Happy Mother’s Day.
As part of my personal celebration, I am planning to indulge in one of my pamper pastimes: Sipping some fine California wine.
Sadly, eco-activists have targeted the Golden State’s vineyards in their latest fear campaign:
The study, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is billed as the first worldwide analysis of climate change on wine production. It concludes that a warming world will produce a decline in wine-grape vineyards— as much as 75 percent by 2050—in regions including California, Chile, Argentina, southern Europe, and Australia. The study’s only points of distinction, though, are its purported global scope (which means the margin for error is larger) and its lack of rudimentary knowledge of contemporary winemaking.The great wine scare has been around for quite a while. Spain even hosted an annual “World Conference on Climate Change and Wine,” featuring that well-known climate scientist and oenophile Al Gore, along with former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, though the series seems to have lost its effervescence after its third meeting in 2011. The current PNAS study is not the organization’s first prediction of a dire future for California’s wine industry. “Climate Change May Bring Sour Grapes,” CBS News reported in 2009 of a similar PNAS study. Still another PNAS study from 2006 explored how “Extreme Heat Reduces and Shifts United States Premium Wine Production in the 21st Century.”
Nice to know our former Vice President is enjoying some wonderful vintages in his post-political career.
Fortunately, as I have noted in an earlier post, the real data does not support the contention that global warming is occurring — man-made or otherwise. And such skepticism is readily apparent in the City Journal piece by Steven F. Hayward:
Left out of the news accounts was the finding that the net area suitable for premium viticulture outside existing wine-grape regions would expand by more than twice as much as the area supposedly at risk in California and elsewhere. As the study says, “Large newly suitable areas are projected in regions of Northern Europe and western North America.” Good news for wine consumers, no? It wouldn’t be the first time viticulture has changed along with the climate: 1,000 years ago, after all, wine was made in England and Greenland. (Climate change already appears to be reviving the British sparkling wine industry—don’t you dare call it “champagne”!)
Additionally, the eco-activists trying to promote this doom scenario have also conveniently forgotten about a cold snap in 2008 that damaged many California vineyards.
I may have to pop in a DVD of one of my favorite films, “Sideways”. In it, one of the lead characters refuses to drink Merlot. I refuse to drink the eco-activists’ global warming “wine/whine” — and it is good to see more people joining me.
In a related piece, Harrison H. Schmitt (an Apollo 17 astronaut and a former U.S. senator) and Dr. William Happer (a professor of physics at Princeton University) demonstrate that carbon dioxide, vilified as the cause of global warming, is actually beneficial to plants — including grape vines.
So, eco-activists worried about our vineyards should actually be clamoring for more CO2, not less! I’ll drink to that!
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