Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; 6000 years ago during the Holocene Climatic Optimum the Sahara desert was covered in lakes and vegetation. All this went away when the world cooled. Some of the poorest people in the world, descendants of survivors of the great drying, struggle to survive by scratching a living in the Sahel, the marginal land on the southern edge of the Sahara.
Africa climate change report reveals heat rising north and south, Sahel getting wetter
26 October 2020
“In recent months we have seen devastating floods, an invasion of desert locusts and now face the looming spectre of drought because of a La Niña event. The human and economic toll has been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.
…
Africa has been warming progressively since the start of the last century, and in the next five years, northern and southern Africa are set to get drier and hotter, while the Sahel region of Western Africa will get wetter, WMO’s Regional Strategic Office Director, Filipe Lucio, told a press conference.
“Overall, Africa needs to take action. Action is needed today in terms of adaptation, but also is needed tomorrow in terms of mitigation”, Lucio said.
The agricultural sector is key to building climate resistance, since it is the dominant employer and it relies on the use of water and energy – both heavily implicated in climate change, he said.
Northern and southern areas under threat of aridity and desertification would benefit from reforestation, which helps to prevent water runoff and creates vegetation which supports the hydrological cycle.
…
Read more: https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/10/1076162
Carbon obsessed organisations like the United Nations only see the negative side of global warming.
Imagine the benefits to Africa and Arabia, and other arid equatorial regions, if global warming restored the ancient Monsoons, which failed 6000 years ago after the end of the Holocene Optimum? Northern Africa and Arabia could once again be like the Garden of Eden.
I suspect we shall run out of fossil fuel long before we release enough CO2 to make the climate that benign. Perhaps when recoverable fossil fuel runs out, our descendants will maintain elevated atmospheric CO2 levels by using nuclear powered furnaces to roast limestone and other CO2 rich minerals, to alleviate the suffering of our planet’s CO2 starved plants. They will most certainly laugh at the public climate change follies of our times, just as we laugh at the irrational concerns of our ancestors.
The Lunatics have seized control of the steering wheel at the UN.
And not a single one of them is someone ELECTED. That’s what they have in mind when they push for global governance. Show elections but a body like the UN making the decisions with completely unelected members. Most of them likely talk about Democracy a lot too.
Hooray.
I have been asleep since the end of October last year and have woken up on 1st. April 2021.
Seriously, people get paid, WITH OUR MONEY, to put out tripe like this?
( Not you, Eric, the UN. )
Good catch, Eric (and h/t to WS). As an official country representative at a large United Nations Event I have seen the UN up close and personal. They not only waste money at a grand rate they utilize the tax money from USA and other similar countries to undertake studies to nowhere and programs directly against the interests of the subsidizing countries. The UN has become a veto contest between China and the USA, watched by the others as they stuff themselves. Remember the old signs “Bankrupt Communism—Throw the UN Out of New York”? This greening of the earth is shirley upsetting the Greenies, what an enigma.
I’m glad I didn’t have a mouth full of coffee when I read that.
Airplane!
Airplane! Also known for strange reasons as Flying High in other parts of the world.
Take note, Disney, THAT is how you successfully remake a movie!
(and yes, Airplane! is a remake. Take that bit of trivia to your next pub quiz 😀 )
Oz:
And all these years I thought it was a parody of the 1970’s drama Airport (IIRC).
My wife got to choose the movie that week and she chose Airplane! thinking it would be
similar to Airport. I was less than enthused but when opening credits showed the tail of a plane skimming through clouds to the “Jaws” tune I leaned over to her and whispered “this may be not
the movie you were expecting”. That was the last time I could breath right from all the laughing.
Whether I recalled that correctly or not: No way they could make that movie now.
First rule of politics. Talk about the problem, spend money on the problem, but never, ever solve the problem.
Move the UN to Botswana. Imagine wanting to get posted there for 10 years.
Since the UN thinks gore-blow warming is so serious, they shouldn’t mind moving headquarters to Svalbard. Real-estate is dirt/ice-cheap there….
Botswana is actually rather nice. Easily the best of the african countries I have visited (about a dozen). Law and order, a fairly decent infrastructure, a fairly honest government.
If I had to relocate to Africa I would choose Botswana.
I have long advocated moving UN head quarteers and most of their agencies such as the UN Human Rights Commission, WHO, ILO among others toMogadishu, Somalia.
I have long advocated moving UN head quarteers and most of their agencies such as the UN Human Rights Commission, WHO, ILO among others to Mogadishu, Somalia.
