91av

As the world warms, severe droughts and heat extremes will lead to a shortage of beer, causing prices to shoot up. In Ireland, the price could double. In some eastern European countries, prices could increase seven-fold. Cue mass panic?

These headline-grabbing conclusions, from a study released today on how global warming will affect beer production, are almost certainly wrong – but we should still take this kind of study seriously.

The thing is, predicting the future is notoriously difficult, and no one can forecast future beer prices with any certainty. It depends, for instance, on demand for beer. How is that going to change by 2100?

Maybe demand will soar as the world’s growing population gets richer. Or maybe hardly anyone will drink beer in future. Young people in many countries are, after all, drinking less than they used to.

We also now know that alcohol causes cancer. Perhaps in fifty years’ time people will regard alcoholic drinks with the same horror we now regard smoking.

Impossible predictions

The point is, such things are just impossible to predict. So to get any kind of result, forecasters have to make a series of assumptions they know are wrong.

In the case of the beer study, the key assumptions were that farmers will keep growing the same varieties of barley in the same places, and that demand and the global economy remain as they are.

“We are not aiming for a ‘real’ future prediction,” says team member Dabo Guan of the University of East Anglia, UK.

Rather, he says, the point is to demonstrate that climate change is not just going to affect staple crops like wheat and rice, but also luxury crops. Global warming could affect the availability and price of many of the foods and drinks that people in developed countries take for granted.

The classic counterargument is that if the price of a commodity like barley increases, farmers will plant more of it and the price will fall. While that is a limitation of the study, Guan points out that climate change could hit many different crops at the same time. And in a world where arable land could be in huge demand, boosting production might not be so simple.

“It’s not only barley that’s going to suffer,” he says. “The price of all crops are going to shoot up, including staple foods, your grapes, your wine, all your chocolate, your coffee, your tea.”

So the take-home message for ordinary punters is that there’s no guarantee that our current luxurious lifestyles will continue unless we do far more to limit further climate change. And for those involved in brewing beer, it means thinking about how to climate-proof the process.

That might mean, say, genetically engineering strains of barley that are drought-resistant. Or maybe brewers could slash their environmental footprint by cutting barley and hops out of the equation altogether and instead using cells in a vat to churn out the key chemicals.

This will have the real ale purists choking on their pints and spluttering into their beards – but what is certain is that things cannot continue as they are.