Why don’t more people believe in the effects of climate change? We’re not going to call it global warming because everyone throws a giant, political hissy fit and then makes “So cold out today, I thought there was global warming” Facebook statuses.
Climate change is a real thing that affects the environment everywhere on Earth.
Habitats are becoming unstable. Deserts are changing shape. Water isn’t flowing the way it used to. Weather patterns are shifting. The past decade holds the hottest years on record, and temperatures show no signs of getting cooler on average.
Sure, a lot of this is probably normal. The Earth has been in and out of ice ages before, so it makes sense that it gets this hot at times. Fine. Humans aren’t helping the problem, though. It seems like most people won’t do anything about the problem until climate change affects something people care a lot about.
Get ready, folks, because your wine supply is about to hit a new mer-low.
“Suitable grape-growing areas may drop 68 percent in Mediterranean Europe by 2050 and fall 73 percent in regions of Australia with a so-called Mediterranean climate, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,” a Bloomberg article reported. “New Zealand’s suitable area will more than double and it will also surge in northern Europe and western North America, it said.”
“The fact is that climate change will lead to a huge shakeup in the geographic distribution of wine production,” said Lee Hannah, a senior scientist at Conservation International and an author of the study, according to a report by the Guardian.
The study doesn’t necessarily promise that wine production will cease to exist or that growing wine grapes in the normal areas is impossible — it’ll take new locations and more technology to keep areas producing normally.
“It will be harder and harder to grow those varieties that are currently growing in places in Europe,” Hannah said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that [they] can’t be grown there, but it will require irrigation and special inputs to make it work, and that will make it more and more expensive.”
The study used 17 different climate models to make its prediction. It “used two different climate futures for 2050, one assuming a worst-case scenario with a 4.7C (8.5F) warming, the other a 2.5C increase,” according to the Guardian article. “Both forecast a radical re-ordering of the wine world. The most drastic decline was expected in Europe, where the scientists found a 85 percent decrease in production in Bordeaux, Rhone and Tuscany.”
Don’t care about polar bears and how their homes are melting? Fine. Haven’t noticed how thick the air pollution in major cities has become? OK. Know someone who loves wine more than Ramona from the Real Housewives of New York? Probably not, because she’s nuts for it, but you more than likely will tell someone the news of the disappearing wine crops.
Yeah, the year 2050 is a little far off right now, but remember the Earth has been around for more than four billion years. Thirty-seven years is nothing.
