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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“Potatoes, tomatoes, maize, and sweet potatoes were introduced into Europe, bringing an end to the periodic famines of Northern Europe. ”
The rise of property rights and a market economy in the Netherlands and the invention of enclosure is what ended famine in Europe. Land gradually shifted to those who were the most productive thus replacing subsistence agriculture with profit based farming. Farmers then abandoned the fallow system and then went into double and triple cropping and the heavy use of manures and legumes. Animal husbandry took off. New crops were tried. This movement spread to England and Scandinavia and Prussia. France and most of the rest of Europe resisted both property rights and the market economy until the early 1800s and as a result regularly starved.
Trade is the answer, Willis, not war on goats! Everyone wins if the Sahelians send their goats to Patrick Gonzalez (with a couple of Azawakh dogs). It will start a research endowment at UC Berkeley and create a sustainable source of funding for the study of the region. Goats to Berkeley, research papers and press releases to Sahel, relief to the rest of us.
@Frosty
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]
+++++
In Namibia it is called ‘holistic veld management’ and was developed in the late ’80’s by Allen. He is in the USA now. I visited a farm a few minutes outside Tsumeb where it was being practised. The standard (government method) rating of the farm was 750 cattle (on 35,000 acres). Using the system the farmer had 1100 and spare capacity of perhaps another 250. An essential element is the removal of all non-native plant species.
It addresses the big problem of thornveld encroachment which is directly caused by cattle left to wander where they want, eating only the preferred grasses. As a result what they do not like proliferates. If you draw a line north-south from Johannesburg, just about that whole area west of that line has a thornveld encroachment problem. Holistic veld management forces the cattle to eat things they do not prefer before moving on. In Namibia they are not brought back to graze that patch again for 7 years. SW Botswana has the same problem of too many stubby trees. At the Mpisi Ranch (fattening ranch) in Swaziland the place went from open grassland in 1975 to a choked thicket in 2000 because of inappropriate grazing.
No tree is safe with hungry goats around. Without trees evapotranspiration diminishes and deserts form.
Shoulda said:
Without trees evapotranspiration, and therefore rainfall, diminishes and deserts form.
****
Robert Brown says:
December 13, 2011 at 4:53 am
The worst drought in the US, however, was the one that occurred in the Younger Dryas (return to ice age conditions ~9000 BP). Or was that the US? Southwest was unusually wet, Midwest and East extreme drought.
****
Yes. The western shore of the Chesapeake Bay has 3 ft+ deep windblown dust deposits from the YD. Talk about a cold, dry dust bowl! That would have been a severe cold-steppe climate right where I’m at now! The native inhabitants at the time either fled southward or perished.
One gets the sense that our climate now is rather benign & beneficial, no?
Plant a tree, kill a goat. Message brought to you by People Eating Tasty Animals. After all, tree’s can produce a great spice for goat meat.
Joachim Seifert says: “…the true
FLATLAND animals are SHEEP…..”
Joachim: I have worked with hill sheep in the Highlands of Scotland; believe me, sheep are indigenous to hill and mountain. They’re just not quite as omnivorous as goats.
The problem, as with many other parts of Africa, is one of poor governance not one of climate , fruit or goats.
The rapid adaptation of say, Holland as mentioned above, to climatic and crop challenges was possible because of good governance and social structures. These arose because there was no “big brother” to bail them out from cocking it up. Just as you expect your teenage son to learn lessons from the big bad world that actions have consequences so it must go with nation states.
The Sahelian climate is not impossible , the solutions are available, but as long as incompetence in government is rewarded with misguided aid all we will get is more incompetence. It’s like paying single mothers to be single mothers, you get a lot of single mothers followed by societal issues.
The simple fact is that Africa has not got the carrying capacity for it’s population managed by their medieval governments and archaic thinking. Bad governance is the problem and we are it’s enablers.
Myna birds (Acridotheres tristis) and Cane Toads (Bufo marinus) are two examples of species that can cause havoc when introduced to an ecosystem that has never seen them before.
Goats are the masters of disasters. They single mindedly set about reverting ANY ecosystem they are introduced to, to a true desert. (The polar ice caps are a desert, the goats got there first 🙂
Well said Willis. Save the Whales, harpoon a Goat.
