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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From a retired Aussie grazier. Managing low rainfall grazing country is a skill which has been practised for well over a century in drought prone outback Australia. A prolonged drought brings special problems. Subdivisional fencing is essential, and of course permanent water for the stock. Itinerant grazing by sheep, cattle or goats is inconsistent with good pasture management. Of course changes in local cultures are much more difficult to effect than agricultural management changes. In kenya in the seventies after the European farmers left the locals promptly removed all the wire from the subdivisional fences! Amongst the many mistakes made by well-meaning novice government managers is to make local farms too small. This I have seen in Libya in a project east of Benghazi at El Maj. Yes, goats are difficult to manage; they always find the grass is greener next door.
Nora Stein referred to a talk, which she heard 35 years ago, about a verdant patch in the Sahel. I have similar memories, estimated to be 30 years or so old, but with scant details of any references to a source. I think it was a piece in one of the UK weekend colour supplements – probably the S Times or S Telegraph – about someone flying in to, say, Timbuktu and noting a small patch of greenery amongst the desert scrub. Inquiries about it on the ground told the journalist that it was a patch of land that had been protected from goats and man (and woman) and left to its own devices for a year or two.
Charlie
Caleb, not sure which of your paragraphs to take seriously, but you can never take the invading Navajo/Apaches out of the picture. I’ve seen many of the ruins along the Colorado River and it’s obvious that the dwellings were built for defense against grain robbers. Granted, the defenders’ numbers were pretty low by that stage, but you still have to explain why the Athabskans picked that particular time to head south, after remaining north for several thousand years. It seems to me a turn for the colder would best explain that, and that might have coincided with drier weather in the SW.
I don’t know the evidence for your 100 year gap, but I always thought John Wesley Powell got it right when he concluded Navajo war prowess did in the Anasazi. In any case the Pueblo still hate the Navajo. –AGF
Willis,
My goodness, take a breath there. You are hyperventilating over a meaningless issue.
Sorry, but for whatever reason, if your intention was not clear to me, it is so now. I obviously don’t know you very well. Blog posting might very well be the worst medium yet invented for communication between strangers.
Likewise, it seems my intention was not clear to you, for I was neither hyperventilating nor being emotionally spastic.
Most people correctly deduce that I must mean “people are the deforestation problem” when I say “we humans are the deforestation problem”.
Sorry for my ignorance of your idioms. So you mean “the people with deforestation problems in the Sahel are the cause of their own problems”. Forgive me for being confused; there are thousands of daily appeals that say I have a deforestation problem on my vast tracts of lands in Brazil, and on my tropical paradises in Africa. They say the planet I own together with my fellow humans is running a temperature because I exhale too much carbon dioxide and my jungles are not inhaling enough.
Most folks are happy to conclude that “we humans” can’t mean them specifically, because they’re not running goats in Senegal.
I might have at first concluded that as well, except for the fact that in most literature produced today, “we humans” now has a completely different connotation. They make gratuitous use of this phrase to castigate the entire human race and to bring them into submission. It seems ubiquitous. It happens in political policy of all persuasions, and it happens at religious services every week around the world.
It seems that far too many people are becoming conditioned to believe that they are responsible for the sins of all mankind, and must make reparations to the god of this world. That is the UN’s and most academics’ position, no?
I was simply pointing out that I think it appropriate that thoughtful ones such as yourself should be aware of it, and careful with its application. That’s all.
No doubt it is a non-issue for you, but perhaps it might be for other readers of this blog. Perhaps this post will be of benefit to them.
Thanks for correcting the formatting. And thanks for all the hard work you’ve put into the many fine blog posts here.
Willis,
“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.”
I agree with the trees, but, what would they do for companionship without the goats??
Some long time ago, 20 years? More? I saw an article about a scientist (the real kind…) in India.
He was seated under a lush rain forest like canopy of green (though none of the stems of the trees was more than about 8 inches thick).
He was being lauded for is work in creating a new agronomy system. One that turned the area from a denuded near wasteland of impoverished and suffering folks, into one of rising wealth, full bellies, and prosperity.
The next picture was of him, about 20 years earlier, seated in the same place. He was on a stump with a barren landscape behind him. The hills beyond were eroded red soil with little fertility left. Nearby were thin, hungry, poor locals. The area was having desertification with decreasing rains.
Then they showed the village today. Healthy, happy, well dressed and well fed people.
What was this magic system?
1) Pen the goats. Do not let them strip the land cover.
2) Plant a legume tree (a leucaena species IIRC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucaena_leucocephala
3) The small fronds could be collected and fed to the penned goats.
4) In a year or so, the plant could be coppiced. The larger limbs cut. Greens stripped and fed to the goats. Wood used for cooking.
