PCA Magazine Summer 2022

PREMIUMCIGARS.ORG VOLUME 3 2022 | PCA The Magazine 37 There are those who say climate change is a hoax, that desiccating rivers and failing crops and unprecedented heat waves have nothing to do with any shift in the climate, but merely reflect the normal vicissitudes of “weather.” Another school of thought claims that climate change is actually real, but that the climate has always changed, and we are just enduring a period in the unending cycle of ebb and flow. Still another philosophy would have it that climate change is real and largely man-made, but it’s too late for humankind to do anything about it. Maybe if we’d attacked the threat 50 years ago things would be different, but now the horse is out of the barn and all we can do is brace for the fallout, and stop wasting money trying to stem the inevitable. Probably the majority of people just don’t care whether it’s real or what may be the cause, as long as their own private existence goes on unmolested. Perhaps this includes some proportion of tobacco professionals, who don’t seem (thus far) to have been heavily affected by an Earth going haywire. After all, we are still able to get fine tobacco products onto store shelves, and customers are buying them. For us that makes everything right with the world. But just so that we don’t take for granted the air, soil, water and thought that makes luxury tobacco possible, let us use this article to 1) reflect on what is going on with climate change, and 2) examine some of the measures that knowledgeable tobacco professionals are taking on our behalf to keep fine tobaccos growing. B Y W I L L I A M C . N E L S O N The effects on the globe are coming into focus. The effects on tobacco- growing: It just depends.