Beer prices to double, or triple?

[Darrell KSR]

Surely this is alarmist...

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Food/beer...l_twitter_abcn

[CitizenBBN]

Calling it alarmist would be generous. Calling it non-scientific trope would be more accurate, lol.

I've always loved these kinds of "studies", on any topic, and they exist on every topic you can find. You take some current data, find a trend, extrapolate it out 30-40 years (this one never gives a date but says the models looked "well into this century" so I'm guessing at least mid 2000s) and then comment on the results.

The problem being of course that there are so many variables between here and there it simply never means anything.

IMO the most classic example of this is the Malthusian premise, where Thomas Robert Malthus projected population growth rates as exponential and increases in foodstuff production as linear and predicted a massive starvation cycle for the world's population. It's a bit of an oversimplification, but that's how the theory has been used. Malthus' own work on the subject was more about how population kept expanding to pressure resources so we'd never get a utopian society.

Anyway, this strikes me as that kind of theory. It assumes there is no increase in production area, no changes in technology, no crop relocation, etc., basically that current lower production per acre continues without anyone doing anything about it.

HIstorically that's just now how things work.

Anyway, didn't mean to get serious, I just find these kinds of things funny and frustrating. These researchers got paid by some grant or school to take this data and massage it and come up with a prediction that, in fact, is all but useless. it doesn't do anything to tell us how to deal with the nearly insurmountable political and economic hurdles to actually reducing emissions, and it's completely unlikely to play out as they projected and even if it did I'm not sure what is useful about knowing that at this point as we know many far more important things would be impacted even more.

[Catfan73]

It does sound like a blatant attempt to get Bubba worried about climate change. Nothing else is working.

[CitizenBBN]

It does sound like a blatant attempt to get Bubba worried about climate change. Nothing else is working.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good pitch. lol.

Honestly for what some of these microbrew beers cost, I think maybe it's already happened.

[dan_bgblue]

I spent 25 years of my life working in production agriculture and just want to say pfffft to their study that is purely hypothetical. I will insert a few cold hard facts and then let them run their calculations. In the US alone yields of barley and wheat have doubled per acre on the eastern side of the midwest since the early 90s. That means that costs of those two critical inputs into the making of beer have decreased over time allowing for many more gallons of brew to be made at a reduced cost.

[bigsky]

More likely that wasteful ethanol requirements will raise beer prices than anything else, and screw up your engine too

[CitizenBBN]

I spent 25 years of my life working in production agriculture and just want to say pfffft to their study that is purely hypothetical. I will insert a few cold hard facts and then let them run their calculations. In the US alone yields of barley and wheat have doubled per acre on the eastern side of the midwest since the early 90s. That means that costs of those two critical inputs into the making of beer have decreased over time allowing for many more gallons of brew to be made at a reduced cost.

As you know Dan, it's laughable to take narrow data, even trending data, and extrapolate as if nothing else will change.

That's why I laugh at so much of what people claim is "climate science", dismissing anyone who questions it as somehow denying "science". I've read this stuff for decades, and it just doesn't hold.

In the 1970s it was Paul and Anne Ehrlich and the Doomsayers, who were projecting all kinds of things, but based on assumptions that science wouldn't increase yields or find answers, etc. As I mentioned, that's a big part of the application of Malthus, that somehow we would never increase production through new advances.

I read an article in the 1970s explaining why the new 1200 baud modem was the theoretical limit of data transmission on our existing phone network, that it just couldn't get faster b/c of the limitations inherent to the process. Think that was right? The guy made a valid point. Using the existing approach 1200 was the limit, but of course we found different approaches and ways around things, and now operate at 100s of times faster.

This kind of work isn't science. It's self-indulgence to keep getting paid as a professor at best, and misleading propaganda that undermines learning of proper scientific principles at worst.


That doesn't mean btw we don't face real environmental threats, including from our pollution emissions. We do. I'm sure it's a bad idea to dump waste and poisons and herbicides and mercury into the food chain, and sulphur and and everything else into the air. It can't be good, but we need to use real science to figure it out, not this kind of stuff.

[Doc]

was actually an interesting segment on Life, Liberty and Levin last night. I typically don't watch that show but for some reason I did last night. Discussed the basis upon which climate change is based and how the fundemental parameters are incorrect (altitude tempatures between the tropics). They went on to discuss how this was used to allow the gov't to regulate but that is for the "Barber Shop". The other point made, one that is often used to fight global warming, is the time frame for the data. They went into the selective nature and how far rhe reseachers went back, being sure to exclude the first half of the 20th century as that data would not support their assumptions.

As you can tell, I'm not a believer in Armagedon where the earth is going to become a blazing ball of fire and turn into the wasteland depicted in the Mad Max trilogies. In other words my beer stock is stable

[CitizenBBN]

Doc, anyone familiar with the Dust Bowl knows the Earth has experienced these warming (and cooling) trends in absence of any human help, and that they last for years and sometimes decades. ONe of the more notable periods within known human history led to increased agricultural production in Europe and the result was the Renaissance.

Now, I prefer to err on the side of caution, so I think it's a good idea for humans to work with Mother Nature as much as possible, and there are various polluting acts we commit, and over-harvesting acts, that I think are very dangerous. I also think reducing air pollution is a good thing.

But how we do that, to what degree, and how we get other nations on board and we aren't just committing economic suicide while they happily pollute away, those are the tough questions. ANd best left for the other board.