OK, so it was in medieval England, but still, can you imagine how the wine collectors felt to see their vintage bottles go from a 96 Wine Spectator rating to a 20 or 30 due to climate change?
The Chronicle today, as part of the Al Gore and the MSM’s continued attempts to get the public whipped up about climate change, ran a story that predicts that global warming will ruin the state’s wine industry by the end of the century. To support their charge, one of the report authors pointed to past climate changes:
"We know that climate change has affected wine production in the past," said Noah Diffenbaugh, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University. "If you go back to the medieval warm period, there were vineyards in south England. Then the Little Ice Age that began in the mid-16th century eliminated those vineyards."
Maybe it’s just because I am a product of the California public school system and therefore wasn’t taught enough history, but I find it hard to believe that medieval England had a wine industry. Sure, there were vineyards, but then Mother Earth, or Gaia as Bay Area residents like to call her, decided to change the ground rules. I don’t think the global warming crowd has really had much impact on the regular American because most of us realize that the Earth is changing all the time. Didn’t we all learn about plate tectonics and such in our high school geography classes?
I also don’t think it is a coincidence that these folks decided to sound the alarm about California‘s wine industry instead of, say, the soybean or peanut industry. It’s the wealthy segment of our society, the ones with the most money to give to environmental non-profits and the Democratic party, that care most about the future of wine. Now, if they had done a study that said that the beer industry was going to suffer from global climate change, then they would have really gotten the attention of the American middle class, especially baseball and NASCAR fans!
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.
