This isn't good...
https://www.news.com.au/technology/...t/news-story/54d1e8fd14ba885c24bf0010b1841073
Global warming will make beer much more expensive, scientists forecast
IN A study designed to strike fear, international researchers have outlined a surprising reason why we will soon pay more for a schooner.
IF YOU weren’t already worried about the effects of global warming, this should definitely do it.
Scientists have looked at the impact climate change will have on barley — a vital crop for beer making — and come up with a grim prediction: a global beer shortage.
While Australia hit “peak beer” in 1974-75, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we still rank about 23rd in the world when it comes to beer consumption per capita.
So this is a very concerning forecast indeed.
The study was carried out by a small team of researchers in the US, the UK and China and published this week in the journal
Nature Plants.
Scientists behind the study suggest that by the end of the century, increased drought and heat could hurt barley crops enough to cause a genuine shortage for beer makers, driving up the cost of a schooner.
“Beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world by volume consumed, and yields of its main ingredient, barley, decline sharply in periods of extreme drought and heat,” researchers wrote.
“Although the frequency and severity of drought and heat extremes increase substantially in range of future climate scenarios by five Earth System Models, the vulnerability of beer supply to such extremes has never been assessed.”
So they set out to look at such a scenario under a range of different climate models.
Worldwide barley is used for all sorts of purposes, mostly feeding livestock. Less than 20 per cent of the world’s barley is made into beer. But in the United States, Brazil and China, at least two-thirds of the barley goes into six-packs, drafts, kegs, cans and bottles.
In Australia, barley
has been losing ground to rival crops due, in part, to climate conditions and slowing overseas demand.
Barley is also one of the most heat-sensitive crops, making it particularly vulnerable to global warming and the extreme events brought on by climate change.
“We find that these extreme events may cause substantial decreases in barley yields worldwide,” researchers said.
In their estimation, losses of barley yield could easily be as much as 17 per cent. That means beer prices on average would double, even adjusting for inflation. In countries like Ireland, where cost of a brew is already high, prices could triple.
Study co-author Steve Davis of the University of California, Irvine, said the beer research was partly done to drive home the not-that-palatable message that climate change is messing with all sorts of aspects of our daily lives.
They knew, people like me would write about it and people like you would read about it.
The findings come a week after
a dire United Nations report described consequences of dangerous levels of climate change including worsening food and water shortages, heatwaves, sea level rise, and disease.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s
early response to the report was to promise that Australia would be not be spending money on climate change conferences and “all that nonsense”.
— with AP