5) Goat poo collected and fermented. “Gobar Gas” piped to the mud huts and used in mud stoves to cook with. Fermented poo is great fertilizer and used both on the coppice orchard and on the garden.
At that point. you have the Virtuous Cycle underway.
With the goats penned, plant cover returns. Soils build.
With the legume tree, nitrogen is added to the soils. Roots hold soil in place and erosion stops. Soil builds…
With wood and gobar gas for fuels, woodlands are no longer lost. More importantly, by not burning dung for fuel, the rates of blindness drop. Not spending hours per day searching for fuel wood, women have time to produce more valuable things.
The fertilized gardens produce far more food from less space than before. Folks are well fed and healthier.
The added productivity of garden trimmings and legume fronds mean excess goat production. The farmers sell excess stock, their families get high quality meat (a scarce item before) and a small cottage industry has developed to make dairy products and soap. They now have money income.
The money income has brought ‘luxuries’ like electric light and TV based education…
Now that would seem to be enough, and maybe it is, but the thing the article was going on about was that RAINFALL INCREASED. By alot. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but soils that had been losing all their water (definition of desert…) to evaporation were now holding excess. That excess (shielded from solar heated evaporation) would be transpired into the tree canopy and fall as added rains. The bean tree forest tended to hang onto it’s water and recycle it, not evaporate it away. A semi-desert turned into a rain forest analog in just a decade or two. (Untreated areas did not show this effect, BTW).
All from a simple change of agronomy system. Pen the goats, bring the fodder to them, coppice but do not fell the trees.
Yeah, count me on the side of ‘pen the goats and plant a tree’…
squareheaded says:
December 13, 2011 at 8:41 pm
Firstly, you are a gentleman, sir. Thank you for your kind words.
Writing for the web is difficult. Curiously, it’s rarely the things that I might guess would cause the trouble that actually do so. Instead, it’s small stuff that I would never guess would cause an issue.
What I meant by “we humans” is that we humans haven’t done the greatest job in not fouling our own planet in general. I was listening today to someone talking about the heavy pollution in Beijing, and thinking about the earlier pollution in US cities, and thinking about the London pollution before that. About rivers that caught fire in the US. About savannahs overrun with people and goats and turned to desert.
Like I said … people haven’t done all that well at taking care of this lovely planet. We’re still learning, and we’re doing better at it as the years go by, but there’s still a ways to go and lessons for folks to learn all over the planet.
All the best,
w.
Gail Combs
12/13/11 @ur momisugly 6:11 p.m.
Thanks for feedback. I didn’t know Savory dealt with goats, thought he was a cattle man by default, though in my introduction to his writings today he confesses his first interest was wildlife, and livestock were not a choice until he came to appreciate their efficacy in countering the devastation of desertification.
You provide more confirmation that the USDA has a lot of ‘splaining to do: subsidized feedlots. What I got from Savory is the land needs the animals (“mobbed and moved” as Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms styles it) in order to thrive, and the move to feedlots, however profitable in the moment, ends in deadland . The Brown Revolution is about the soil. He seems to have been gently and with political correctness dealing with the frustration of having what seems intuitive and has been demonstrated in practice meeting with opposition from an established, but failing, consensus.
Remind you of anything? Co2 is plant food.
RE: agfosterjr says:
December 13, 2011 at 7:39 pm
Are you sure you are not referring to the Fremont Culture, which was north of the Anasazi? They sure did store their grain in some hard-to-get-to places, halfway up sheer cliffs, and so forth. This does indicate a lack of trust in neighbors.
The Athabaskans (who became Apache and Navajo) reached the coast of Oregon and California around 1000, but didn’t move into the Southwest until the 1300’s. By then the Anasazi crisis was already in progress.
The word “Anasazi” is from the Navajo language, and usually is translated as meaning, “Ancient Ones,” which misses a subtle flavor of meaning. In fact the word translates to something more like “Ancient Foes,” rather than “Ancient Neighbors” or “Ancient Friends.” So perhaps the arriving Navajo and Apache did polish off some surviving Anasazi, however the collapse of Anasazi culture was well underway.
I met Archeologists in the Southwest, and none would speculate the way I do. You had to ply them with liquor to get them to say much of anything. However the ones I spoke with did suggest that it was the Anasazi themselves who “altered their ceremonial structures,” at the end.
RE: “In any case the Pueblo still hate the Navajo.”
I lived in that area and both worked and partied with Apache, Navajo, Zuni and Acoma, and I’d say “hate” is a strong word to use, especially when describing Hopi. There was a Hopi-Navajo land dispute going on, and interestingly enough, it involved the exact sort of over-grazing we are discussing. The Hopi claimed the Navajo were abusing the land. I’m not sure how they worked out their differences, but they did. No warfare was involved.
.
