by Jonathan Scott, 2nd May 2026
There is something deeply wrong with the way climate risk is being discussed. For years, agricultural companies, investors, farmers, food producers, and governments have been told to prepare for one future. A hotter future. A drier future. A future defined by global warming, carbon reduction, heat stress, emissions targets, and endless policy documents written by people who have probably never had to protect a crop from frost at three o’clock in the morning.
That story has become so dominant that almost every other possibility has been pushed to the edge of the debate. I think that is dangerous. Our own modelling points towards a colder and more difficult climate environment over the coming years, not the smooth warming pathway that dominates most Western policy assumptions. More importantly, some agricultural clients are already seeing the practical signs on the ground. Shorter growing windows, late frosts, colder nights, damp conditions, weaker harvests, delayed planting, more disease pressure, and more uncertainty about which crops are actually suitable for the next decade.
This is not an academic argument. It is a food production argument. Food production does not care about political narratives. It cares about temperature, sunlight, rainfall, frost, snow cover, soil moisture, growing degree days, energy costs, labour windows, pests, parasites, fungal pressure, and whether a crop can actually reach maturity before the season turns against it. That is the reality.
One of the great weaknesses of modern political thinking is its obsession with straight lines. Politicians see a short-term trend and assume it will continue indefinitely. Temperatures rise, so they assume warming must continue in the same direction. Asset prices rise, so they assume growth is permanent. Tax receipts rise, so they assume the money will keep coming. Energy systems appear stable, so they assume resilience exists.
This is childish thinking. The natural world does not move in straight lines. Economies do not move in straight lines. Civilisations do not move in straight lines. Climate systems do not move in straight lines. They move through cycles, reversals, accelerations, pauses, breakdowns, and regime shifts.
Western governments seem almost incapable of understanding this. They think in slogans, targets, deadlines, and charts drawn by people who mistake a trend line for reality. They rarely seem to understand economic cycles, climate cycles, solar cycles, oceanic cycles, agricultural cycles, demographic cycles, debt cycles, or the deeper astronomical cycles such as Milankovitch cycles that shape long-term climatic conditions over vast periods of time.
That failure matters because policy built on linear thinking becomes fragile. It assumes tomorrow will be a slightly more extreme version of today. It does not prepare for reversal. It does not prepare for cooling. It does not prepare for colder winters, weaker harvests, disrupted ocean currents, rising heating demand, or shorter growing seasons.
This is where ideology becomes dangerous. Not merely annoying, but dangerous. If governments understood cycles, they would build redundancy into energy systems. They would maintain reliable baseload power. They would protect agricultural diversity. They would invest in water storage. They would stress-test food systems against cold as well as heat. They would treat climate as a complex system rather than a moral campaign.
Instead, much of the West has built policy around a single authorised story. The result could be insufficient energy, insufficient food, and insufficient water. That is not resilience. That is institutional stupidity dressed up as virtue.
The mainstream climate narrative has spent decades telling agriculture to prepare for warming. Governments have built policy frameworks around it. Consultants have built reports around it. Universities have chased research funding around it. Regulators have written rules around it. Companies have been pushed to disclose carbon exposure, reduce emissions, measure soil carbon, change fertiliser use, alter land management, and prepare for heat-related stress.
Some of that work is useful. Heat matters. Drought matters. Water stress matters. No serious person should pretend otherwise. But the problem is balance. If the entire climate risk industry tells agricultural producers to prepare for a hotter world, then farmers and food companies may start making investment decisions around only one version of the future. They may shift crop varieties. They may buy land in different regions. They may invest in irrigation systems, heat-resistant crops, shade systems, water storage, and drought planning.
Fine. But what if the more immediate threat is not heat? What if the threat is colder growing seasons, frost after early budding, snow cover delaying planting, damp cold creating fungal disease, or an energy shortage because winter heating demand rises while governments have dismantled reliable baseload capacity in the name of green transition policy? What if the threat is water insecurity caused not only by drought, but by disrupted precipitation patterns, altered snowmelt, frozen ground, poor recharge, and unreliable seasonal flows?
This is where the current climate narrative becomes not merely incomplete, but dangerous. Because if you prepare for the wrong risk, you lose the crop anyway.
The agricultural evidence we are seeing from clients is not theoretical. It is practical. It shows up in operational conversations long before it appears in a glossy policy report. Growers are asking whether certain crops remain suitable. Plantation operators are questioning whether historical yield patterns can still be trusted. Food companies are asking why regions that looked reliable on paper are becoming more difficult to manage. Agricultural investors are seeing that long-term suitability models based on warming assumptions may miss cold-related risks that can destroy value quickly.
