To the Mainstream Media: Quit Lying About Crop Yields, They Are Increasing, Not in Decline
By
Anthony Watts
June 23, 2025
The Guardian lies again.
A number of mainstream media outlets carried stories claiming that climate change threatens crop yields and production, among them The Hill, Yahoo News, CNN, and The Guardian. That claim is refuted by everything botany, agronomy, data on crop yields, and the general greening of the Earth tell us about the effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). Each of the reports cite a single study as evidence, yet its findings are flatly contradicted decades of field, laboratory, and greenhouse data showing that crop yields have risen dramatically with the general warming of the Earth since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th century, and should continue to do so in the future. In fact, world food production is at an all-time high.
The Guardian story, “Climate crisis could hit yields of key crops even if farmers adapt,” is typical of the reports issued by other outlets. They all cover the cover the same claims. The author of The Guardian‘s story, Ajit Niranjan, writes that global warming threatens to reduce staple crop production by as much as 120 calories per person, per degree of warming—even if farmers adapt.
The Guardian’s article, as with all the other media stories on the topic, reference a single new econometric study which claims to find, under various warming scenarios, average calorie yields could decline—despite rising incomes and improved agricultural practices. This study relies on an abstract, climate model-based scenario built on assumptions about future behavior, not observational data. That’s a crucial distinction.
Take, for instance, the real-world data. Cereal yields globally have increased from around 1.5 metric tons per hectare in the 1960s to over 4 tons per hectare in 2020, per U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization statistics. As Climate Realism has discussed repeatedly, “every major crop—corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice—has shown dramatic increases in productivity globally and in nearly every major producing country” since the mid-20th century.
This is not anecdotal. It is quantifiable, observable science.
https://climaterealism.com/2025/06/quit-lying-about-crop-yields-the-guardian-they-are-increasing-not-in-decline/
