Editor’s Note: This guest post from The Daily Sceptic’s Chris Morrison, debunks a story carried by the BBC that banana production is being diminished, leading to shortages and higher prices, due to climate change. Climate Realism has repeatedly refuted claims that climate change is harming crop production. Although bananas have only been addressed in a couple of posts, here and here, those posts show that what is true for the vast majority of crops it true for bananas as well. Banana production is improving and setting records even as the Earth is slightly warming. Indeed, Morrison’s analysis is firmly grounded in data from U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, which shows banana production and yields are increasing and regularly setting records. As a result, any increase in prices or shortages must be due to other factors, like increased demand and supply chain issues.
Banana prices to go up as temperatures rise, reports Matt McGrath of the BBC. What a magnificent story – adding to the fake climate emergency narrative and helping out Big Banana all in one go. Alas, the uncharitable might note that the story is slightly spoilt by banana output having doubled over the last 20 years, helped, almost certainly, by a little extra warmth and atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Bananas are set to get more expensive as climate change hits a much loved fruit, says Pascal Liu of the World Banana Forum, a UN umbrella group promoting the banana business. ‘Experts’ are reported to be concerned about the growing threats from a warming world and from the diseases that are spreading in its wake. McGrath helpfully adds that last week saw shortages in several U.K. supermarkets due to “storms at sea”. There are reported to be concerns about a relatively new strain of Fusarium Wilt, a plant disease that has been widespread in commercial banana plantations for over 100 years.
McGrath quotes the Big Banana spokesman as observing that climate impacts pose an “enormous threat” to supply, compounding the impact of fast-spreading diseases. Prices in the U.K. “are likely to go up – and stay up”. Which would appear to be very good news for those in the banana business. As the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) graph below shows, they have also enjoyed staggering high rises in recent yields.
In common with other large scale makers of agricultural produce, the last few years have had difficulties with disruptions from Covid and the war in Ukraine leading to rises in the price of fertilisers and transport. More normal conditions seems to be returning with the FAO reporting that the outlook for 2024 “looks more positive than in the previous two years, provided that price variations in real terms will continue to be favourable”.
As we can see, British taxpayer-reliant McGrath is not just doing his bit to help push up banana prices for U.K. consumers, but he combines this noble work with his usual day job nudging citizens to accept the insane collectivist Net Zero policy. The new variant of Fusarium Wilt can be spread by flooding and strong winds, it is said. M.r Liu notes that the disease will be spread much faster “than if you have normal weather patterns”. It is surprising that McGrath didn’t point out that in its latest assessment report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) observed that estimates of the impact of human involvement in severe storms outside natural variation remained of “low confidence”. In addition to severe storms, the IPCC found little evidence of human involvement stretching out to 2100 in tropical cyclones, heavy rain and pluvial, and river and coastal flooding.
No doubt a small lapse in rigour at the BBC’s multi-staffed climate desk, given that McGrath is usually a keen student of the IPCC as a “sound scientific source”. Accepting €100,000 from the green foundation of the large Spanish bank BBVA in 2019, he noted that the media landscape was awash with ”fake news” stories. He defended the “primacy” of specialist journalists that draw on sound sources such as the IPCC. The green foundation, meanwhile, fawned all over him, noting “his extraordinary capacity to communicate complex environmental issues and science to global audiences”.
Of course, the McGrath article is just one of many that appear in legacy media outlets that attempt to insert alleged human involvement in the continually changing climate into general news stories. As regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will be aware, these stories do not appear totally by accident. Green billionaire cash floods into operations seeking to influence journalists, politicians, scientists and even Hollywood scriptwriters to catastrophise information promoting the climate collapse scare and the need for a Net Zero solution. Fake news is now endemic throughout the mainstream media. This despite signs that in the wake of the Covid experience, the general public across many Western countries is starting to lose faith in top-down controlling narratives.
Speaking of tropical fruit, the BBC’s amusingly described ‘disinformation’ correspondent Marco Silva is currently enjoying a six-month sabbatical with the green billionaire-funded Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN). To “hit closer to home”, course participants are told to pick a fruit such as a mango and discuss why it wasn’t as tasty as the year before due to climate change. This will allow the subject of climate change to become “less abstract”. In a recently published essay, two OCJN organisers said their course was designed to allow climate journalists “to move beyond their siloed past” into a strategic position within newsrooms, “combining expertise with collaboration”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
