banana crops threatened by climate change, contrary to TIME\u2019s claims, FAO data show banana harvests have regularly set records for yield and production 1994 through 2023, the last year for which data is available:<\/p>\n\n\n\n