Mali
Dutch docu about the trees and the green wall.
part English spoken
http://nieuwsuur.nl/video/203904-verwoestijning-in-mali.html
Searching the Internet for pig exclusion fencing in Hawaii shows this kind of damage to the earth is not the exclusive domain of goats. Exclusion fencing is an unpractical solution but does show dramatically not only the impact of the animals but also the rapid recovery possible when this pest is controlled. It is a travesty this kind of control is not available for rogue climate scientists who see every problem as having a human cause with a governmental solution.
I don’t imagine it is any different for goats. Even cute goats that avoid porcupines.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
December 13, 2011 at 7:39 am
Thanks for posting, very interesting stuff.
Stuart Huggett says:
December 13, 2011 at 1:36 am
“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”
I, too, worked in Northern Nigeria from 1964 to 67 as Geologist-in-charge of the Geological Survey’s branch office in Jos (nice title – I was the only geologist and I had a Nigerian typist and a messenger with a bicycle – there was no telephone, the messenger made daily visit to the telegraph office and local message delivery), in the central north part of Nigeria. I mapped reconnaisance geology over about 20-30,000 sq mi in two regions of the Sahel: a large tract of Precambrian east of Jos (with Jurassic(?) alkaline ring complexes and Eocene (?) to recent volcanics in the western part) and also in northwestern Nigeria in the Sokoto/Yelwa (on the Niger) area. It was drier than hell during the dry season (two of my clinical thermometers broke that weren’t desert grade!) and I used the river beds as roads and ran two to three day compass and pace traverses from the rivers to remote parts of the area – I did this alone without an assistant, a thing wouldn’t recommend trying there now. When the rains came the rivers rose quickly and you could be stranded for months on the wrong side of the last river before the road. You had to watch the horizon for clouds late in the season because a rainstorm 20 mi away could flood your river with the sun all shining around you. I, too, was present for, I believe, 3 military coups and a wave of riots and killings (Hausa/Fulani muslim northerners killing Christian Ibos and Calabaris working and living in the North – Jos had one big one with the last train for the south leaving and there were more than a few bodies on the streets). After the civil war broke out, largely south of where I was working, I continued mapping (the British who populated the government bureaucracy stated that we should carry on and mind our own business and we would be okay). I had an incident where a school teacher I met who was living in the small village near a missionary settlement (Sudan Interior Mission) where I was renting a small house for my work, wound up reporting me to the authorities as a suspicious character, probably spying for the rebels because of the compasses and maps etc. and the mysterious trips I was going on. One day, I was pursued on a traverse for three days by a posse carrying clubs, spears and implements but I didn’t know this at the time because they naturally stuck to the trails while I was travelling cross country on compass lines. When I got back to the mission settlement after two more traverses, the head missionary with the pleasant name of Bessie Barney exclaimed “Thank God you are alive!” They told me the story and advised that I get out the region and back to Jos immediately. When I got there, my driveway was full of vehicles and I came into household with my wife weeping and being consoled by geologists and their wives over a report that I had be captured and executed by patriotic citizens. Apparently word got to Maiduguri on Lake Chad that I had been killed and the geologist there drove to Jos to report the sad tale. Man we had a grand party that night!
Bingo. That’s exactly how the Israelis reclaimed the wasteland known as Palestine, and made it bloom.
Caleb said, “Where we see bare, red sandstone buttes and mesas today, green vegetation climbed the sides, and grew on the tops”
Is that what it looked like during the Chaco culture?
Not to be confused with “Hogan’s Goat”.
In a Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahel_drought, there is the following comment: “As disruptive as the droughts of the late 20th century were, evidence of past droughts recorded in Ghanaian lake sediments suggest that multi-decadal megadroughts were common in West Africa over the past 3,000 years and that several droughts lasted far longer and were far more severe”.
Any discussion of droughts in the Sahel without mention of the history of droughts, it seems to me, is intentionally deceptive. It does rather detract from the importance of the study in question, however.
