Pirate's Cove

How many stories over the past few years have hyperventilatingly (yes, I know, not a word) told us that coffee production was doooooomed due to “climate change”? Like this one from the hyper-partisan Huffington Post (via Tom Nelson)

The wild Arabica coffee plant, the parent of the bushes on coffee farms, could go extinct as soon as 2080, according to a study by researchers from the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens published in PLoS One on Wednesday.

To generate their predictions, the researchers used a computer to simulate the potential impact of climate change on the regions that are home to the wild coffee plant, in the mountains of East Africa. They found that by 2080, global warming was likely to reduce the number of “bioclimatically suitable localities” for wild coffee growth by between 65 and 100 percent. In other words, if their worst-case scenario comes true, there will be nowhere on earth for wild coffee to grow. In the long term, that spells almost certain extinction.

And it’s all your fault for refusing to buy a Chevy Volt, keeping your AC below 78, taking showers longer than 2 minutes, and using hair spray. Oh, look, computer models, which have worked oh so well in predicting this 15+ year pause, predicted drought where there is wet, told us kids wouldn’t know what snow looked like, and…well, did their computers actually predict anything correctly?

So, what’s the reality? Namely that there is so much coffee being produced that growers are considering growing less because the glut is reducing profits and they do not have the space to store it

(Bloomberg) Brazil is increasing competition among coffee sellers as farmers unload beans to clear storage space for the next harvest, judging that losses will be limited by translating dollar revenues into weaker reals. With global output exceeding demand for a fourth year, accelerating sales will drive prices down 11 percent to $1.08 a pound by Dec. 31, according to the median of 18 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

“The lower real will most certainly help exports, making Brazil a much more aggressive seller,” said Rasmus Wolthers, a trader at Wolthers & Associates, a brokerage in Santos, Brazil. “There’s a lot of coffee in Brazil, and there isn’t enough space to store it all, so producers will have to sell. I expect to see much more aggressive sales offers.”

Colombia, the second-biggest grower of arabica beans, increased exports by 32 percent in the first five months of the year after the peso weakened 7.1 percent against the dollar, according to the nation’s Federation of Coffee Growers. Sales from Peru, the third-largest producer in South America, fell 31 percent in the period as buyers turn to supplies from Brazil.

The glut has caused prices and the futures market for coffee to fall. But, you say, that’s just a few South American countries

Global coffee production, including robusta that accounts for 41 percent of supply, will exceed demand by 4.46 million bags in 2013-2014, from a 10 million-bag surplus a year earlier, according to the USDA. Inventories will reach a five-year high of 30.53 million bags, the USDA predicts.

Well, another Warmists meme bites the dust…not that they’ll ever admit they were wrong, they’ll simply ignore their previous prognostication and blame this on CO2 in another way.

BTW, Starbucks is mentioned in the story, noting that their costs have gone down and profits are up potentially 21%, partially due to the glut of coffee beans. Will they stop whining about “climate change”?