Climate change may cause a beer shortage: Study

In 2018, it appears science is proposing a new way the world ends — not just with climate change, but also with a lack of beer.

The supply of beer, the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world by volume consumed, is due to decrease because of projected drought and heat brought on by climate change, according to the journal Nature Plants. Droughts and extreme heat waves hurt the production of barley, which is beer’s key ingredient, and the cost of beer is predicted to rise because of the limited resource.

On Oct. 8, a United Nations report read almost like a biblical warning: Climate change will cause heat waves, the sea level to rise, disease, and food and water shortages. Barley is a crop that is highly sensitive to heat. According to the study’s co-author, Steve Davis of the University of California, Irvine, the new research on beer was conducted to serve as a more evident message of how climate change will affect our lives.

“I’m a beer drinker and home brewer, so the topic seemed like a fun combination of my professional and personal lives,” Davis tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Whether our findings are important remains to be seen. More expensive beer isn’t exactly an existential threat, but it is an example of one of the million different ways that climate change is going to disrupt our lives, and it may hit a lot closer to home for Joe six-pack.”

Davis also tells Yahoo Lifestyle: “Changes in mean climate will reduce barley yields if farmers do nothing, but we make what may be a heroic assumption that barley growers will be able to counteract the gradual shifting of temperature and precipitation. Instead, we focus on what happens in extreme years, which we define at the threshold of a historical 1-in-100-year event of concurrent heat and drought. Unfortunately, those extremes become much more frequent and much more severe under high-warming scenarios, becoming an every-other-year event in the latter part of the century if fossil fuel emissions continue unabated.”

Science isn’t trying to be a buzzkill, but here we are, right? Less than 20 percent of the world’s barley is made into beer, and most of it is used for purposes such as feeding livestock. So now they’re telling us we can’t even have a burger to go with that beer. Such a cruel fate.

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