Climate Hysteria and Breakfast Cereals

After its dispute with Scarlett Johansson over Soda Stream, one hoped Oxfam would begin moving towards a more realistic world view. But apparently not.

Mother Jones uncritically covered the release of a recent report by Oxfam which claimed that very specific brandname "breakfast cereals will get a lot more expensive thanks to global warming." According to the report,

"In major markets like the US and the UK, Oxfam calculates that climate change will drive up the retail price of products like General Mills' Kix cereal by up to 24 percent and Kellogg Corn Flakes by as much as 44 percent over the next 15 years. Such retail price hikes are the consequence of rising prices of commodities like corn and rice, projected to double by 2030, with half of the increase due to climate change.[4]"

The IMF, World Bank, and others cannot predict national, regional, nor global economic trends with any reasonable degree of accuracy -- even over the short-term -- and yet Oxfam is projecting the price of Kix and Corn Flakes to two significant figures over 15 years? That must be an impressive economic model they have access to. Reference 4 in Oxfam's paragraph must surely link us to a rigorous description of their model. Nope. Here is Oxfam's complete explanation of how they project the price of brandname cereals nearly two decades into the future:

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Oxfam is projecting the price of Kix and Corn Flakes to two significant figures over 15 years

"Projected price increases were generated by translating the previously estimated impacts of climate change by the year 2030 on rice, corn and wheat prices into impacts on the prices of selected consumer food products that contain those grains. We used historical grain and consumer product prices, product ingredient lists and nutrition labels, and historical examples of how rising commodity prices affect retail prices to build a model that estimates the potential increases in retail prices that will result from climate change."

It seems to me that if you had the capacity to predict the retail price and input costs of these types of consumer goods well into the future at high-accuracy and high-precision, you could become fabulously wealthy. Amazing prophecies now coming out of the climate alarmism community -- the same one that cannot accurately predict climate trends, as evidenced by the two-decade long "warming hiatus" (a.k.a., starting to look like global cooling) we are in, and which the climate modelers apparently failed to predict. But I guess if we coupled the climate models to the breakfast cereal price prediction models, maybe then we would know what is going to happen. OK then, this is all settled science. Moving on. Here is another statement in Oxfam's report:

"Climate change is contributing to storms, floods, drought, and shifting weather patterns. These are causing crop failures, food price spikes, and supply disruptions."

Here is the FAO's Food Price Index in real (constant) dollar terms since 1961, along with the world price of crude oil in constant 2012 US dollar terms over the same timeframe. If anthropogenic climate change has any substantial impact on global food price, I'd like to see the alarmists explain the detailed trends in the FAO Food Price Index since 1970. Of especial interest are explaining away the strong correlation between oil prices and food costs as a primary causative agent in food price spikes during the past few decades, along with the declining and then stable trends in the food price index during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and first half of the 2000s. The correlation coefficient between the FAO Food Price Index and the cost of crude oil is an astonishingly high r=0.87 since 1980 (r²=0.75). Since 2000, the r²-value is up to 0.9. Correlation isn't causation, but it is a pre-requisite. If I was trying to rationally understand food prices, I'd look first to the costs of basic production inputs such as energy before invoking anthropogenic climate change causes. Here is another Oxfam statement:

"In its March 2014 scientific assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that climate change has already lowered wheat and maize yields in many regions and, on average, globally since the 1960s."

Global and regional wheat and maize yields are available online from the FAO. Here they are since 1960. Sorry, but I must be missing that unequivocal signature from anthropogenic climate change's negative impact on yields since the 1960s. And yes, there will always be significant year-to-year changes in yields due to natural climate variability and other factors. Always. It is the trend that matters, not individual datapoints. One could imagine food security alarmists claiming that maize yields had peaked in the 1980s, but they hadn't. More than two decades later, look how much they increased. Same applies for wheat yields in the early to mid-1990s or the late 1990s and early 2000s. And yet during the last two years global wheat yields hit their two highest levels, ever. Another tough issue will need to be addressed. Crop yields simply cannot continue to increase forever. That would be a physical impossibility (i.e., we cannot ever yield 10 trillion tons of wheat per square inch). What is the maximum yield? Who knows, but it will be reached eventually, and before the maximum is reached, the yield curve will likely start to flatten. Thus, if we do start to reach maximum possible crop yields soon, the yield curve flattening will likely be (incorrectly) interpreted as due to anthropogenic climate change by the alarmists, when in fact it will likely have little causal relation. The alarmism from Oxfam just keeps on coming:

