Brewers say do not cry in your beer in the face of global warming: salt: NPR

The paper, published Monday in the newspaper Plants Naturewarns of "severe supply disruptions" in barley. By analyzing several possible scenarios of climate change, the authors found that global yields could drop by 17% in future droughts and heat waves, and that beer prices could be catastrophic.

However, some players in the beer sector think the conclusions are exaggerated.

"Although climate change is a source of concern, this study is not an excellent indicator of what will happen in the real world," said Bart Watson, chief economist at the Brewers Association , a professional group based in Boulder, Colorado. Watson believes that the industry – especially the agricultural sector – will adapt to the planet's changing climate, thus avoiding such significant impacts.

The same is true for Dwight Little, president of the Idaho Grain Producers Association, which represents the wheat and barley producers of Idaho, the largest barley-producing state in the country. .

"If the warming happens as they predict it, my impression is that it will gradually increase over a long period, giving farmers time to change," he says.

In their article, a team of 10 scientists from China, Britain, the United States and Mexico warns that crop damage from droughts and heatwaves could drop world beer production by 16 percent. %. This will lead to an increase in world beer prices, or double the average. The research also warns that barley yields will be disproportionately affected by brewers. This is because farmers who feed barley with barley will be forced to compete with beer producers for limited quantities of grain. And, in such economic conditions, the beer will lose.

"Our analysis showed us that we would probably prioritize food over the luxury drink," Steven Davis, co-author of the journal and Associate Professor of Earth System Science, told The Salt. the University of California at Irvine. "In many cases, wealthy consumers will only pay more for their beer, but someone will have to go without barley, and it seems like the beer industry as a whole in will do less. "

In total, consumption could fall by 29 billion liters. That's about the amount of beer that Americans drank in 2011, according to research.

The study corroborates earlier findings on cereals and climate change. A study conducted in 2017 by the University of California at Davis predicted that higher temperatures in the spring and summer could reduce the yields of many important grains for beer by the end of the century. It predicted a 21% drop in winter wheat yields, 17.3% for winter barley and 33.6% for spring barley.

New Plants Nature A newspaper made headlines Monday: "Climate change could double the cost of a beer," reported wired; and "Heat and drought could threaten global beer supply," warned The New York Times the same day.

But Greg Koch is not particularly worried.

"I saw the headlines, but I did not take the clickbait," says Koch, co-founder of Stone Brewing Co. in San Diego. Koch is deeply concerned about the many negative impacts of the planet on the planet, but he is a little frustrated that people have become aware of a relatively minor consequence of human activity: the scarcity of beer.

"It's a bit myopic," adds Koch.

Few at the Idaho Grain Producers Association does not believe that barley producers will be hit as hard as predicted by Davis and his co-authors.

"There are a lot of things farmers can do to adapt to climate change," says Little. Farmers regularly face the "extremes" of weather, often adjusting their planting schedules. In some cases, when extreme heat or drought threatens a crop on irrigated land, farmers can often simply apply more water, which can offset the effects of heat.

"I just do not see that we are unable to produce as much as barley brewers want," says Little.

In their research, Davis and his colleagues studied extreme weather events, including droughts and heatwaves, which could occur more and more simultaneously – a double blow for agricultural crops. According to Davis, if humans do not significantly reduce their consumption of fossil fuels – the main source of pollution that contributes to global warming – the weather is so extreme that it is currently only striking every 24 years. he adds.

"And that's only their frequency," he says. "Gravity is also likely to increase."

Regarding the impacts on the beer sector, the research has a strong caveat, which Davis explains from the outset: his models and coauthors assumed in their modeling that all factors other than the climate of the Earth would remain stable in the future.

"All of our analyzes are based on the world as it exists today, so we do not integrate projections of economic growth or population growth into these outcomes," Davis said. The idea, he says, was to isolate and better understand the specific effects of warming without complicating things.

The 2017 UC Davis study did more or less the same thing.

Watson at the Brewers Association estimates that these assumptions have led to an overestimate of the effects of global warming on beer production. He says the research "incorporates a number of unrealistic assumptions". Barley production is already changing, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture cited by Watson in a recent blog post, in Canada, indicating a shift northward to latitudes that could stay cooler in a warmer future.

Davis agrees that adaptation efforts like this could protect the barley industry from impacts, but it sticks to the findings of the paper.

"We have already made a lot of progress in creating new varieties of cereals and in producing smaller land and in places where conditions can be difficult," he said. "Even so, it seems hard to imagine that they will be proposing a variety of barley able to withstand the extreme weather events we have examined."

Davis has contributed to many other studies analyzing the causes and impacts of climate change, including meat production in Brazil, deadly air pollution in China, and massive mortality from heat waves in India. Indeed, in the introduction to their analysis, Davis and his colleagues recognize that a rise in the price of beer is "not the most worrying impact of future climate change" .

When asked if he and his colleagues planned to rely on new discoveries based on further research, Davis responded with uncertainty.

"We are interested in beer, but we do not want to make it the focus of our efforts to mitigate climate change," he said.