A Life Without Coffee: Imagine A Life Without Coffee

Imagine a life without coffee. It is scary, isn’t it? Coffee is the elixir of life. This is seen with the statistic that Americans alone drink four hundred million cups of coffee each day. While the United States drinks a lot of coffee, Sweden and Finland drink more than double what Americans do with seventeen to twenty-two pounds versus Americas nine pounds (“Coffee Statistics”). There may be a day in the future where Monday mornings do not consist of a giant cup of coffee to get through the day, or meeting friends for a cup of joe to catch up on work or school. Coffee runs could come to an end by the year 2080 because coffee will be extinct due to global warming.

No one is exactly sure how or when coffee came about, but there are many theories.

This is not a cherry that might be on a milkshake, but it does look like a cross between an enlarged red cranberry and a cherry. Once the coffee cherry is ready to be processed, the bean must be extracted. There are two methods for this; A wet and a dry one. The dry method is simpler and is typically only used when water is scarce, but it takes a significant amount of time for the bean to dry out. The wet method, however, is more common. First, the pulp must be pulled out, and then the beans are sent through a water pipe where the skin is removed. From there the beans journey into spinning drums which separates them by size. Once separated, they are sent to fermentation tanks to sit for twelve to forty-eight hours. After fermentation, there are a couple more steps such as different methods for drying the bean, and hulling it. Now the beans are ready for export, and are sorted by size and color. The milled beans, or green coffee, are loaded into shipping containers ready to make their way into the world (Murray). As global warming is affecting where the coffee can be grown this causes exporting problems because it can not be grown as quick as it is needed. Data from the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service predicted that the world coffee production for the 2015/2016 fiscal year would be 152.7 million sixty kilogram bags of coffee (Murray). Coffee is exported all over the world, but it can not be grown all over the

It includes the atmosphere, oceans and the Earth’s surface (Bradford). Global warming and coffee are closely connected because global warming results in high temperatures and long droughts followed by lots of rain. These factors are both reducing coffee plant production. Coffee has adapted to grow in specific climate zones, but rising temperatures causes a substantial difference in these climates. . The rapid rise of rainfall is also causing a decrease in crops ("Coffee and Climate: What 's Brewing with Climate Change?" ). Action needs to be taken now to prevent coffee