New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal found a familiar villain for her Thursday Business story on the woeful state of Colombia’s coffee crop - "climate change" (“Coffee Source In Colombia Suffers Setbacks – Climate Change Poses a Threat To the Popular Arabica Crop”).
Like most of the small landowners in Colombia’s lush mountainous Cauca region, Luis Garzón, 80, and his family have thrived for decades by supplying shade-grown, rainforest-friendly Arabica coffee for top foreign brands like Nespresso and Green Mountain. A sign in the center of a nearby town proclaims, “The coffee of Cauca is No. 1!”
But in the last few years, coffee yields have plummeted here and in many of Latin America’s other premier coffee regions as a result of rising temperatures and more intense and unpredictable rains, phenomena that many scientists link partly to global warming.
The coffee crop is only the latest thing Rosenthal sees threatened by global warming, excuse me, “climate change.” Back on February 13, she wondered if your house would survive it: “Huff and Puff and Blow Your House Down – Most buildings – ice rinks, stadiums and homes – were built with specific weather conditions in mind. Will they survive climate change?”
On December 14, 2009, she warned hysterically from Bolivia: “A World Bank report concluded last year that climate change would eliminate many glaciers in the Andes within 20 years, threatening the existence of nearly 100 million people....Their disappearance from certain vistas is as startling to Bolivians as the absence of the twin towers is to New Yorkers.”
And on November 1, 2007, Rosenthal warned that ski resorts and golf courses” might be “among [the] victims” of climate change.
