How Climate Change Is Playing Havoc With Olive Oil (and Farmers)
- 6 years ago
How Climate Change Is Playing Havoc With Olive Oil (and Farmers)
Scientists with the World Weather Attribution program, a group dedicated to the study of extreme weather, concluded last month
that the "the chances of seeing a summer as hot as 2017" had increased tenfold since the early 1900s, and the chances of a heat wave like the one that hit the region for three days in August, nicknamed Lucifer, had risen by four times.
California said that I hesitate to say this because I love the Mediterranean and I want people to have Mediterranean olive oil,
Extremely hot days are expected to be much more frequent in the coming decades, potentially disrupting our everyday lives.
24, 2017
TREVI, Italy — It was in June, the time of year when the first olives normally burst from their blossoms in the mild warmth of early summer, when Irene Guidobaldi walked through her groves in blistering heat
and watched in horror as the flowers on her trees began to wither and fall.
Other years, it rains so much — as it did in 2014 — that the olive fly breeds like crazy, leaving worms inside the olives.
Now, said Ms. Guidobaldi, stretching wide her long twiggy arms, "It’s like playing the lottery."
Sign up to receive our in-depth journalism about climate change around the world.
The heat wave that swept across southern Europe this summer, which scientists say bore the fingerprints of human-induced
climate change, is only the latest bout of strange weather to befall the makers of olive oil.
Scientists with the World Weather Attribution program, a group dedicated to the study of extreme weather, concluded last month
that the "the chances of seeing a summer as hot as 2017" had increased tenfold since the early 1900s, and the chances of a heat wave like the one that hit the region for three days in August, nicknamed Lucifer, had risen by four times.
California said that I hesitate to say this because I love the Mediterranean and I want people to have Mediterranean olive oil,
Extremely hot days are expected to be much more frequent in the coming decades, potentially disrupting our everyday lives.
24, 2017
TREVI, Italy — It was in June, the time of year when the first olives normally burst from their blossoms in the mild warmth of early summer, when Irene Guidobaldi walked through her groves in blistering heat
and watched in horror as the flowers on her trees began to wither and fall.
Other years, it rains so much — as it did in 2014 — that the olive fly breeds like crazy, leaving worms inside the olives.
Now, said Ms. Guidobaldi, stretching wide her long twiggy arms, "It’s like playing the lottery."
Sign up to receive our in-depth journalism about climate change around the world.
The heat wave that swept across southern Europe this summer, which scientists say bore the fingerprints of human-induced
climate change, is only the latest bout of strange weather to befall the makers of olive oil.