Wake up and smell the coffee

Coffee beans are one of the most cultivated crops on the planet. The introduction of coffee to Western Europe correlates with the start of the industrial revolution and for hundreds of years, coffee has held a special place within the intellectual and scientific communities. From the intelligentsia of London’s 18th century coffee houses to office workers of today, supply has always been assured and taken massively for granted.

Coffee yields are, however, at a 35 year low. Growing coffee takes a very precise set of conditions: to produce a high quality harvest requires a very specific combination of temperature and rainfall. Our climate is becoming less predictable and is only set to change further over the coming years. Yields are also being affected by pests which thrive under higher temperatures. The worst case scenario predicted by scientists is that all the current locations fit for growing coffee will become unsuitable by 2080.

In comparison to the displacement of millions affected by sea level rises and the loss of arable farm land the world over, a reduction in coffee yields may seem rather insignificant. However, 28 million people rely on farming coffee to make a living and with an estimated 500 billion cups drunk annually, the millions reliant on the world’s most popular stimulant would find increased costs and eventual loss of coffee an irritation at the very least. The cultural shock of losing coffee may be enough to jar people into reconsidering climate change.

Despite a broad consensus amongst scientists that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for changes in the Earth’s climate, there are still a large body of sceptics. Those who believe that climate change isn’t affected by human actions are simply not looking at the vast amount of available evidence.

Climate science seems to have been written off as a discipline by many. Controversies at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in 2009, in which emails were leaked alleging that some scientists manipulated climate data to try to suppress critics, served to damage its reputation. This was a major embarrassment, but this isolated incident should not bring the whole field into disrepute.

The evidence is strong: all but one of the ten hottest years on record have occurred since 2000; the only exception being 1998. For the last 36 years the world’s temperature has risen above the long term average. 2012 was an extreme year for weather. North America and the Arctic experienced their warmest years on record with the Arctic ice cap experiencing record low sea ice cover of just 1.32 million square miles. Temperatures in Australia reached over 50°c, so hot that meteorological temperature scales had to be amended to allow for the mapping of this heat range.

Whilst these phenomena should not be viewed in isolation, it is clear that extremes in weather are now becoming the norm. According to the International Panel on Climate Change’s statistics, the earth’s temperature has risen by 0.8°C between 1850 and 2005 and this rise correlates almost perfectly to rises in greenhouse gases in the troposphere since industrialisation.

A recent study published in the journal Science has suggested that a large scale melt of the Siberian permafrost is almost inevitable, which will mean that millions of tonnes of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, will be released. Records suggest that a rise of 1.5°C is all that is needed to trigger such a thaw.

As the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, this will cause positive feedback, speeding up the effects of climate change leading to further melts. There are particular fears of a runaway decomposition – once ice starts to melt, microbes in the soil would consume the carbon and produce heat, melting more ice and releasing ever more greenhouse gases. The melting of the permafrost represents a tipping point: once it starts, there may be no way of stopping it.

Scientists and policy makers need to work together as they did in the 1990s to ban CFCs. CFCs were once widely used in refrigeration units and aerosols and were responsible for creating a large hole in the ozone layer concentrated in the polar ice caps. The deadlock that has ensued at international climate change conferences, like Copenhagen in 2009 and Doha in 2012, prevents such a swift and extensive response to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientific community has produced the evidence. It now needs to turn up the heat on policy makers to start prioritising climate change and work towards meaningful multilateral efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, before it is too late. We really ought to wake up and smell the coffee.