"Agricultural regions in the world's poorest countries will feel the effects of climate change most acutely. Across Africa and South Asia, crop yields of wheat, maize, sorghum, and millets are expected to be reduced by about 8 percent by 2050. In some African nations, by 2020, yields from rain-fed agriculture could fall by 50 percent. Climate change is projected to reduce agricultural productivity by between 9 percent and 21 percent throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America by 2080. Wheat yields in South Asia could plummet by 50 percent by 2050, while rice yields are predicted to decline by 30 percent in the Middle East and North Africa."

A fine selection of hysteria among the projections. Take the claim of how "wheat yields in South Asia could plummet by 50 percent by 2050." Wheat yields in South Asia hit their highest level on record in the latest year for which data is available (2012), up 10 percent since 2010 alone, more than 15 percent since 2000, and a whopping 52 percent increase since 1990. Since 1980, wheat yields in this region have more than doubled. Where is that evidence of an anthropogenic climate change induced reduction of 50 percent over the next three-and-a-half decades? There isn't any. The trend is still headed in the other direction, nearly five decades after the National Climate Assessment told us the impacts of anthropogenic climate change started becoming most evident. But the core problems in Oxfam's report are clear from the following types of highly specific alarmist stories it tries to tell:

"In Guatemala, rainfall shortages during peak growing seasons have caused serious harvest declines, including an 80 percent drop in maize crops in 2013. Soaring temperatures destroyed up to 40 percent of Guatemala's coffee harvests in 2013-2014, putting thousands of agricultural laborers out of work. [31]"

Guatemala's maize crop harvest declined 80 percent in 2013 because of "rainfall shortages during peak growing seasons"? Well, when I refer to the FAO's country brief for Guatemala dated March 7, 2014, I read the following, and am also provided with the following table that appears to completely contradict Oxfam's claims:

"Estimates for the 2013 maize and bean crops indicate an increase in production: The third maize season 'de apante' is well advanced particularly in the main producing department of Peten in the north. Similar to the first and second seasons, production is considered to be good due to favourable weather conditions during all of the cropping seasons. Preliminary official estimates indicate an aggregate 2013 maize production of 1.7 million tonnes, up 2 percent from last year's good harvest and record. The increase in production reflects both higher yields and plantings."

Oxfam claims that Guatemala suffered an "80 percent drop in maize crops in 2013," whereas the FAO says that the 2013 maize production was 1,732,000 tonnes, higher than both the 2012 production value of 1,690,000 tonnes and the 2008-2012 average of 1,650,000 tonnes, and that 2013's "increase in production reflects both higher yields and plantings." I look forward to Oxfam explaining that discrepancy. What about Oxfam's claim that "soaring temperatures destroyed up to 40 percent of Guatemala's coffee harvests in 2013-2014"? That reference [31] from Oxfam's report is this February 1, 2013 story from Bloomberg, which stated the following: "The Guatemalan National Coffee Association declared a state of emergency due to the spread of rust disease, which will generate losses of as much as 40 percent of the 2013-2014 national harvest, association President Nils Leporowski said." Note the future tense word "will" in the story from only one month into 2013. Compare that to Oxfam's past tense claim of fact in a report dated May 20, 2014 that "40 percent of Guatemala's coffee harvests in 2013-2014" was "destroyed" by "soaring temperatures." How can a story predicting a possible future scenario provide historical fact via its projections. The answer is that it cannot. Here is what the USDA's May 2013 production report said about Guatemala's 2013-2014 coffee crop: "Coffee production for marketing year 2014 (October 2013-September 2014) is forecast at 3.88 million bags, eight percent below the level of MY-2013." By September 2013, the Wall Street Journal was reporting this about Guatemala's 2013-2014 coffee crop:

"The leaf-rust fungus that is afflicting coffee plants throughout Central America will reduce Guatemala's coffee output by 4% to 5% in the next growing season, the head of the country's coffee-producers group, Anacafé, said Tuesday. The country's farmers will probably produce three million 60-kilogram (132-pound) bags of coffee in the season that begins in October, according to Anacafé Chairman Nils Leporowski."

