Editorial: Climate change Grinches look to ruin the holidays

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas Review-Journal on Dec 23, 2025

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Who doesn’t have a soft spot for the smells of the holidays? The aromatic cinnamon stick flavoring a cup of eggnog or the hint of vanilla in grandma’s baked goods can trigger wonderful memories of the Christmas season.

Leave it to progressive climate Grinches to warn that global warming represents a threat to some of these cherished traditions.

Last week, The Atlantic published a piece under the heading, “Climate Change is Coming for Your Favorite Holiday Foods.” The premise was that the “ingredients for your favorite holiday foods are becoming increasingly harder to grow because of climate change.” Those ingredients include chocolate, coffee, vanilla and cinnamon.

Author Rachel Kahn notes that many cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, “which has been facing more days of extreme heat and drought,” threatening production and driving up prices. Jennifer Grey, a meteorologist with The Weather Channel, told Kahn that vanilla and cinnamon are also under threat because they are grown almost exclusively in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, “places that are facing climate extremes.”

As for coffee, “climate change is drastically shrinking the land where it can grow,” Kahn reports. “Suitable locations could decrease by 50% by 2050, according to a 2014 study.”

All of this might cause great distress for coffee, chocolate or cinnamon aficionados — if it were true. But the numbers don’t indicate that any of these holiday staples will be disappearing from the shelves anytime soon. As H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute notes on the website climaterealism.com, “U.N. data clearly demonstrate a substantial growth in the production of each of the crops discussed over the past 35 years of global warming.”

For instance, Burnett points out, cocoa production is up more than 157% since 1990. That includes higher production in West African nations, including the Ivory Coast (setting a new record in 2023), Ghana (up 122% since 1990) and Nigeria (up 17%).

The same goes for the other commodities. Burnett notes that coffee production is up 82% over the past 35 years, while vanilla production has more than doubled and cinnamon production is up 289% over the same period.

“It is impossible to tease out or discern a tangible threat to the continued availability of those products in the readily available data or production trends,” Burnett concludes.

Current trends don’t always reflect future ones, of course, and The Atlantic piece addressed what may occur in the years to come, not our current situation. But given the dismal prognostication record of climate doomsayers — wasn’t New York City supposed to be under water by now? — we’ll wager that Burnett paints the more accurate picture of coming events.

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