Cold is not always dramatic. Sometimes it appears quietly. A few more nights below critical thresholds. A spring that arrives later than expected. A planting window that narrows. A fruit crop that flowers too early, then gets punished by frost. A cereal crop that sits in wet, cold soil and struggles to establish. A vineyard hit by damp conditions, mildew, and poor flowering. A plantation that suffers because low temperatures slow growth and increase disease vulnerability.
The damage does not need to fit the climate slogan. It only needs to hit the crop. This is one of the reasons I think agricultural risk analysis needs to be rebuilt around real-world field conditions rather than political climate assumptions. You cannot run a farm on slogans. You cannot insure a harvest with a speech. You cannot protect food security with a carbon target.
You need to know what is happening in the ground, in the air, in the soil, in the water system, and in the local geography. That is where spatial intelligence matters.
The Maunder Minimum is important because it reminds us that colder climate periods are not imaginary. It refers to a period from roughly the mid-seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century when recorded sunspot activity was extremely low. It overlapped with some of the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age, particularly across parts of Europe and North America.
The historical consequences were severe: shorter growing seasons, harsher winters, frozen rivers, crop failures, food shortages, social stress, energy pressure, and higher vulnerability in agricultural communities. The point is not to claim that history repeats in a neat straight line. It does not. But the Maunder Minimum is a useful warning against arrogance. It reminds us that food systems have always been vulnerable to cooling. It reminds us that cold can be far more damaging than modern policy language admits. It reminds us that a colder world does not simply mean putting on another coat. It means weaker harvests, higher heating demand, more pressure on energy systems, and greater instability in food supply chains.
I think this is the part that Western governments do not want to discuss properly. A colder climate is politically inconvenient. It does not fit the preferred emissions narrative. It does not justify every policy decision already made. It raises uncomfortable questions about energy security, food security, and whether governments have pushed their economies into fragile systems based on narrow assumptions.
If winters become colder, Europe has a problem. If growing seasons shorten, agriculture has a problem. If energy demand rises while reliable power generation has been reduced, households and industry have a problem. If food production falls while input costs rise, governments have a political problem. That is why this subject deserves serious research, not ridicule.
One of the most important cold-risk questions concerns ocean circulation, particularly the Atlantic current system that helps moderate the climate of western and northern Europe. The basic issue is simple enough. Europe sits much farther north than many people realise. Cities such as London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Berlin, and even parts of France are at latitudes that would be far colder without the warming influence of Atlantic ocean circulation. The west coast of Scotland is a classic example. It is far north, yet the maritime influence creates milder conditions than many would expect. That is why you can find palm trees in parts of western Scotland and Ireland.
Remove or weaken that oceanic heat transport, and the European climate changes sharply. This is not a small issue. If the Atlantic current system slows further, western Europe could face much colder winters, altered rainfall patterns, greater storm disruption, and shorter agricultural windows. That would affect crop planning, livestock management, energy demand, transport systems, water management, and food imports.
It would also expose the absurdity of assuming that Europe’s main problem is always too much warmth. Europe has built much of its modern climate and energy policy around warming and decarbonisation. But a colder Europe would need reliable heating, robust grids, gas storage, nuclear baseload, winter resilience, protected agriculture, and serious food security planning.
Instead, many countries have spent years weakening their energy resilience while talking endlessly about carbon. I think that is reckless. A colder Europe would not be a minor inconvenience. It would be a structural shock.
One of the most obvious implications of poor climate forecasting is wrong crop selection. Agriculture is a long-term investment. Farmers and agricultural companies do not simply change direction overnight. Orchards, vineyards, plantations, irrigation systems, storage facilities, processing plants, and logistics networks are built around assumptions. If those assumptions are wrong, the losses can be severe.
If producers are told to prepare for warming, they may move towards crops better suited to hotter and drier conditions. They may reduce investment in frost protection. They may plant varieties that perform well in heat but poorly in cold springs. They may shift production into regions that look attractive under warming models but remain highly vulnerable to frost, snow, or shortened growing seasons.
That is not adaptation. That is misallocation. A coffee plantation vulnerable to cold air pooling can suffer enormous damage from frost. A vineyard can lose much of its annual crop in a single cold outbreak after bud burst. A fruit orchard can be destroyed by frost during flowering. A potato crop can suffer from cold, wet soils and disease pressure. A grain crop can fail to mature properly if the growing season shortens. A vegetable producer can lose production through snow cover, greenhouse collapse, transport disruption, and frozen irrigation systems.
These are not theoretical risks. They are practical risks. They happen in real places, to real businesses, with real balance sheets. This is why agricultural companies need cold-risk modelling. They need frost maps. They need elevation analysis. They need crop suitability models that include cooling scenarios. They need growing season monitoring. They need soil temperature analysis. They need disease pressure modelling linked to damp and cold conditions. They need transport vulnerability assessments for snow and freeze events.
They do not need another abstract lecture about the climate emergency from someone who has never managed a harvest.