Try Eswatini. It is like Botswana with rain large rivers and greenery all round. Although it is mountainous, it is easy to get around. It has 4 climate zones and more than 4000 species of plants.
The UN could take over part of the new convention centre in Ezulwini Valley (heaven)
Ok, that won’t work then. Move the U.N. to the edge of Erta Ale volcano. Tell them there will be a move contemplated when they actually solve some problems. Nothing like incentives.
That is actually an excellent idea. The UN posting in New York is a tremendous plum for these parasites. They are the best and brightest of their sad little basket case countries, educated mainly in the Western Liberal universities to the point that they have zero common sense left and believe the Western liberal gobbeldygook perversion of science and common sense. The UN actually robs these countries of people that they need.
I was trying to correlate the drying of the Sahara with the change in climate in Scotland and Ireland that caused bog to replace woodlands. It seems the two events happened in roughly the same time frame as far as I could tell.
What was more interesting was that the majority of search results were about restoring bogs. Why would you want to, bogs are a bit like deserts in terms of biodiversity when compared to mixed woodland. If the climate is returning to a green Sahara then possibly Scotland and Ireland will become warmer and drier and bogs will be replaced naturally by trees.
I watched a documentary about Scotland’s lost forests and a person who is trying to bring them back. Plenty of logs and stumps preserved in the peat to prove their existence. The saplings have to be protected from the deer, who eat the bark during the winter.
Loren,
That will be the Red deer. Curiously there is a managed herd of Reindeer that roam the Cairngorm Mountains.
On the heather moor below the summit of Cairngorm the Scots pine are self-seeding and growing at an elevation of 2,000 ft which is 500 feet above the forest line. The pines are able to grow here because Reindeer are not able to eat woody plants and the Red deer are kept away.
With 70 million people facing starvation, an appeal for action has come from David Beasley, Director of the World Food Program—which won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. $1.6 of $6.8 billion was received, when 2000 billionaires sit by. Famine destabilization and mass migration are the alternative.
US farmers face major crises right now, and they could easily ramp up to deal with this with an Executive program.
Refilling Lake Chad with the Transaqua Project to restore agriculture is a major priority.
The policy of the UN agency in the lead is simply open genocide.
Nothing wrong with creating and preserving soil anywhere in Africa.
I don’t see that much negative in what was written, as it puts potential avenues up for discussion, rather than imposing a continent-wide UN government by diktat.
If adaptation to drier climate means planting trees, well that sounds sensible. It doesn’t have to be solely forests, it could be nut crops, fruit crops of certain kinds.
If more rain is going to come to the Sahel, then promoting development of groundwater, promoting topsoil development sounds sensible stuff.
If climate is going to change, who cares why if the solution is to adapt to the change in pragmatic and sensible ways?
I spent time in an oasis on the northern edge of the Sahara Desert. For those of us from lands where water is abundant, it is difficult to imagine a place where EVERYTHING depends on this one scarce commodity – where a small isolated community’s entire existence relies upon continued access to underground water and the ability to pump it to surface, and where the failure of water supply is the death of the community.
But Allen you and Eric think its all a con, how is a con going to possibly turn the Sahara into a garden of eden?
The climate emergency is fake. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, so if we get really lucky, with enough CO2 we might be able to restore the conditions of the Holocene Optimum.
Unfortunately humans can’t liberate enough carbon to improve global climate on that scale. Only a naturally warmer world, incidentally releasing more CO2 from oceans, can do that.
Yeah I know. One can hope.
Ah, BUT, and a big BUTT, is that CO2 or any other gas is not a greenhouse gas (GHG); this term was made up for a purpose, to mislead the public. Several salient points to cover.
First, CO2 has a VERY limited IR absorption range, being only three frequencies equivalent to 800, 400, and -80 deg C. In sunlight, CO2 is saturated with incoming radiation as the Sun is 3000 deg C as a source. But, being saturated means that CO2 is absorbing and emitting all the time and thus energy input is a wash. CO2’s absorption and emissions might even be a negative as it diverts some insolation from reaching Earth’s surface.
Second, the only frequency applicable in our climate range is CO2’s -80 deg C IR peak, which means that, as everything is warmer than this, CO2 will be constantly emitting IR to space (rejected from the surface as the surface is always warmer and thus rejects this IR).
Third, it is at night, with no insolation, that CO2 and water vapor, properly called “radiative gases,” serve to convert energy in the atmosphere to IR, which is lost to space, again the surface being warmer and reflecting incoming IR. This is why the air chills so quickly after sundown, the radiative gases are at work.
