Climate change is threatening ketchup, salsa, and California.
Honestly, I don’t care if climate change is threatening California. Much of that is because a lot of California’s problems are self-inflicted. It seems more than a few of those problems can be attributed to virtue signaling rather than actually solving real problems.
But the problem to deal with is the affects of climate on tomatoes. No tomatoes, no ketchup or salsa.
One-fourth of total tomatoes grown every year on our planet comes from California, but now tomato production is decreasing in the state at an unprecedented rate. The yield of tomatoes dropped by about 23% in 2021 as compared to the year 2015. Plus, the limited supply of tomatoes is further causing a never before seen jump in the prices of popular tomato-based products like ketchup, salsa, and pasta sauce in the US and elsewhere in the world.The blame for this is being laid on climate change, specifically the drought that has been plaguing the Southwest. To read some of the reports out there, drought was never a problem until the evil humans caused the climate to change.
Then again, a lot of the Southwest is arid or semi-arid and has experienced more than a few megadroughts, some which lasted decades and few which lasted centuries, all of which occurred long before humans started pouring gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Some of the drought problem can also be laid upon the aforementioned virtue signaling which caused much needed water projects to be canceled and existing water infrastructure to be dismantled which has only added to the water supply problems. Somehow, I doubt we’ll hear anything about that from the media.