Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The Sahel, that stretch of harsh territory south of the Sahara desert, is a bleak region. I did some work there, in a couple three countries. I came away with the conviction that if every day, every person in the Sahel planted one fruit tree and killed one goat, in about twenty years it would be worth visiting.
Figure 1. Map of the Sahel region, shown in orange.
Anthony highlighted some science by press release in “Climate change blamed for dead trees in Africa“. The press release is about a paper that won’t be published until this coming Friday. The lead author provided the following quotes for the press release. (emphasis mine)
“Rainfall in the Sahel has dropped 20-30 percent in the 20th century, the world’s most severe long-term drought since measurements from rainfall gauges began in the mid-1800s,” said study lead author Patrick Gonzalez, who conducted the study while he was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Forestry. “Previous research already established climate change as the primary cause of the drought, which has overwhelmed the resilience of the trees.”
I thought, “Really”? Because I was sure I remembered all kinds of recent articles about the “greening of the Sahel”. In any case, I’ll take any excuse to learn something new. So I went off to see what the rainfall records had to say about the “world’s most severe long-term drought”.
I found three rainfall records that covered the Sahel in the time period from 1901 to the present. Two (CRU and GPCC) are available from KNMI Climate Explorer, and one (Sahel Index) can be downloaded from the University of Washington. I used the same geographical area as used by the University of Washington, from 10-20°N, and from 10°W to 20°E. The results are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Three different estimates of rainfall in the Sahel region, 10-20°N, 10°W-20°E. Bright red line shows the 9 year Gaussian average of the median of the three estimates. Photo is of the Sahel region, Senegal
I’m sorry, but I’m not seeing either a “severe long-term drought”, or a drop of “20-30 percent in the 20th century”, or a human fingerprint in that record. Modern times are drier than mid-20th century, but not much different from the first part of the century. Rainfall has gone up, and it has gone down, and then back up again. Nor is there any obvious correlation with the general warming of the planet over the same time period. Given the close agreement of the three records, I think we can have reasonable confidence in the data.
I did enjoy his claim that “Previous research already established climate change as the primary cause of the drought.” Climate change causes droughts? Interesting theory. Does climate change also cause not-droughts? I wonder what else is caused by climate change, given that the climate has always been changing.
Finally, I was not mistaken that I remembered articles about the “greening of the Sahel”. Here’s information from the Encyclopedia of the Earth, from National Geographic, and from the Global Warming Policy Foundation regarding how the Sahel has been getting, not drier and browner, but wetter and greener ever since the 1980s.
Conclusions? My only conclusion is that folks are getting desperate for funding, and that the manufacturing of climate pseudo-catastrophes is a booming cottage industry.
w.
PS—I’m dead serious about planting trees and killing goats. The main cause of what desertification occurs in the Sahel is humans, but not by way of CO2. We do it by burning whatever will burn to cook our food, and by letting the goats destroy the rest.
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Way to Willis – fruit and goats – right on! I lived in N Nigeria for a couple of years in the mid 60s – my first experience of a coup…
Stu.
That was in fact Way TO go Willis, of course…
Well done Willis. It doesn’t take much research to debunk the alarmists out there with their begging bowls for more funding. How come this cr@p gets published in a peer-reviewed document? What are the peer-reviewers doing to allow it to be published?
Notice the uptrend in rainfall from 1910 to 1950 and the decline from 1950 to 1980 and then increase since. So the rainfall increases when temperature increases, rainfall declines when the global temperature declines. This is further confirmation that the changes in rainfall are likely due to changes in the Intertropical Convergence Zone which migrates North and South in response to changes in global temperature. As temperatures warm, the ITCZ moves farther from the equator. When temperatures cool, it’s maximum Southern migration lessens.
Another point of validation for natural variation.
Good sleuthing. Don’t worry about claims made, they’ll be ignored by those who count. The real headline out of Durban should have been:
Climate Change changed to Climate Hope and Change
You are right about goats. Here in Portugal they even eat hard trees; can’t imagine what they are capable of there.
Then, it’s the same Kilimanjaro story: you get rid of the vegetation, moisture disappears, and then, be it snow or rain also tends to be less frequent. The planting of trees is urgent, and it has been even analyzed. Please see, for instance:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/55436u2122u77525/fulltext.pdf
Then, there’s the Horn of Africa, where one of the worst droughts in the last decades is happening. No wonder that they don’t like to talk about it, because the IPCC was predicting a steadily increase in rainfall:
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2011/09/horngate-how-contamination-has-been.html
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2011/09/horngate.html
They just get almost everything wrong!
Ecotretas
Suddenly, I feel a little safer, should I visit the Sahel…
Interesting that they appear to get over 400mm of rain a year.Here in Australia a lot of our wheat crop is grown in areas that have less than 400mm of rain annually.
Going by this and the previous related thread there is much agreement developing that this climate change at least, is a consequence of latitudinally shifting climate zones which is my particular hobby horse.
Furthermore old papers are coming more to the fore showing that up to about 30 years ago many scientists were following that track as part of the mainstream.
Since then, climatology has been sidetracked but hopefully common sense is returning.
It is likely that everything that we have perceived as climate change has in fact been nothing more than a redistribution of energy across the Earth’s surface as the speed of energy flow through the Earth system speeds up or slows down as a negative response to ANY forcing.
The important issue is as to the nature of the primary forcings and they would appear to be solar and oceanic in origin. Any effect of more CO2 would be miniscule in comparison.
AGW proponents should be asked how far our CO2 emissions would shift the climate zones compared to the natural solar and oceanic effects.
Willis, of course there was a 20-30% reduction, if you only look at the high of 1955 and compare it to the low in 1983. We are talking “Climate Science” here after all you know.