Fourth, “climate science” claims it is CO2 and water vapor, as GHGs, in the upper tropical troposphere (UTT) that sends IR down to the surface, thus warming the surface and the climate. However, the UTT is at -17 deg C and the surface at 15 deg C (global climate models do not do night-time, so its daylight 24/7 and thus the surface is always hotter than the UTT. A cold body cannot warm a hot body. It’s a thermodynamic nonstarter.
Our CO2 emissions are greening the planet and there is no downside to having a healthier world and more food.
Loydo, Greenhouse 101: they put CO2 into a greenhouse because it is plant food.
But I thought that the greenhouse caused CO2.
??
Maybe that’s thinking like a liberal.
Just one more thing you can’t figure out, Loydo. The scam is that moderate and natural warming is a man made disaster. The closely adjacent scam is that this minor, beneficial warming can be stopped and is somehow a bad thing. You are an instrument of fake news, anti-human Socialism and climate disinformation.
Water scarce in the Sahel, is not scarce a few hundred km away, where it simply runs off into the sea.
Why wait for rain like extinct mammoths – divert the water to Chad and watch it green in years instead of millennia.
Using the “natural cycles” is the new colonial trick to further suppress Africa.
After all the US diverts water, and the NAWAPA, North American and Power Alliance, involving Alaska, Canada and Mexico is the way to go.
If there is suppression of Africa, it certainly isn’t in the form of wise investment in projects with potential. It is in the form of government to government transfers that exacerbate and aggravate and enable rampant corruption, which results in poorly productive and counter productive allocation of funds according to illegitimate political agendas.
If your project makes sense. the Africans will figure it out for themselves when they have the capital at hand to get to that tier of decisions. The don’t need us telling them what to do. They need normal market forces to guide them. The invisible hand!
Love the irrational concerns comment at the end of the article.
These people eat food because of climate alarmism, but can have no other motive than helping humanity out of the goodness of their heart as their primary motive for perpetuating these lies.
I only hope the American people can see through these wicked lies.
The Sahara greening is a disaster affection millions.
When the Sahara was just an area of good unstable sand and little else, vermin and plagues were virtually unheard of. Now with all this greening there are plagues of locus an increased populations of vermin and people.
Hopefully the UN can organize some for of mass spraying in the area to kíll-off this unwanted green invasion of plants. The Sahara must be kept plant free and returned to its pristine sandy state.
The UN must take action!
🙂
If you look at what the UN peeps are saying, they make it clear that they are terrified – just mind-blowingly TERRIFIED!!!! – of things they can’t control. And they can’t control weather, the planet itself, or even their own GI systems, so they have to squawk about it and point fingers while spinning in circles.
Okay, well, stop sending them money. Disband the UN, spend the money on improvements here at home, and put that real estate in NYC to better use – something like training migratory avian flocks to avoid wind farms and solar farms. Hey, anything is possible these days, including whirled peas!
The UN psychopaths clearly show their Malthusian agenda :
– a greening Sahara would indeed mean an increasing sub-saharian population, a very bad thing for the Malthusian obsessed by Paul R. Ehrlich’s “population bomb” lunacy.
And the Cecil Rhodes “Confession of Faith” – not for faint nerves :
https://canadianpatriot.org/2015/04/11/cecil-rhodes-the-roundtable-movement-and-eugenics/
Rhodes, the British Colonial, in his own words.
Looks like the UN is part of the Rhodes Round Table, now.
The original “Common Purpose” ?
Ancient lakes of the Sahara
And
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315050647_The_Archaeology_of_Rock_Art_in_Northern_Africa_In
Depictions of people and animals near now-desiccated lakes.
greening the Sahel and upwards would be pretty good, so of course the Un is agin it.
Climate Change Deniers should take note.
Climate is always changing, and the fact that the Sahara Desert was a rich grassland 8 to 10 thousands years ago, is a very profound example of how climate has changed in the past, without the influence of anthropogenic emissions of CO2.
Much more recently than that, and the green period ended in stages at different times and places, such as Arabia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
But over in most places by end of Holocene Climate Optimum, c. 5200 BP. Everywhere after the 4.2 Ka Event.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
“Climate Change Deniers should take note.”
Where? where are these heretics of whom you speak?
……oh yeah, that’s right, they only exist in your imaginary world of goody and baddy people.
You can’t even get the dates right, yet you feel entitled to lecture others…….
You’ve got to tighten up that hair trigger on your fight-or-flight response. Read the last 8 words of his post.
“without the influence of anthropogenic emissions of CO2.”
Fair enough, apologises, friendly fire.
