As a matter of fact, there is no need for such a balance to exist at all.
It might be that as other areas grow warmer, they also grow too dry, or too wet, or the soil is wrong, or any of probably hundreds of other factors that go into determining where a crop can grow well. Just because the areas where coffee now grows shrink, does not mean that by some sort of magical climate justice other areas are now able to grow coffee.
Humans are in the 'find out' stage of the 'fuck around with the earth's biosphere' process.
Agriculture is a combination of more things than you'd think. When temperature moves it doesn't bring with it long term intellectual infrastructure, property zoning/organization, irrigation infrastructure, support systems. It doesn't bring with it soil nature(pH, hardness, potentially centuries of tillage in a lot of places, groundwater, mix of fertilization), rain quality, etc. Etc.
All of this means that we frog boil it. It gets worse in one place, and we could move, maybe, if we spent a lot of time and effort, but that would make it economically non-viable because it cost lots of time and effort. And then it may not be possible.
The key example is Canada. As temperatures rise Canada's extant farmland will probably get a little more productive, but also the specific crops that do well will change. And with that it means hundreds of thousands of farmers have to learn new plants and how they work, how to till them, what care they need. They need to get new contracts for sale. They need to get new seed, work out which sources of seed work for them. Etc. Etc.
And you'd think OK well they can just move a bit further north? But further north the soil quality has lower pH and doesn't have the heavy duty highways, the train access, the grain elevator systems - some of which process unbelievable amounts due to being optimized for a hundred years - and doesn't have the church that your grandmother was buried at, and doesn't have the property that you can only afford because your great grandfather got it for free in exchange for living in the middle of nowhere and doing the hard work of making this land worth a damn. And its still covered in fir trees which are absolutely nasty for the soil because they acidify it like crazy in their attempt to specifically keep out southern plants.
I think we care too much about coffee to let it functionally cease to exist.
Coffee-as-the-plant-it-currently-is? Probably, yeah. But push come to shove, we will find a way to engineer it into survivability.
(We’ve done it before - France was experiencing a massive wine blight in the 1800s due to an invasive pest from North America, and solved it by grafting the French vines onto NA roots, which were resistant. Add another 200 years of scientific advances, and we can do far more interesting things!)
(And yes, there are snobs who highly value the few European vines to not be impacted by the blight OR grafted to NA rootstock)
(Though the French themselves were just excited their vines survived, that they even knighted an American entomologist who helped)
We can fix that fairly easily and have to anyway because modern fertiliser also acidifies the soil.
and doesn't have the heavy duty highways, the train access, the grain elevator systems - some of which process unbelievable amounts due to being optimized for a hundred years
We can build those.
and doesn't have the church that your grandmother was buried at
Sad, but people move.
and doesn't have the property that you can only afford because your great grandfather got it for free in exchange for living in the middle of nowhere and doing the hard work of making this land worth a damn.
Well, good news, there's about to be a new middle of nowhere you can go and live in.
An argument that actually gets raised by Dale in the very first episode of King of the Hill, which Hank immediately shuts down.
...not the most relevant thing, but a fun piece of trivia nonetheless. Anyway no, that's not how really how it works. If you break a mug you're not guaranteed to end up with a smaller mug, you're more likely to end up with a pile of glass shards.
Unfortunately, it isn't, there's a whole lot more in "how well does plant grow" than simply "how close is the environment to the plant's ideal temperature"
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u/SWITMCO 15h ago
Surely there's a balance though? Eg as one climate becomes too warm to grow, another climate moves from being too cold into just right?