The energy implications are just as serious. A warmer world creates cooling demand. A colder world creates heating demand. Both matter, but heating demand can be politically explosive because it affects survival, comfort, and social stability.
Cold weather increases electricity demand, gas demand, heating oil demand, biomass demand, and pressure on grids. It also affects renewable systems. Solar output is lower in winter. Wind can be variable. Batteries face performance challenges in cold conditions. Transmission systems come under stress. If cold weather coincides with low wind, high demand, and weak backup capacity, the result can be severe.
This is why energy policy based only on decarbonisation is incomplete. A serious energy strategy must ask what happens if winters become colder, if heating demand rises, if gas storage is inadequate, if electricity demand peaks during still, cold weather, if agricultural producers need more energy for heating greenhouses, drying crops, pumping water, and keeping logistics systems moving. It must also ask what happens if fertiliser production becomes more expensive because energy costs rise, and if food processing facilities face higher winter operating costs.
This is the chain people often ignore. Cold climate risk is not just an agricultural issue. It is an energy issue. And because agriculture depends on energy, it becomes a food security issue.
Food shortages do not usually appear out of nowhere. They build through a series of pressures: poor harvests, higher input costs, transport disruption, energy shortages, disease outbreaks, water stress, export controls, government panic, price spikes, and political unrest.
A colder climate would pressure several of these at once. If major growing regions experience shorter seasons, late frosts, cold wet springs, and increased disease pressure, yields suffer. If energy demand rises at the same time, input costs rise. If transport networks are hit by snow, flood, or freeze damage, supply chains slow. If governments respond by restricting exports or subsidising domestic supply, global markets tighten further.
The result is not just a farming problem. It becomes a national stability problem. This is why the lack of serious research into cooling scenarios is so troubling. Food systems are too important to be planned around one authorised narrative. Governments should be funding serious research into multiple climate pathways, including colder outcomes, regional cooling, solar cycles, ocean circulation change, and cold-related agricultural risk.
Instead, too much of the institutional world behaves as if the only acceptable risk is warming. That is not science. That is ideology dressed as science.
A serious research agenda would not begin with a political conclusion. It would begin with field evidence, models, and uncertainty. It would study solar cycles and their potential effect on regional climate. It would examine the implications of a weaker Atlantic current system. It would model colder winters in Europe and North America. It would assess the impact of shorter growing seasons on staple crops.
It would map frost vulnerability across vineyards, orchards, coffee regions, citrus zones, and high-value agricultural areas. It would examine how damp cold affects fungal disease and crop quality. It would study the relationship between cold weather, energy demand, fertiliser prices, and food production costs. It would assess whether current crop adaptation policies are pushing farmers toward the wrong investments. It would identify which regions gain and which regions lose under cooling scenarios.
Most importantly, it would treat cold as a serious risk, not an embarrassing contradiction. That is what scientific investigation should look like. Science should not be frightened of the wrong answer. It should be frightened of refusing to ask the question.
For agricultural clients, the answer is not to abandon all warming assumptions and replace them with cooling assumptions. That would be too simplistic. The answer is to widen the risk framework. Companies need to plan for heat and cold, drought and damp, water shortage and waterlogging, longer growing seasons in some places and shorter growing seasons in others, crop migration northward in one scenario and frost damage in another, carbon regulation and energy shortage, climate policy and climate reality.
Our view is that agricultural risk must become more spatial, more practical, and more sceptical of political fashion. The future will not be managed by slogans. It will be managed by those who understand the geography of production.
That means knowing where cold air settles, where frost arrives first, where soils stay too wet, where snow cover delays planting, where transport routes fail in winter, where energy shortages would affect processing, where crop varieties are mismatched to the actual risk profile, and where water systems are vulnerable to altered rainfall and snowmelt.
This is what clients need. Not propaganda. Not panic. Not fashionable language. They need clear, place-based intelligence that helps them protect production and capital.
The climate debate has become far too narrow, far too political, and far too hostile to inconvenient evidence. If computer models are pointing towards colder conditions over the coming years, that should be investigated seriously. If agricultural clients are already seeing colder conditions affecting operations, that should be studied seriously. If food producers are exposed to frost, snow, damp, fungal disease, energy deficits, and water insecurity, then those risks should be brought to the centre of planning.
There is nothing scientific about ignoring cold because warming is the approved narrative. There is nothing responsible about telling farmers to prepare for heat while frost destroys their crop. There is nothing intelligent about building energy systems for mild winters if colder winters are possible. There is nothing resilient about food systems that prepare for the climate they were told to expect rather than the weather they actually receive.
I think this is the real issue. Not whether one side wins the climate argument, but whether agriculture survives the assumptions being made on its behalf.
The crop does not care about ideology. The grid does not care about policy theatre. The soil does not care about ministerial speeches. The weather arrives, and then reality takes over.