Unlike today’s concerns about climate, the late-1800s concern about horse manure were based on reality; increased amounts of horse manure were becoming more and more of a problem, with quite negative consequences and no solution in sight at the time. A better analogy would be the fear of witches during the 16th and 17th centuries.
I still think witches are scary (but not scary enuf to warrant garroting).
Horse poop is/was more of an annoyance that it is scary. (100 bums could have been conscripted to clean up after 10,000 horses on the streets of New York could … they just didn’t do it).
Climate change is like a poopy witch; something that should be a simple annoyance, but people let the scary part of their imagination get control and they want to garrote something.
wait…what?
They are terrified of the Sahara greening?
That confirms it, these people are afraid of plants. Plain and simple. It must be so! I mean think about the war to starve them out and how much money they have spent to increase plant famine around the globe. And now despite them doing their darndest to keep up the famine, the plants have rebelled and have broken out! How dare they! This mean fargin war!!
Hang their bells on a tree, the somanabatches!
Fire up the chainsaws!
LOL. Oh I’m so glad both of you got that movie reference. What a great flick.
“Northern and southern areas under threat of aridity and desertification would benefit from reforestation, which helps to prevent water runoff and creates vegetation which supports the hydrological cycle. ”
Despite the stupid premise that the greening of the Sahara is bad this “mitigation” is probably a good idea that won’t slow the greening.
“….Urgent Climate Action Required to PREVENT the Greening of the Sahara Desert….”
Didn’t you know? We currently live in the Ideal Earth. Everything is absolutely perfect in our Garden – the temperature, the weather, the environment. ANY change to this, or any threat of a change, must be resisted to the last ditch…
To hear the “greens” talk, it’s not so ideal now – they seem to prefer LIA climate.
There is a great Ted talk by Allan Savory – How to fight desertification and reverse climate change
He has decades of experience
https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertification_and_reverse_climate_change
Eric writes in the above article: “I suspect we shall run out of fossil fuel long before we release enough CO2 to make the climate that benign.”
Well, Monday’s WUWT post of an article authored by David Wojick reporting on the preprint of a paper by Wijngaarden and Happer ( https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/10/26/study-suggests-no-more-co2-warming/ ) is pretty strong evidence that any ADDITIONAL CO2 accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere (whether from natural or man-made sources) cannot possibly drive additional global warming.
Don’t forget that trace amounts of other man-made green-house gases may contintue the process when increasing CO2 can no longer do the job. We’ll have a green Sahara yet!
This is pure and simple mental illness when any climatic change of any kind is seen as bad, even when it’s obviously beneficial like greening of a desert.
This extreme mental illness is linked to membership of the global warming death cult.
Looking at life they see only death.
News flash:
Urgent action needed to defund and ignore the UN!
I just hope that such scribblings that I leave behind, should they survive, will make my descendants realise how wise their great? Grandad was.
Il faut planter des baobabs et des KHEJRI / https://theconversation.com/khejri-larbre-qui-donne-vie-au-desert-143021
but is the Sahel greening, or is this just a recovery from earlier drought?
Nearly all the online references are from dubious climate skeptic sites.
I found this analysis:
‘Examination of the time series of greenness principally reveals two major periods: (a) 1982-1993 marked by below average vegetation and persistence of drought with a notable large-scale drought during the 1983-1985 period; and (2) 1994-2003, marked by a trend towards “greener” conditions with region-wide above normal vegetation conditions starting in 1994. Spatial patterns enable us to conclude that there is not a single footprint of desertification, rather they indicated the variability of green vegetation biomass over the region in response to inter-annual variations in rainfall.’
Call me skeptical but you never read your own links …. we can tell because most of them don’t even support your post you village idiot. Still waiting to see if you are going to donate $3B USD so Algeria can go forward with it’s solar panel dream.
It’s obviously whatever you want it to be. Your mind … your reality.
griff posted: “I found this analysis:” (no reference given)
What a coincidence . . . I once found a spider under a rock.
Seems to be the reference
You quoted a 2008 paper, griff. Why are you (fecklessly) trying to mislead anyone to believe that this paper represents current understanding of the Sahel? The greening of the Sahel is clearly not due to a just a few years of increased rainfall from 1994 to 2003 as it has persisted for for over 25 years now.
“but is the Sahel greening, or is this just a recovery from earlier drought?”
Yes and yes.
It’s well known, Africa greens during warm periods, and is drying during cooler ones.
Further reading
“from earlier drought”
Yes griff , there has been a CO2 drought for many thousands of years
Even the trickle of CO2 now in the atmosphere is starting to end that drought.
