By BJORN LOMBORG, National Post, July 23, 2026
Summary: Climate change is not threatening everyday staples like coffee and olive oil, nor is it causing supply shortages and price increases. In fact, warming is increasing planetary greening and helping feed eight billion people.
These days, no morning ritual is safe from climate alarm. The journal Nature has just declared that coffee is “critically threatened by climate change” and described . scientists racing to save your espresso from “extinction.”
The New York Times blames sky-high coffee prices on climate-driven supply crunches in Brazil and Vietnam. And your olive oil? CNN and Bloomberg wail about a seemingly permanent “crisis,” with Mediterranean droughts foretelling a future in which this everyday staple vanishes for good.
The message is clear: Global warming is coming for your family’s dinner table and only sweeping climate policy can save it. The message is also wrong. Cut through the hype, and not only is food more plentiful than ever but its inflation-adjusted cost is near historic lows relative to any time since 1900.
Food fear-mongers ignore inflation and long-term data
Start with coffee, supposedly on its deathbed. This year, global coffee production is expected to set yet another record — more than double the world’s output of 50 years ago. Crops on the brink of extinction typically don’t deliver record harvests. And despite recent price bumps, the real price of coffee has trended downward since 1960. Adjust for inflation and, on average this century, coffee has cost half what it did last.
How do outlets such as the New York Times get it so wrong? By inexcusably ignoring inflation — comparing coffee prices from the 1970s, expressed in the dollars of that day, with prices expressed in today’s dollars. By that standard, everything is at a record high, always.
Even Nature’s own reporting on coffee undercuts its ominous headline that reads “How Scientists are Fighting to Save it from Extinction”. Ethiopia keeps more than 12,000 arabica plants in living gene banks for breeding heat- and drought-tolerant varieties. “I believe we have enough gene pool to fight climate change,” the Ethiopian plant geneticist leading the effort says. Farmers in hotter regions are already switching to hardier coffee species that professional tasters can’t distinguish from fine arabica. That isn’t extinction. It is what agriculture has always involved: adaptation and improvement.
The supposed olive-oil crisis collapses under the same scrutiny. According to United Nations’ food statistics, global production has tripled since 1961 and doubled since 1990. Last year, this year and the exceptional 2018 harvest mark records for production of olive oil. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted prices have not increased and have even declined slightly since 1990. Again, better farming and expanded cultivation outweigh any climate effect.
Food scare stories follow a formula: Take an isolated weather event, attribute it to global warming, skip inflation adjustment and ignore the long-term data. Natural year-to-year swings driven by economics, trade policy and subsidies get repackaged as apocalyptic trends. What’s rarely mentioned about current price pressures is that they come mainly from fertilizer and transport costs — inflated, ironically, by climate policies that raise fossil fuel energy bills for the essentials of farming.
How climate change helps farming is ignored
Nor is mention ever made of the ways climate change helps crops. Carbon dioxide is plant food, which is why commercial growers pump extra CO2 into greenhouses to produce more tomatoes. NASA satellites show the planet has been greening for four decades, meaning the world has added leaves over an area equivalent to that of at least twice the Amazon rainforest (see Figure 1).
On balance, climate change will hurt agriculture. But its negative effects are dwarfed by rising productivity. One highly cited study in Nature finds that without any climate change, global food-calorie production will increase 51 per cent between 2010 and 2050. But with extreme, unrealistic warming, it still increases by 49 per cent. Across all models and scenarios, the difference in calories available per person amounts to onetenth of one per cent.
The explanation for this persistent increase in food-calorie production is that humanity keeps getting better at growing food. Cereal production has more than quintupled over the past century while real food prices have more than halved.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s turned famine-prone countries into exporters via widespread adoption of highyield crop varieties, expanded use of chemical fertilizers and improved irrigation. India, once written off as a basket case dependent on food aid, quadrupled its rice production between 1961 and 2023 and is today the world’s largest rice exporter.
Global daily calorie availability per person climbed from less than 2,200 in 1961 to more than 2,900 now. Global undernourishment has plummeted from roughly one in four people in the developing world in the early 1990s to fewer than one in 10 today.
Innovation, not climate fear, is needed
The task now is to finish the job. Innovation should extend to underresearched crops such as sorghum, cassava and millet — staples for two billion people in the developing world that have been largely ignored by commercial breeders. Investment in biotechnology, precision agriculture and drought-resistant crop varieties will do far more for the world’s poor — and for your grocery bill — than any emissions target.
We can keep feeding more people and do it better by doubling down on what actually works: innovation.
Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of False Alarm and Best Things First.