The negative effects of climate change
All too often, college is a place where students push their ability to function properly while running on a few hours of sleep. There are midterms, papers and other homework to accomplish all while balancing the plethora of clubs and other demands. This hectic life of planning out your week and giving yourself only a certain amount of time to accomplish it all inhibits the amount of sleep you obtain.
What is the source that allows students to avoid falling asleep at their desk while they accomplish the tasks they desperately need to complete? Coffee.
Coffee is the gold mine of students seeking the pep in the step they need. However, what if the coffee mine has run dry?
Imagine this. It’s 1849 and you hear the news that gold has been struck in California. This is your chance to make something of your life. You live in Philadelphia, Pa., so you start saving your money to travel to California. You learn how to mine in order to get to California to strike this gold. You buy all of the materials needed to mine and you finally make your trek to California. You get there and your life is halted, because you learn this gold James Marshall discovered has run dry. All your funding has gone down the drain and you’re stuck.
Now take this situation and replace the idea of gold with coffee. Just as the gold miners invested everything that they had into finding gold, all of the college savings you have stored away are tied up in these four years. To make the most of your investment, you need to do well in your classes, but to do this you end up running on a few hours of sleep. All you have learned in college is only because coffee pushed you along. Coffee is the equivalent of gold in the eyes of a college student. However, the mine is depleting.
What is the culprit? Climate change. “Climate change is threatening coffee crops in virtually every major coffee producing region of the world,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. This is because coffee adapts to specific temperatures to grow and climate change is driving these conditions askew.
The increased and intense rainfall occurrences that happen in coffee-growing regions is also decreasing the production of coffee beans.
Also, with warmer temperatures invading the coffee-growing regions, the spread of diseases like coffee rust, a fungus that destroys the source of coffee, and the spread of the pest called the “coffee berry borer,” an insect that destroys coffee beans, are causing the production of coffee to decrease in great numbers.
Since this problem is too big for one coffee company to fix, it is up to the population of coffee lovers to band together and fight against climate change. Climate change is real and is affecting our lives in more ways than just the glaciers melting. Among other things, climate change is affecting the price of coffee, since production is becoming limited. Climate change is hitting us right in the comfort of our homes, making it more difficult to can enjoy a nice warm cup of coffee to start our day.
Although it was impossible to prevent the drying of the gold mines in the 1850s, it is now up to the current population to take the steps necessary to stop climate change and keep the gold mines of coffee, that a majority of students depend on every morning, from drying up.
