James Taylor, Forbes

Environmentalists delivered a dire report this Christmas season: Human-caused global warming is causing wheat harvests to fall. The message was repeated uncritically by much of the mainstream media.

Had they bothered to check the facts, the media would have discovered climate alarmists were lying once again. Wheat yields are rising dramatically in the U.S. and internationally - due in part, no doubt, to the fertilizing effect of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

In his regular column at Forbes.com, James M. Taylor - a senior fellow of The Heartland Institute, which distributes Climate Change Weekly - refutes alarmists’ claims concerning wheat production by going directly to the data. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports global wheat yields have risen by 33 percent since 1994. In addition, there has been a 4 percent increase in land acreage growing wheat. Combined, the 33 percent increase in per-acre wheat yield and the 4 percent increase in land harvested for wheat equal an almost 40 percent increase in the global wheat harvest since 1994. Rather than slowing, yields set records in 2013 and again in 2014.

Global wheat production sets new records virtually every year, contradicting alarmist’ claims of falling production.

Alarmists and media lied both about general wheat trends and wheat production in specific countries and continents. For instance, Reuters cited a single report to claim wheat yields had fallen in hotter regions such as in Africa, Australia, Brazil, and India. The real data, highlighted by Taylor, tell a quite different story:

Wheat production in Egypt, the only significant producer of wheat in Africa, has quadrupled during the past 30 years, “with the past 10 years producing the 10 highest wheat crops in Egyptian history.”

In addition, “Africa’s second largest wheat producing country, Morocco, produced its highest wheat crop in history in 2013,” and South Africa produced record wheat yields in 2014.

Brazil also produced consecutive years of record wheat yields in 2013 and 2014, 2014’s wheat crop being 30 percent larger than 2013’s record yield.

India appears likely in 2014 to surpass its previous wheat production record, set in 2012.

Of the countries cited by Reuters as having falling wheat production, only Australia failed to produce a record crop in 2013 or 2014. However, as Taylor points out, “its 2014 wheat crop was the eighth largest in its history,” with the record yield set just three years ago in 2011. Australia’s wheat production has risen steadily for four decades, with 2014’s wheat crop being four times larger than the yield in 1972.

For far too long, environmentalists and their willing dupes in the media have been allowed to make false claims unchallenged. Once the facts are checked, global warming-related food fears should fade, like darkness before the light of day.

See the world wheat record and the US corn and soybean record yields.

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