I'm not sure climate change bears more blame than agricultural systems that incentivize monocultures fragile in the face of external stresses. Climate change is only one such stress. Crop diseases are as old as agriculture.

And really, agricultural collapse is quite separate from ecosystem collapse; agriculture is many ways defined by the intentional absence of ecosystem.

Just going by the wikipedia entry for X. fastidiosa, but

"Symptoms of X. fastidiosa diseases worsen during hot, dry periods in the summer: lack of water and maximum demand from a full canopy of leaves combined with symptoms due to disease stress infected plants to a breaking point. Cold winters can limit the spread of the disease;[8] as occurs in California, but not in regions with milder winters such as Brazil." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylella_fastidiosa#Environment)

It sounds like this could definitely be related to climate change. I'm sure monoculture agriculture doesn't help, but (based on quick searching) olive trees don't fruit in a commercially viable way until they are 7+ years old and don't reach peak yield until they are 70 years old.

If it was purely a monoculture issue, I'd question why it didn't happen sooner given the lead time necessary to increase production.

I don't think it's necesarily one or the other. Climate change is a stressor, and monoculture makes crops less reseilient to stress.

Crops undergo massive failures relatively frequently. Bananas are headed towards their second extinction this half-century. As stresses perhaps become more acute due to a rapidly changing climate and environment, this lack of resliliency may prove quite harmful, more so than the damage that can be reliably attributed to any individual stressor.

I don't know, I actually don't know enough about olive farming practices to know if monoculture is a factor? I assume this is a factor and you are correct.

I did find a Nature article about it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45365-y that was pretty useful. Seems to suggest it was a factor and may expand the effected range, but it is also an introduced disease and doesn't require climate change to impact large parts of the Mediterranean coast.

edit: You may be interested to know bananas didn't go extinct, per se. Mass market US bananas are propagated clones. We have bred the seeds out of bananas (with rare exceptions), so most large scale agricultural plants are tissue culture or cutting clones. The mass market variety was the Gros Michel/Big Mike, which you can still buy online easily. Panama Rust is adapting to the Cavendish, which was resistant when it became the new US mass market variety after the Cavendish. Greater availability of other varieties would be great. Neither of those are the best bananas out there (Nam Wah, Pisang Raja, and Blue Java are all great).

Thanks for the paper :) This seems ominious for olives at large, and points to globalization as a larger culprit than climate change. Global trade seems even less likely to disappear than fossile fuels.

The history of bananas is quite interesting, and the future looks to be as well. While it did fall short of true extinction, I'm hopeful we can learn from past mistakes. Perhaps I'll have the opportunity to try one of the other cultivars someday.

Yet in 1956 a devastating freeze destroyed the French olive oil industry. So perhaps an argument could be made that if there was more global warming in 1956, the industry would be more robust.

We can play the “climate change causes everything bad” game for pretty much anything, but we’d be intellectually dishonest if we denied that climate change could actually have benefits.

This logic feels somewhere along the lines of death as a cure for cancer.

I think it has much more to do with monocropping than with climate change. There are lots of other examples with different crops long before the effects of climate change were noticeable.

It has more to do with invasive species than anything. Xyella fastidiosa is native to the gulf coast states in the US. Olives and other species from the old world lack any resistance to the bacteria.

This same bacteria causes Pierce's disease in Vitis vinifera, the common grape (from Eurasia). Whereas North American Vitis species are resistant to Xf.

There's a lot of research going into solving Pierce's disease here in the US from breading programs to bacteriophages. The later may end up helping solve the same problem in Olives.

Yeah, this seems to be similar to what is happening to the banana.

What does this have to do with climate change?

Nothing, but people like to trot out climate change fears at every opportunity. It’s getting to be almost like religious people that want to proselytize at every opportunity.

Oh right. Never happened before. Disease is a new thing folks /s

Yeah, only germs and fungi grow in warm regions. All higher life forms will rot away. Thankfully, our brains will rot away first.