Letters to the Editor: Climate change-caused weather disasters certainly aren’t good for agriculture

To the editor: Climate change involves billions of changing variables, changes that threaten life as we know it on our beautiful blue and green planet (“Climate change isn’t taking food off your table,” July 14). Yet guest contributor Bjorn Lomborg once again selects contradicting facts concerning a very small number of these variables and effectively says, “Don’t worry about this, folks. Let the fossil fuel industry amass enormous amounts of money while continuing to set your atmosphere on fire. Climate change is actually good for you!”

Each of his “facts” are almost comically misleading. Lomborg explains that, like all sciences, agriculture continues to improve. This is, thank God, true, but a landmark study in Nature Climate Change found that climate change has reduced global farming productivity by a whopping 21% since 1961.

Lomberg certainly knows the alarm over coffee and climate change arises from future modeling, not present-day production. And surely he knows that olive oil production involves one of the most climate-sensitive crops on the planet and recent droughts in Europe and the Mediterranean have caused catastrophic crop failures (more than 50% in Spain).

Perhaps Lomborg’s most egregious sleight of hand is how he proposes that CO2 is good for plant growth, ignoring the obvious kindergarten fact that no plant likes the extreme heat, severe droughts, fires and floods that come with it.

All we as humanity have to do to save ourselves is to reduce fossil fuel consumption, while moving toward renewable energy sources. The technology is here, and it is cheap and getting cheaper.

JJ Flowers, Dana Point

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To the editor: Lomborg proclaims, “Climate change will, on balance, hurt agriculture. But its impact is dwarfed by rising productivity.” Further, he says that “food is both more plentiful and cheaper today.” Then he cherry-picked examples of cash-crop coffee and olive oil production farming.

But it’s his slanted interpretations of the “greening” of the planet that alarms me most. Yes, plants grow bigger due to higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. But studies are showing the bigger plants have less nutritional punch. Major staple food crops like wheat, oats and rice have shown a reduction in protein, iron and zinc content and decreased concentrations of micronutrients. We will need to eat more to stay healthy, and the herbivores we rely on for bacon, burgers and nuggets will need to eat more too. That will mean our food ecosystem of planting, land use and water availability will all be stressed.

The advent of more innovative plants doesn’t mean we should ignore the CO2 we are pumping out. No food grows on lands flooded, parched or ripped apart by constant winds. That is what climate change ultimately means for our dinner tables.

Suvan Geer, Santa Ana

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To the editor: Here’s how Lomborg pooh-poohs concerns over agriculture and climate change: “This year, global coffee production is expected to set yet another record — more than double the world’s output of 50 years ago.” Guess what else has more than doubled in those same 50 years? The world’s population! And on top of that, global incomes have risen; coffee demand per capita has surely grown. So to keep pace with demand, coffee production needs to do better than track population growth.

Given Lomborg’s own abuse of statistics, it’s a bit rich when, later in the same piece, he faults journalists for “inexcusably ignoring inflation” when comparing past and present coffee prices. But Lomborg is not confused about statistics — he knows full well when and how to misuse them when it suits him to do so.

Nick Moschovakis, Bethesda, Md.