Funny how all the replies to my earlier post have almost all missed the point I was making. I’ll try to make myself more clear:
Doing a quick grab of data and making a conclusion by eyeballing a hastily drawn graph is not scientific. If you want to scientifically criticize an article, then be scientific about it. Science is as much about the method as the actual results and conclusions that are produced.
As for the paywall preventing most of you from accessing the article, well that’s up to the journal and not the authors. Journals have to make money somehow, but I can understand your frustration. I’m sure a free pdf version will come up on a Google search over the next few days or weeks. If you ask nicely (give it a go), maybe even P. Gonzalez will send you a copy by e-mail: http://www.patrickgonzalez.net/
On that site you’ll see his evil climate scientist face. He might just bite you through your computer screen!
These recent posts about the Sahel reminded me of this paper, for which unfortunately I hadn’t kept a link. It took a while to find it again.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/55436u2122u77525/fulltext.pdf
Irrigated afforestation of the Sahara and Australian Outback to end global warming
Leonard Ornstein · Igor Aleinov · David Rind
Abstract Each year, irrigated Saharan- and Australian-desert forests could sequester
amounts of atmospheric CO2 at least equal to that from burning fossil fuels.
Without any rain, to capture CO2 produced from gasoline requires adding about $1
to the per-gallon pump-price to cover irrigation costs, using reverse osmosis (RO),
desalinated, sea water. Such mature technology is economically competitive with the
currently favored, untested, power-plant Carbon Capture (and deep underground, or
under-ocean) Sequestration (CCS). Afforestation sequesters CO2, mostly as easily
These guys suggest it would be economical using desalinized ocean water, but I think it could be done even cheaper by assembling a fleet of heavy duty ocean tugs to grapple icebergs shedding off of Antarctica, hauling them to the coasts of Africa and Australia, beaching them there and collecting the melt water to be pumped inland for irrigation. Admittedly I have only done a rough BOTE calculation on this,on a night quite a while back when I saw that Richard Branson was offering a big prize for the best plan to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. There may have been some liquid lubrication of my mental processes involved, the memory is a little vague.
They are already doing this kind of thing in the North Atlantic, although they are only moving the icebergs enough to keep them out of the shipping lanes so that the grappling techniques might require some innovation to complete the much longer hauls required. Using desalinization would almost require that the system be mostly or entirely publicly financed, but although it might take a demonstration grant to get the iceberg system launched, I could envision private capital moving in to develop it. Possibly even iceberg futures on the CME someday
Garretts hit and run shows the level of blinkered fanaticism we are up against. Even an idiot can see from the data and the anecdotal evidence that the sahel has been reported as greening for two decades, which is in line with the uptick in precipitation levels shown on Willis’ graph. Even the papers abstract notes human causes, which involve zero land management and an inbalance in livestock.
Its not rocket science to question the papers conclusion that its all down to CO2, it just takes a brain.
Mike M says: “…There was a sliver of truth that slipped out from them explaining the increase of US snow fall in the last few winters being due in part to the air holding more moisture. That appears to work as well in Africa as well as North America.”
That’s a very small sliver. More moisture can create more precipitation, but to go all the way to snow can’t be explained by increased temperatures. Another 13.3% beyond the energy of condensation has to be removed to make snow, and more yet to get it to a temperature where it will accumulate. Hot can’t make cold.
There’s some Chinese fellow named Dai Aiguo at the National Center for Atmospheric Reseaarch who claims the whole planet is turning into a desert. He has a mathematical and theological disciple who hangs out on Amazon predicting the end of agriculture by 2050 or so. He claims areas of severe drought have tripled in the past 40 years or so. I argued with him for a while, which gave me the opportunity to study up on alleged drought in the Sahel, Australia, North America, China, and Siberia. At the end of the day, I concluded that God must be hiding all these new deserts on the moon, because they aren’t present anywhere on this planet.
Actually, I think I concluded there might not be room for all the missing deserts on the moon, either.
I have to agree about the goats and the cutting for firewood. I lived in Africa for 40 years and as the populationshave exploded, so has the desertification. Stripping vegetation results in poor soil and erosion follows. I’ve seen entire tracts that were fertile fifty odd years ago become useless wasteland. Kill the goats, control the destruction of the vegetation and watch the deserts retreat again.