The New York Times has a report by Christopher Flavelle which details how the climate crisis is hitting the Napa Wine Country in ways that may make it impossible to continue as a wine region.
Sunscreen on grapes. Disinfected toilet water used for irrigation. Napa Valley winemakers are taking extreme steps in the face of climate change.
The article contains a number of individual stories to provide context, but the main points are these:
- Wildfires in the last few years have taken a huge toll, burning out vineyards and wineries. The risk of fire is not decreasing — it’s getting worse.
- Even when fire doesn’t directly burn out a winery, smoke from wildfires in the area can leave a smoky residue on the grape skins of red varieties that affects the taste of wine made from them. (White varieties don’t use the skin in making wine, but are less valuable.)
- The high temperatures the region is experiencing are shriveling grapes into raisins on the vine — hence the use of sunscreen and other measures.
- Drought is making water scarce; winery reservoirs are drying up and they are using treated waste water from municipalities in some cases. There’s a chance that water, which is costly to truck in, may have to be reserved for people over plants as this goes on.
- Understandably, growers and vintners are finding getting insurance impossible. The risks of wildfires are simply too great. Those who can still get coverage are paying more for less.
The wine industry is holding on for now, but the possibility it can’t continue is one that can no longer be dismissed.
There’s a scene in “Atlas Shrugged” if I recall correctly, where one of the principles is upset he can’t get his customary grapefruit juice for breakfast.
He’s even more upset when he’s told it’s because the trains of his railroad are having trouble getting the fruit from California to New York - at which point he belatedly gives orders to increase the protection for a key bridge over the Mississippi…
Of course that is fiction - nothing worry about, right?
Funny thing. A few weeks ago a key highway bridge over the Mississippi used by a lot of trucks had a major beam crack… Even without climate events, that pesky infrastructure is a problem all by itself.
I wonder how many of the fossil fuel billionaires burning up the planet will suddenly pay attention when they can no longer get their favorite Napa wines any more?
The rest of the food supply is in trouble too - but famines and droughts and other weather events are just a problem for the little people, right? Maybe not...
Floods swept Germany, fires ravaged the American West and another heat wave loomed, driving home the reality that the world’s richest nations remain unprepared for the intensifying consequences of climate change.
The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it. The week’s events have now ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas — activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.
“I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change. “There’s not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save people’s lives.”
The pictures from the flooding in Europe show incredible devastation — and it struck quickly. Scientists are saying they need more computing power just to keep up. Modeling and predicting the extreme weather events the climate crisis is making more common is not a luxury.
Top climate scientists have admitted they failed to predict the intensity of the German floods and the North American heat dome.
They've correctly warned over decades that a fast-warming climate would bring worse bursts of rain and more damaging heatwaves.
But they say their computers are not powerful enough to accurately project the severity of those extremes…
...Some scientists argue that it's futile to wait for the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] to say how bad climate change will be.
That's partly because the panel's "Bible", which is supposed to gather in one place the sum of knowledge on climate change, will actually already be out of date when it’s published because review deadlines closed before the German and American extreme extremes (sic).
Prof Bill McGuire, for instance, from UCL, told me: "The obvious acceleration of the breakdown of our stable climate simply confirms that - when it comes to the climate emergency - we are in deep, deep s***!
This is the future we were warned about.
If you haven’t contacted your Congress people to let them know you really REALLY are insisting on the climate provisions in the infrastructure bills coming up, now would be a good time to let them know. Getting the word out elsewhere wouldn’t hurt either.
(If you are interested in staying on top of the extreme weather events, Severe Weather Europe is one place to check. It covers more than just Europe.)