How Climate Change Is Playing Havoc With Olive Oil (and Farmers)

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/climate/olive-oil.html

Source:  By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times

2017-10-24. . . For GSS Climate Change chapter 8. Excerpt: ... Ms. Guidobaldi, an eighth-generation olive grower, bought water by the truckload, nearly every day, for most of the summer. The heat wave that swept across southern Europe this summer, which scientists say bore the fingerprints of human-induced climate change, is only the latest bout of strange weather to befall the makers of olive oil. Some years, like this one, the heat comes early and stays. Other years, it rains so much — as it did in 2014 — that the olive fly breeds like crazy, leaving worms inside the olives. Or there’s an untimely frost when the fruits first form, ...Gone are the days when you could count on the mild “mezze stagioni,” or half-seasons, that olives rely on before and after the heat. Gone, too, is the cycle you could count on: one year good, next year not good. ...Now, a changing climate is turning olive oil into an increasingly risky business — at least in the Mediterranean, the land of its birth.... 

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