Global Warming Is Helping to Wipe Out Coffee in the Wild

It seems seed banks are most imperative.

The end is near. Without coffee, what purpose would there be.

The author assumes that every crop must be grown in the same location it has for the past one hundred years. This is a glaring mistake, the crops will simply be grown in new locations.

I mostly drink coffee and my wife of 53 years only drinks tea. Tell me what is happening to tea so I can depress her also. Thank you.

Well hey, if we can't get people to care about climate change for the sake of our planet and the people on it, maybe we can bribe them with coffee...or more accurately it's disappearance. Surely those who rape the earth and destroy our world aren't immune to coffee withdrawal?

Thank you for the insight into this travesty and bad news indeed.

Over 50 YAG, I got a golden parachute for not accepting a job from a NYC company and I got rather a lot of money. Growing up in a small IN town, I always wanted to see the world. I got an open around the world flight ticket and planned to stay gone 3 months. I stayed traveling for 18 months and here is how I learned to learn coffee. While traveling in Tanzania, we stopped at a place called Gibbs Farm, which turned out to be a coffee plantation and being a very extrovert person, I saw next to the plantation manager. We had coffee cups on our table, and with the temp at 80+F, I tuned my cup over indicating no coffee for me. Well I was an experienced wine taster and knew how to taste. After tasting the coffee, I asked the manager, "What the hell is this". He said for the first time in your life you have tasted freshly roasted and brewed Arabica coffee. That hooked me. I started as all beginning roasters with the small electric roasters, graduated to popcorn poppers and after meeting Doug Zell at Intelligentsia Coffee and seeing how they used German Roasters called Hothow roasters with cast iron roasters, my search began. Fortunately I was living in S WI at the time and I happened to be acquainted with a large metal fabrication firm and determined to build my roaster had them make a drum from cold rolled 12 gauge steel. I now roast only Guatamalan Gesha Coffee to the beginning of second crack from Sweet Maria's and they us only fair traded coffee.

Maybe members of the GOP don't drink coffee so they don't care about climate change and deforestation? Unfortunately, the survival of coffee is just one of many reasons that climate change and deforestation have to be addressed and why the GOP is no longer relevant in solving the major issues of our era. (I will not even address how comrade Trump is responding to these issues.)

This class for BASF, Bayer, DuPont, Dow, Monsanto and Syngenta!

This might actually get trump followers to pay attention. After all, (snark alert) those real patriots sitting at local diners in the early morning in Iowa ain't gonna complain about liberals while drinking tea, you know! Waitress: More coffee, gents? It's $5.00/refill, cuz there's no bean-growing climate anywhere anymore, and General Foods' shareholders don't care about Moosebutt County patriots like us. Well, another cup? Gents: Stupid Obama! trump says liberals drank up all the coffee with their floofy lattays, leaving nothing for us real Americans. Stupid liberals! It's the DeepState, as we know, hoarding coffee in undergound bunkers at the southern border so only terrorists will have caffeine. Dearleader said that Hannity said it.

Response to Paulie's letter. We are past the tipping point, and accelerating. The insect world crashed several years ago, and both the California kelp forests and Bering Sea disappeared last year. Trump is not only our 45th President, he may also be the last American president.

In the last three to five years something has happened to coffee, at least for me. Prior to that period I had little trouble brewing wonderful coffee. Since then it has been all but impossible. At first I wondered if something had happened to my taste buds. Now, common sense tells me that something has happened to the bean. If I am not mistaken most good Arabica coffee is grown at altitude and under shade trees. In other words it is sensitive to too much heat and sun and also probably drought and flooding rains. Where the best had been grown would also have been in a stable environment. Roasters seem to be promoting that their beans are suitable for espresso. I think that is because that roast is less demanding of the bean. A bean that has been losing its unique and desirable qualities. It would seem that farmers are being left with the dilemma of a degraded climate in which to grow or going higher into the mountains to transplant their coffee trees.

The author is a bit of Chicken Little saying the sky is falling and botanical species will go extinct. Natural selection is happening with wild coffee and nature will ensure that they adapt to the new climatic situations producing natural adaptations that can be incorporated into new arabica and robusta varieties. Nobody mentions whether CIRAD in France has a genetic collection. And then, there is always CRISPR.

I manage a small coffee farm on Maui. Although there is an allure to wild coffee (which grows in some remote areas of the state), it can also be a vector for disease - especially the coffee borer beetle which can be devastating and very costly to control organically. Many of the farmers I know are also eager to propagate older and unique varietals, although fertile seed is sadly difficult to obtain.

Good grief. The earth does not need coffee to survive. And neither do humans. Also, the elephants and rhinos don't care.

Having visited various coffee variety collections around the world, some formerly supported by the ICO (international coffee org), I can attest to the note about a lack of funding and old specimen plants. I was just at Coffee Research in Kenya a couple months ago and the collection appears on the verge of death. Preserving coffee genetic diversity might hinge on plants in these collections and it’s doubtful those plants will last much longer. When the ICO was strong these gardens were remarkable, well funded and kept fresh with new plant material. It’s so important to underscore the economic importance of coffee to smallholder farmers, how it provides cash income to so many millions globally. It’s already a weak plant with inconsistent fruiting from year to year. If it’s further diminished by climate shift, the effect on small farmers and the rural economies in so many nations is huge. For me, that’s a chief reason to sound an alarm. For the environment, Arabica coffee is almost like an indicator species, and one easy to get the public to pay attention to! Even in the short 20 yrs I’ve been a coffee buyer there are areas that produced good volumes of good coffee that are no longer able to farm due to global warming. Insects (coffee berry borer) and fungus (rust/roya lead fungus) spread in these areas as temperatures rise and devastate the coffee plants. In Colombia, there are parts of Huila that were flush with coffee 20 years ago and can’t grow it now.

Coffee is a source of joy and 'pick me up' to millions, including me. Is there anything we can do? Otherwise all we will have is synthetic coffee from some monster company. Will some one start a fund to finance a save here?

I believe the climate has already passed the tipping point. With human populations continuing to explode I doubt there is any way to avoid the extinction of many species, including humans.

Give us this day our daily fix and lead us not into withdrawal...

Coffee, on the heels of buggeddon, which was heart breaking to read. This should be a red flag for everyone, if everything else was not! We have to put all drama and politics in its place and concentrate, focus, dive into stopping all the heat machines; of societies, industry and individually. We must stop the heat and pollution now to help at all. What is coming is already baked in, and life will be miserable for us, but let's try all we can to not make it worse and not snuff out all life on earth. The rest is just not that important unless it is standing in the way of this. All efforts should be directed at this; a future for the Earth and all the wonderful biomass. Without a friendly habitat, nothing else matters... And some coffee would be really nice too.

This makes me so sad, I can't even comment.

Thanks to Mr. Davis and those who are testing and preserving this remnant of Earth's heritage.