As I travel a lot in my country South Africa I have also come to regard the goat as a destructive animal that should be eradicated or at least be controlled as to how much it grazes, it has a voracious feeding mechanism that spares no part of any plant it comes across, they even dig up the roots!
I believe they are the root cause of most desertification of the Old World.
Willis,
You’ve replied to my criticism by calling me a “fool”, a “jerk” and “dense”. I called your analysis “not scientific” and “pathetic”, but I made no remark as to your personal character. I do not know you and it would be a cheap shot to call you names just because I disagree with you. I would have expected you to also refrain from name-calling. I’ll leave it to other readers to judge for themselves as to the nature of your personal character.
I am aware of the validity of extra precipitation and greening in the Sahel in recent decades. Again, I never disagreed with the conclusions of your analysis. I just never considered your analysis valid in the first place because it was a quick eye-balling of data to prove a conclusion that you already felt was true. I cannot argue against an analysis that is flawed from the outset. What I find disingenuous on your part is your attempt to convince your readers of scientific facts through unscientific methodology. I find it sad that a majority (though not all) of your readers simply accept your analysis without a hint of criticism.
If your main gripe is with press releases of scientific results, then by all means hammer that issue home. It’s an interesting debate and one which I am only beginning to form an opinion on.
The Gonzalez paper is as good as published. A corrected proof has gone through the peer-review process. I presume the term “publish” is being used by journals as a legacy term of the old printed versions. I imagine that over time the corrected proofs will become the de facto “published” copies.
Best regards,
The dense fool and jerk who dared to criticize you.
@ur momisugly Garrett
“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. ”
I do not see from the available extract, any evidence of science that proves deforestation is due to anything other than goat devestation and human population influence.
Garrett, this quote from the abstract, “Climate change forcing of Sahel climate variability, particularly the significant (P < 0.05) 1901–2002 temperature increases and precipitation decreases in the research areas, connects Sahel tree cover changes to global climate change. This suggests roles for global action and local adaptation to address ecological change in the Sahel.", tells me I don't need to spend $31.50 to read the paper. When the buzzwords "global climate change" and "global action" appear, my BS antenna go up and I'm not spending a dime on the paper. However, I might read it for a laugh if someone makes it available for free.
The PR acknowledges that rain gauge measurements date back to the 1880’s, but their documentation of ‘tree deaths’ only started in 1954, coincidentally (?) the wettest year in the past 110 years.
Somewhere in the forest of dead trees they managed to find some cherries ripe for the picking.
Garrett says:
December 14, 2011 at 4:07 am
(emphasis mine)
Garrett, when you act like a dense fool, you should not be surprised when someone describes you as such. Your opening salvo, the way you introduced yourself to me was:
If you think that that opening is not an attack on my “personal character”, you are even more of a densely foolish jerk than I thought.
I was responding to a press release, to try to counter the most egregious errors before more damage could be done. You accuse me of not being “scientific” enough to fit your fantasy, when in fact you didn’t even understand the context, much less the content.
Finally, in addition to your more obvious faults (which you have displayed for us in full peacock mode as though you were proud of them), you have execrable manners. Here’s a protip, Garrett—if you come into a thread and in your first sentence you accuse your host of writing a “bogus” article, you should not be surprised when you suffer some blowback for your asininity …
Sincerely,
w.
Caleb, at 105: You’re right. I didn’t know the difference between the Fremont and Anasazi. Too bad we don’t know what language or languages the Fremont spoke. Thanks, –AGF
Willis
You have a (good) answer to everyone,
except me
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/13/to-sahel-and-back/#comment-829021
Is that because you don’t know?
Robert Brown says:
December 13, 2011 at 4:53 am
——————————-
Thank you Robert for taking the time to put it so clear!
HenryP says:
December 13, 2011 at 6:35 am
Willis, I don’t know if I told you yet. I think I have discovered a correlation between the leaf area index (LAI) and the entrapment of heat (warming).
Maybe the following article can help. If you ignore the CAGW bias, it shows how the carbon cycle increased:
“The uptake of carbon by vegetation and soil, that is the terrestrial productivity during the ice age, was only about 40 petagrams of carbon per year and thus much smaller: roughly one third of present-day terrestrial productivity and roughly half of pre-industrial productivity.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/21/carbon-on-the-uptake/
HenryP says:
December 14, 2011 at 10:00 am (Edit)
You had asked about Leaf Area Index. I don’t even know what that is … which is why I didn’t answer.
Apologies,
w.
Willis,
I attacked your scientific abilities, not your personal character. If you can’t distinguish between the two then rational discussion with you will be quite difficult. A person can be pathetic scientifically and be a nice, reasonable person in all other affairs. I will always distinguish between your professional character and your personal character when evoking scientific arguments. However, calling me a dense, foolish jerk is a cheap shot on your part, and I suspect you know it.
