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Welcome back.
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Today: Will coffee survive climate change?
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I’m Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit.
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COFFEE: BACK TO THE FUTURE
Caffeine.
Can’t sleep with it, can’t operate as a human being in the year of our lord twenty twenty-three without it.
Caffeine comes in a wide variety of sources, including tea, soda, and other terrifying processed drinks.
But today let’s focus on what Jack Aubrey’s friend Alexander von Humboldt called “concentrated sunshine”:
Coffee.
Two billion cups consumed every day.
An estimated 154 million adults (75% of the US population) report drinking coffee, and half of adults drink it every damn day.
Because of exactly how it works in our brains and how prevalent it is, coffee effectively rewrote humanity’s baseline consciousness.
“Don’t Talk to Mom Before Her Coffee” trinkets made Etsy what it is today, coffee fueled the Industrial Revolution, gave us confidence (and, seemingly) energy -- all conveniently harvested and laboriously produced on the backs of millions of slaves on the other side of the world.
The slavery is a little less now (and historically, a blip compared to sugar plantations), but the brutal conditions remain -- and it’s getting hotter every day.
Can coffee, the world’s second-most consumed beverage (after water, the other liquid we can’t operate without), survive climate change?
From what we can tell, which isn’t much, the Chinese have been drinking tea for a very long time, maybe since the 200’s AD.
Coffee seems to have gotten its start a thousand years or so later in East Africa and across the Silk Road and Red Sea to the Arabian peninsula. It’s probably not coincidental that Muslim scholars relied on it to, you know, invent math.
“(Coffee) seemed to be tailor-made for a culture that forbade alcohol consumption and gave birth to modern mathematics”.
I’m not kidding. The word “algebra” is derived from the Medieval Latin, from Arabic “al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa al-muqabala”. Al jabr seems to translate to “reunion of broken parts”, which is also not coincidentally what happens to my wife every morning when pry open her eyes and deliver her a hot coffee with an extra shot of espresso tucked right inside.
Alcohol, as those Muslims scholars could tell you, is a nightmare. More on that later.
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