Willis, is there any data for the “Mid 1800s” as stated in the Paper?
Stuart Huggett says:
December 13, 2011 at 1:36 am
Thanks, Stu, always good to hear from you.
w.
@Old Goat
Just don’t go with Willis.
Odd how the mind works first thing in the morning. Willis wrote goat, and I thought Pontiac GTO (first or second generation). Sorry for going off topic, Willis. I’ll go make a cup of coffee.
Climate change is a change in state and it itself changes nothing. It is a description of a change that has already occurred. Grasslands to deserts. Forests to savanna.
If I were you Willis, I would not fall into the AGW crowd’s use of the term ‘climate change’. Climate change as a cause the way warmists and climate ‘scientists’ always use it is itself an oxymoron, and in reality, this earth has not seen any real climate change for quit some time. However, speaking of the Sahel, it might be one of the most recent a century or more ago.
The warmists are picking at grains of sand and by it are being great deceivers. Every story like this is but another nail in their own professional coffin, a sick joke on science ignorance, every warmist’s scientific ignorance.
My previous blog blamed the PDO and AMO but I forgot the local’s love of goat meat. I also forgot that goats are browsers not grazers and can climb to areas in a tree beyond human ability, I know because we kept goats a few years ago and remember on goat walking along the edge of a fence top to get to an apple tree to feed. So perhaps they should kill all the goats and keep sheep, who can’t climb trees, and still plant fruit trees.
I think you’re dead right on the goats Mr. Eschenbach, I saw a graph breaking down various farm animals in global farming, there may be a correlation to goat numbers and desertification, but the remarkable data was regarding the increase in goat numbers. see [1]
Allan Savory [2][3] has developed a grazing management system which has proven to reverse desertification in Zimbabwe, during a 10yr drought. [4]
The technique (time controlled grazing) is to mimic natural herd movements that grasses evolved to cope with, by fencing off sufficient grazing for one or two days, and moving the herd on to a new fenced area. Pasture is fertilised by the herd, has time to fully recover to it’s most nutritious stage before allowing the herd back on the same patch. I know of one farm in Virginia [5] that has increased topsoil depth by 18″ in 6 years utilising these techniques, 3″ per year! The depth of topsoil supports higher productivity so much so the animals can stay out all winter, digging through the snow as natural herds once would have, which also reduces the overheads of winter housing.
[1] http://permaculture.org.au/2011/06/22/growing-goat-herds-signal-global-grassland-decline/
[2] http://chelseagreen.com/blogs/jtellerelsberg/2010/02/25/following-up-with-allan-savory-on-using-cattle-to-revsere-desertification-and-global-warming/
[3] http://www.holisticmanagement.org/
[4] http://www.new-ag.info/en/focus/focusItem.php?a=1775
[5] http://www.polyfacefarms.com/
Willis yo did not use the cliamte filter for your data, it looks like a hockey stick and can be turn either blade up or down depending on your required out come.
Please apply the filter, blade down for this study of drought (up for proof of increased flooding of course).
/sarc.
Such a bogus article, masquerading as science. Willis dislikes an article based on a press release. It doesn’t appear he bothered to look up the actual peer-reviewed article. He then does a quick internet search and downloads three data-sets. He puts the data into a nice little graph, and adds his own 9-year running Gaussian average (?). He then eye-balls it and exclaims that he cannot see any downward trend (even though he never plotted a trend line). His scientific conclusion is that “rainfall has gone up, and it has gone down, and then back up again” with no “obvious correlation” with global warming. He thinks that analysis qualifies as science. And you all buy it. Quite pathetic if I may so.
For those who want some real, heavy scientific reading, here is a link to the peer-reviewed article by Gonzalez et al.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140196311003351
By all means, criticize the paper with detailed scientific results and analyses. Not with whimsical eye-balling of a hastily put together graph.
Just another indication that we should take nothing the warmists write/say at face value. Thanks Willis.
Ditto rukidding. 400 mm is about 16 inches in real measurements, and that’s exactly what the Palouse gets. Is the Palouse an unproductive desert? Nope, it’s the most profitable wheat-growing area in America.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CDsQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fadmin.aghost.net%2Fimages%2FE0177801%2F2008WF4WebSmHomepage.pdf&ei=2S7nTp6CIsGQiQLx8IyhBw&usg=AFQjCNHWINkLp9_41jbEXoww_1pXhKSUFQ
In other words, rainfall isn’t the important measurement. Temperature, soil quality, and human skill make the difference. Mostly the latter.
(about dairy goats)
“The lactation period of the milking doe is 305 days. During this period, the average doe in the herd will produce 1500-1700 pounds of milk, or about ½ gallon or more per day on average.”
(http://members.toast.net/dawog/Goats/DairyGoatFactBook.htm)
Also goats are very hardy and do not need much tending, when you compare it to the effort you need to make to keep other livestock.
So, asking the Sahel people to kill their goats is just like the UN is asking North Europeans to freeze (to death at times) to save the planet.
Unless you fix the protein problem and make goats obsolete by bringing something that is superior that works out better than goats(short-term as well as long-term), no amount of rain will sort the Sahel, goats in numbers would even be a menace to a rainforest jungle with their appetite.
(Ironically this is a problem that we actually *could* solve with the tech that we currently have, unlike the ‘we want energy from nothing’ stuff…)
Garrett,
all formalia and no substance, could you tell us what your trend line looks like for the period Willis and the data he is using is refering to? And please stop playing that Hockey Team peer reviewed-card, it’s kind of pathetic.
@Garrett, the article is hidden behind a paywall, how convenient.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140196311003351
Not only is change inherent to climate but climate change cannot be the cause of one of the key parameters of climate, precipitation. It is the other way around, a shift in average rainfall would result in “climate change” in the subject region.