Story submitted by LeRoy Demarest
According to Al Gore’s polemic Lake Chad is shrinking due to global warming, however, Winston Churchill noted the shrinking of the lake in 1899.
One of the evidences used by Al Gore in his Oscar winning and vacuous work An Inconvenient Truth is the shrinking Lake Chad. Gore shows a series of four images of Lake Chad on page 116 of his book. The pictures show the lake shrinking from about 25,000 square kilometers in 1963 to about 1,500 square kilometers in 2001. While largely debunked here and elsewhere it is has been a used canary of climate change by others pushing the narrative and more recently here . NASA and others make the point that the shrinking of Lake Chad is most likely due to irrigation draws, overgrazing, and poor land use management. While there is obvious validity to this argument and explanation, the knowledge that Lake Chad has been shrinking is old news.
Well over a 100 years old, old news. In Winston Churchill’s book The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan , published in 1899 , Churchill specifically mentions Lake Chad. (This can be read for free online .) Following an account of a dust up between British and French forces in the small outpost of Fashoda in the Sudan, Churchill takes some time to describe how Northern and Central Africa was to be divided between the Europeans/Egyptians. He writes:
Altogether France has enough to occupy her in Central Africa for some time to come: and even when the long task is finished, the conquered regions are not likely to be of great value. They include the desert of the Great Sahara and wide expanses of equally profitless scrub or marsh. Only one important river, the Shari, flows through them, and never reaches the sea: and even Lake Chad, into which the Shari flows, appears to be leaking through some subterranean exit, and is rapidly changing from a lake into an immense swamp.
Clearly, Churchill and his contemporaries new that the lake had been diminishing for some time. It was of no desire to the British Empire and was vanishing rapidly. Unfortunately for us, modernity has a way of blinding us to history. Prior to cars, significant industry and anthropogenic global warming, Churchill et. al were well aware of Lake Chad metamorphosis to a swamp.
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I was in Tchad and Northern Cameroun in 1994 for a week on a field expedition to study a certain genus of flower bulbs. One day we decided to visit Lake Tchad, and although we drove for many km inside the boundary of the lake listed on our map, we never observed any standing water and eventually decided to give up the mission.
Had a similar experience in 1996 concerning Lake Ngami in Southern Africa. We drove the entirety of a dirt road which completely bisected the boundary of the lake and never observed any standing water; in fact there were areas where there were many trees in the 20-30ft height range.
An inconvenient truth for The Inconvenient Goof
How’s this for climate change! Here are two chunks of redwood found at the 300m depth of the Ekati Diamond Mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories, a couple of hundred km from the arctic circle. The diamond pipe – an explosive volcano erupted violently creating a crater in the middle of a redwood forest and broken chunks of these trees fell back into the crater along with much of the blasted volcanic rock that went skyward plus fountains of lava rock still issuing from the throat. The event occurred 50 million years ago, but the wood is beautifully fresh and even has gum in the fractures. Imagine a redwood forest near the arctic circle!
http://www.livescience.com/23374-fossil-forest-redwood-diamond-mine.html
If conditions are right for a lot of broad shoreline vegetation to take root, say, from a drop in water level causing a change from steep shoreline to very shallow incline, then the plants themselves are going to uptake a huge amount of water and may account for the “acquifer” theory.
…Clearly, Churchill and his contemporaries knew ….
“Exaggeration in temperature records seems quite plausible to me, because the human element can easily be skewed, whether it is wind or temperature.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/08/weather-observers-misread-wind-speeds-skewing-a-major-hazards-database/
“Exaggeration in temperature records seems quite plausible to me, because the human element can easily be skewed, whether it is wind or temperature.” or lake levels
It would be helpful if you elucidated what if any your point is here. You have a habit of just throwing out cryptic comments like these, and expect the reader to know what your thoughts are. Churchill made an observation, he did not assign any number or record data from his observation.
You really need to improve your commenting style.
“You have a habit of just throwing out cryptic comments like these, and expect the reader to know what your thoughts are.”
You are assuming that Mosher knows what his thoughts are himself, and that there is some continuity or stability to them. Judging from his posts, this is not clear.
“, and is rapidly changing from a lake into an immense swamp.”
This is ambiguous… It changes from a lake (close to the river in the South) into an immense swamp in the North ? Without any evolution in time… Only in geography.
If only Mr Gore and his cronies possessed a quarter of Mr Churchill’s wisdom the World be a much better place!!