Back in March I wrote about Peak Arabica Coffee:  Top coffee scientist warns, “Coffee production is under threat from global warming.” I ran this chart:

Seven months later, Big Media grabbed the story when Starbucks started talking up the threat.  Good Morning America and the CBS Early Show both did segments on it.

Characteristically, though, both networks treated the story mostly as a source for levity.  And you’d be hard-pressed to find them given equal time to the far more consequential, far more serious, impact of climate change on global food prices and supply (see “Oxfam Predicts Climate Change will Help Double Food Prices by 2030: “We Are Turning Abundance into Scarcity”).

Here are the two network videos and an excellent print story on “Food price volatility – causes and consequences”:

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That’s the big AP story that HuffPost linked to from its screaming banner front-page headline yesterday (see below).

Significantly, the story doesn’t mention how Sen. Bennet (D-CO) used his opponent Ken Buck’s global warming denial to help win the eco-conscious state (see “Did Ken Buck’s global warming denial cost the Tea Party favorite a Senate seat? and below).  The story opens:

DENVER — If you want a sense of how President Barack Obama’s team intends to win in the West, look no further than Democrat Michael Bennet’s successful fight to retain his Colorado Senate seat last year.

Bennet, who was appointed in 2009, captured a full term in a tough year for Democrats by turning the campaign into a “choice,” not a referendum, on his brief time in the Senate.

He portrayed his opponent, Republican Ken Buck, as out of step with state voters. He used strong fundraising to blanket the airwaves and build a large campaign organization to turn out Hispanics, young voters and women squeezed by the economic downturn.

Obama’s team has studied that model, and party leaders say the senator’s campaign could serve as a template for Obama in other competitive Western states next year.

We’ll see.

One way that Buck was out of step with Colorado voters is that the voters care about global warming and clean energy, whereas Tea Party extremist Buck did not, as The Hill reported at the time:

As I discussed in a November post, Bennet clearly and deftly played the global warming card — which recent public opinion research and electoral analysis suggests is a winning strategy (see Bombshell: Democrats Taking “Green” Positions on Climate Change “Won Much More Often” Than Those Remaining Silent).  Here’s some background on what happened in Colorado:

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