Add beer to chocolate, coffee and wine as some of life's little pleasures that global warming will make scarcer and costlier, scientists say.
Increasing bouts of extreme heat waves and drought will hurt production of barley, a key beer ingredient, in the future. Losses of barley yield can be as much as 17 percent, an international group of researchers estimated.
That means beer prices on average would double, even adjusting for inflation, according to the study in Monday's journal Nature Plants . In countries like Ireland, where cost of a brew is already high, prices could triple.
The findings come a week after a dire United Nations report described consequences of dangerous levels of climate change including worsening food and water shortages, heat waves, sea level rise, and disease.
Study co-author Steve Davis of the University of California, Irvine, said the beer research was partly done to drive home the not-that-palatable message that climate change is messing with all sorts of aspects of our daily lives.
Several scientists who weren't part of this study said it was sound and perhaps more effective way of communicating the dangers of global warming. Read the Full article on the link above -
