TITLE: In Provence, Winemakers Confront Climate Change
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/07/business/economy/wine-climate-change-provence.html
EXCERPT: Mr. Chaudière is the president of an association of wine producers in Ventoux. His winery, Château Pesquié, is in the Rhône Valley, where the impact of climate change over the past 50 years on winegrowers has been significant.
The first burst of buds appear 15 days earlier than they did in the early 1970s, according to a recent analysis. Ripening starts 18 days earlier. And harvesting begins in late August instead of mid September. Change was expected, but the accelerating pace has come as a shock.
For many vineyards, the new weather patterns are resulting in smaller grapes that produce sweeter wines with a higher alcohol content. These developments, alas, are out of step with consumers who are turning to lighter, fresher tasting wines with more tartness and less alcohol.
For other vineyards, the challenges are more profound: Dwindling water supplies threaten their existence.
How to respond to these shifts, though, is not necessarily clear.
Emergency irrigation, for example, can save young vines from dying when the heat is scorching. Yet over the long haul, access to water near the surface means the roots may not drill down deep into the earth in search of the subterranean water tables they need to sustain them.
Chêne Bleu, a small and relatively new family winery on La Verrière, the site of a medieval priory above the village of Crestet, is one of the region’s leaders in developing adaptations for cultivation and processing that are regenerative and organic.
“We’re all going to get whacked by similar weather challenges,” said Nicole Rolet, who inaugurated the winery in 2006 with her husband, Xavier.
In her view, there are two responses to climate change: You can fight it with chemicals and artificial additives that battle nature, she said, or “you can create a balanced functioning of the ecology through biodiversity.”
TITLE: How climate change is threatening your beer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/10/10/climate-change-beer-hops/
EXCERPT: It’s getting harder to grow coffee, tea, and grapes for wine on a hotter planet — and now researchers say, climate change may be coming for your IPA.
A new study out Tuesday found drought and higher temperatures will lead to a decrease in the quality and quantity of hops, the aromatic plants that give beer its flavor.
By 2050 in Europe, the research projects, yields for traditional aroma hops will drop by 4 to 18 percent. Production of hop acids, which are key for flavoring, will fall by 20 to 31 percent.
Hop growers are already seeing the impacts.
“Over the past number of decades we can see a decrease of hop quality,” said Miroslav Trnka at the Czech Academy of Sciences, one of the researchers of the new paper, which was published in the journal Nature Communications.
“I’m sure we can find a way to grow hops that, in the future, can withstand these conditions,” he said. But, he added, “You cannot wait until the industry collapses.”
TITLE: Climate intervention technologies may create winners and losers in world food supply
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-climate-intervention-technologies-winners-losers.html
EXCERPT: Writing in the journal, Nature Food, the scientists described the results of computer models simulating varying climate scenarios and their impacts over time on the production of the world's four major food crops: corn, rice, soybeans and wheat in all locations where they are grown.
Some scenarios were produced by simulated stratospheric aerosol intervention (SAI), also known as geoengineering, to halt or reverse climate change, while others, for comparison purposes, weren't. The SAI scenario, inspired by volcanic eruptions, would involve spraying sulfur dioxide gas into the stratosphere. By placing a cloud of what becomes sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere continuously, the process would shield the Earth from the sun, cooling it.
"Not one of the 11 climate change or climate intervention scenarios we analyzed benefits everyone," said Brendan Clark, a doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS), and lead author on the study. "Nations may have different ideas of what constitutes an optimal global temperature, which could lead to conflicts. It would be like people fighting over the thermostat in a house, but on a global scale."
The models showed marked differences in agricultural productivity depending on where a country is positioned on the globe. Continued, uncontrolled climate change, the models revealed, favors crop production in the cold, high-latitude areas, such as Canada, Russia, the U.S. northern border states, Scandinavia and Scotland.
Moderate amounts of atmospheric sulfur spraying, which may either halt or slightly lower global average temperatures, favors food production in the temperate regions known as the mid-latitudes, where most of the large land masses of North America and Eurasia are located, according to the analysis.
Large amounts of climate intervention to significantly reverse warming and lower the global average temperature would favor agricultural production in the tropics, the region of Earth around the equator.
In the Western Hemisphere, the region includes Mexico, all of Central America, the Caribbean and the top half of South America. In the Eastern Hemisphere, the tropics include most of Africa, parts of the Middle East, most of India, all of Southeast Asia, most of Australia and most of the island nations of Oceania.
"Are we willing to live with all these potential impacts to have less global warming? That's the question we're trying to ask here," said Alan Robock, a Distinguished Professor of Climate Science in the Department of Environmental Sciences at SEBS, and a co-author of the study. "We're trying to quantify each of the potential risks and benefits so we can make informed decisions in the future."