Wrong, The Guardian, There Is No Evidence Climate Change Is Harming Bananas
By
H. Sterling Burnett
May 16, 2025
The Guardian was among a number of mainstream media outlets to carry a story claiming climate change is threatening wipe out banana production. No data supports this claim, rather it is based on speculation about future climate conditions 55 years in the future. Production and yield trends show that bananas are doing fine, and no reason other than a single study’s speculation to assume they will do otherwise in the future.
The Guardian’s story, “Climate crisis threatens the banana, the world’s most popular fruit, research shows,” paints a picture of current decline and looming disaster for banana production and the people that rely on the fruit as a staple.
“The climate crisis is threatening the future of the world’s most popular fruit, as almost two-thirds of banana-growing areas in Latin America and the Caribbean may no longer be suitable for growing the fruit by 2080, new research has found,” writes The Guardian. “Rising temperatures, extreme weather and climate-related pests are pummeling banana-growing countries such as Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Colombia, reducing yields and devastating rural communities across the region, according to Christian Aid’s new report, Going Bananas: How Climate Change Threatens the World’s Favourite Fruit.”
The report the banana scare story is based upon was not peer reviewed research but rather the output of an activist organization pushing “climate justice.” Despite its questionable pedigree, numerous mainstream media outlets carried stories covering the report, for instance, The Independent, The Telegraph, Euronews, and MSN. The headlines of most of these stories were even more hyperbolic than The Guardian’s, alternatively purporting to report that climate change is “killing,” (Euronews) bananas or that they are on the verge of being “wiped out” (The Independent), or that they may “vanish from export shelves” (The Express Tribune). The reporters writing the stories showed no evidence of exercising any intellectual curiosity questioning the study’s claims or undertaking any independent journalistic investigation to fact check the Christian Aid’s report, rather the stories were written more like press releases promoting the findings.
https://climaterealism.com/2025/05/wrong-the-guardian-there-is-no-evidence-climate-change-is-harming-bananas/