So which is it? 40 percent or 4 percent? An order of magnitude difference exists between these two predictions, both made by one "Nils Leporowski" within the span of nine months. And looking at Guatemala's coffee yield history, it appears coffee yields have been stable since 1997, after more than tripling since the 1960s. How is this indicative of the negative effects of climate change? Yields cannot increase forever, and if -- as the alarmists have been telling us -- anthropogenic climate change has been most evident since the 1960s/1970s, and coffee yields in Guatemala increased by 325% over this timeframe, doesn't that suggest climate change has a possible net agricultural benefit in some regions? Oh, the contradictions in the alarmists' arguments are ubiquitous. What we need is solid data on Guatemala's actual 2013-2014 coffee harvest. That cannot come from a media story that pre-dates the start of the actual harvest by many months, as Oxfam's report referenced. A recent story from May 9, 2014 in Fox News Latino tells us that the International Coffee Organization has Guatemala's coffee production from April 2013 through March 2014 down just 3.48 percent from the year before. Finally we have this anecdotal evidence in the Oxfam report:

"Richard Oswald remembers when he was a boy growing up in Langdon, Missouri, how regular the rain used to be. But in May 2011, his fields and many others across Langdon took a terrible beating when the river flooded, swollen by record snowfall in the Rocky Mountains and unprecedented rainfall in Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. The river scoured craters in the fertile land and blanketed it with sand. For five months, Oswald's farm was under water. Oswald blames climate change, in part, for the flooding, which eventually led to more than $2 billion in damages, in a year in which Missouri alone had three declarations of major disasters. The devastation on that river bottomland, where harvests of soybeans and corn flow into global food supply chains, contributed to record high prices of grains that year. Oswald normally farms corn, which is processed into corn starch and sold on the commercial market. From there it would likely end up as thickener in any number of products made by major food and beverage companies. But this year, 'there was nothing to harvest,' said Oswald. 'We spent all the money for inputs -- seed, fertilizer, herbicides -- and got nothing in return.'"

Langdon is an unincorporated community in Atchison County, Missouri. According to the USDA/NASS database, corn production in Atchison County during 2011 was 18.1 million bushels, down only 3.9 percent from 2010, and 24 percent higher than it was during 2012. Between 2000 and 2013, annual corn production in Atchison County averaged 18.4 million bushels. In 2011, the corn yield in Atchison County was 149.5 bushels/acre, up very slightly from 149.4 bushels/acre in 2010 and modestly above the 2000-2013 average of 143 bushels/acre. Thus, 2011 was an average corn production year in this small county in northwestern Missouri, and nowhere near the broad crisis that the Oxfam report suggests. Even statements such as "Richard Oswald remembers when he was a boy growing up in Langdon, Missouri, how regular the rain used to be" are layered with pseudo-science. Memories are notoriously unreliable, particularly with regard to the weather. How does Oswald even define "regular" rain? There isn't a single significant trend in any month's individual precipitation since 1895 between March and October in northwestern Missouri. Nor are there any significant trends in the number of days with precipitation during any of the months between March and September at the nearby climate station at Maryville (just 40 miles east of Langdon), and for October, there is a significant increasing trend (i.e., more "regular" rain). As far as I can tell, rain isn't getting any less "regular" over time in the Langdon region. Throughout its report, Oxfam calls on the "Big 10" food and beverage companies to do more to fight climate change, and it repeatedly attempts to shame them into cutting their carbon emissions. But rather than attacking others using poorly supported assertions and apparently erroneous interpretations of climate data, Oxfam should spend more time examining its own behavior, and instead seek to communicate with the public and business communities via the most scientifically rigorous approach possible.