I was responding to a press release, to try to counter the most egregious errors before more damage could be done
So you countered a press release, which was an introduction to a long research article where the arguments are laid out in more detail, by a blog post that only barely scratches the surface of the facts? How imaginative. I think I understood the context quite well actually. Again, what I found very disingenuous was that you tried to counter using science, but that your attempt at science was pathetic: you eye-balled a graph you made of data that you retrieved from the very organisations that you often accuse of misconduct. And many of your readers happily accept your “analysis” as been a done deal. Sure, you can complain about the press release, you can argue against the scientific abilities of Gonzalez et al., you can complain about some AGW supporters blindly accepting the Gonzalez paper as a done deal, but if you want to counter then you need to show that you and your supporters don’t do likewise. On this particular case, you failed to show that.
Here’s a protip, Garrett—if you come into a thread and in your first sentence you accuse your host of writing a “bogus” article, you should not be surprised when you suffer some blowback for your asininity
You can hold on to your protips. If you think you can write a blog post that’s misleading and not expect to be told so, then so far you’ve had it too easy. And if your “professional” response to somebody calling your article “bogus” is to insult them, then you and me have different definitions of the word “professional”.
Garrett
Henry@LarsP
Thanks.
The problem is that I need someone or the authors of this paper
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/24/the-earths-biosphere-is-booming-data-suggests-that-co2-is-the-cause-part-2/
to actually give me the LAI (in figures) of the places where they looked so that I can do a correlation with the warming / cooling observed in the places that I analysed.
Does anyone know how I can contact the writers (all Liu):
Liu, S., R. Liu, and Y. Liu. 2010. Spatial and temporal variation of global LAI during 1981–2006. Journal of Geographical Sciences, 20, 323-332.
Garrett says:
December 15, 2011 at 1:56 am
Willis,
Bullshit. You said that my article was “bogus”. That’s not a scientific term where I come from. You called it a “masquerade”, said I was “pathetic”, and described my work as a “whimsical eyeballing”.
Science at its finest. If I recall correctly, Einstein used the same terms when he disagreed with Lorentz, called his work “bogus” and said Lorentz was “pathetic”.
If you don’t think that’s a personal attack, you really should get out more, Garrett.
You won’t find one single scientific article with that kind of personal nastiness in it. Those kinds of claims are not scientific. They are just your own ugliness creeping out.
Don’t like me calling you on it? Doesn’t matter in the slightest to me. Your attack mode may not offend those around you, they may even mistake it for science as you do. I, on the other hand, find it ugly and offensive, particularly when used as your opening salvo upon entering an otherwise peaceful discussion.
If you want to discuss the science, I’m more than happy to do so. If you want to tell people they are “pathetic” and “bogus”, I’ll call you on it every time.
w.
RE: agfosterjr says:
December 14, 2011 at 9:43 am.
The best we can do is look at the languages of the surviving Pueblos, and right off the bat you find a mystery. Hopi, Zuni and Acoma are each very different; far more different than can be explained by the passage of 700 years. In fact Zuni is only remotely like any neighboring language. I think it is called an “isolate language.”
I shouldn’t speculate, but it is too much fun to resist. Perhaps the Anasazi spoke a variety of languages. Perhaps ther culture began as small, distinct city states. Perhaps it morphed into a culture where each caste spoke its own language. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.
I’m way off the topic of goats and desertification. However that is the sort of thought Willis provokes: Broadening. Thanks, Willis.
There should be a strong caveat attached to all conjectures about rainfall variability in regions at the margins of major deserts. The correlation between rainfall amounts and local temperatures is generally weak and often the inverse of the warmer = wetter presumption. That is the case throughout the West African Sahel, where rainfall comes primarily from thunderstorms, both local and imbedded in line squalls. These “tornadoes,” as they’re called locally, produce very strong cooling effects not only by reducing insolation but by sharply increasing convection. They leave behind areas where surface daytime temperatures wind up several degrees Celsius lower than in unaffected places.
Thanks again, Caleb. I spent a few hours reading up on the Fremont and Anasazi, and in some respects came away with the same opinion I started with. Except that I was ignorant of the differences, like their moccasin craft–the Anasazi making them from Yucca and the Fremont from deer hooves. More than one source remarked on the possibiity of combined factors leading to the increased density and defensiveness of Pueblo construction: a changing climate as well encroaching enemies. However they were more inclined to blame Numic speakers than Apachean speakers.
And one source said the transition from Anasazi to Freemont was found on the Green River rather than the Colorado, which if correct would suggest that the ruins I was more familiar with were in fact outlier Anasazi dwellings. What might make so many different nations unite? Possibly a common enemy, and possibly the Navajo. One thing’s certain: the Athabascans covered a lot of ground, and that’s more characteristic of predators than prey.
Regards, –AGF