Are the Greenies stupider? Or is this just a function of the fact that the world is getting better and they are down to less and less significant problems to concoct stupid non-solutions to? Sorry to answer your question with a question, but you always just ask for ir.
This is wrong. The Green Sahara is linked to orbital changes (Milankovitch forcing) and takes place periodically when high Northern Summer Insolation due to precessional changes displaces the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone northward allowing the African Monsoon to reach the Sahara once a year.
This has happened multiple times in the past during interglacials and during glacial periods, leaving a mark in the Mediterranean sapropels that display orbital frequencies. It is not due to the global climate being warmer or cooler.
Green Sahara: African Humid Periods Paced by Earth’s Orbital Changes
We could multiply CO2 levels by 10 and we would still not get a Green Sahara. We could increase global temperatures by +4 °C and we would still not get a Green Sahara. The monsoon has to reach there. The good thing is we don’t have to do anything. The Sahara will be Green again in about 9000 years. It’s time to buy some land there dirt cheap and in 9 millennia it will be very valuable.
Don’t the assertions in your comment put paid to the idea of a “global climate” then?
I have seen various sources that reckon this planet has anywhere from 5 to 30-something distinct regional climates, all of which respond to a wide variety of influences, most of them having nothing to do with human activities.
Whether the monsoon is displaced by orbital changes or by other forcings is immaterial.
As you note the orbital effect is also noticeable during glacial periods, but it is very much weaker than during interglacials.
It would require enough rise in climate forcing to greatly reduce El Nino conditions for the Sahara to green.
According to Wikipedia (whose link I clicked)…
“The covering of much of the Sahara desert by grasses, trees and lakes was caused by changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun; changes in vegetation and dust in the Sahara which strengthened the African monsoon; and increased greenhouse gases, which may imply that anthropogenic global warming could result in a shrinkage of the Sahara desert. ”
I’m thinking, which is it; change of the earth’s orbit (what happened last time) or “implied” AGW (which cause cause the next time). By the way, aren’t grasses, trees and lakes better than dust and sand?
Not surprising that the folks working hard to diminish and then sequester atmospheric CO2 would also submit an Orwellian argument to get rid on the results.
Sick?
That hardly begins to describe them.
Fifteen years ago I was conducting an audit west of Timbuktu in Mali in the Sahel at the edge of the Sahara. An NGO was drilling a deeper well in a small village. This would allow the people to stay longer in their village in the dry season. When the well ran dry they would migrate down to the Niger river. They would be taken advantage of there and it was the worst time of year for them. I hope, for the sake of some good people, that the Sahel dampens sufficiently to give them water year round from the new well.
With [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate cooling… warming… change, the world will be terminally green, and our posterity will not know deserts anymore.
“Urgent action” = “Send us more money so we can have endless meetings at exotic locations with plenty of food and drink”
The reality is that, based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. Despite the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale the support the conclusion that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. So we just have to learn to deal with the climate that Mother Nature has provided.
It’s time for Egypt to reincarnate its glorious kingdom. All hail Pharaoh!
I don’t know about restoring the pharaohs but I have witnessed what an astounding difference the availability of water to irrigate apparently dry and lifeless desert makes having seen what happened at El Kab, site of an ancient Egyptian walled town in Upper Egypt. Before water from the Aswan dam was brought to the area it was bone dry and inhospitable. A very few years later as irrigation was extended the area around the site was transformed to a lush green crop producing profusion of vigorous plant life. It was truly remarkable.
Why would anyone be against this?
Easy for misanthropes.to be against this.
An interesting article on the green Sahara; the last lakes there of.
Aramco World, May/June 2014
The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. I can’t believe their brains don’t just explode.
In case of proven vacuum, they don’t explode, but implode.
It’s worse than we thought.
Think of the children.
The Amazon rain forest relies on wind blown Sahara desert sand to survive.
This is antiscience, the wetter Sahel since 1995 is due to weaker solar wind states driving a warm AMO phase.
Whilst not the Sahel Lake Turkana in Kenya has had record inflows and is at levels not seen for decades.
am
Thanks for the tip.
The reports that Lake Turkana levels have risen from 500 to 800 meters (rising 300 meters) are not credible.
Here is the Google Map location for Kalokol
A surface profile on Google Map Pro from the lake shore at 361 m (1184 ft) to the centre of Kalokol at 383 m (1256 ft) is a rise of 22.8m (72 feet) over a distance of 5.45 Km.
A rise of 30 meters in lake level (not 300) seems to be more likely (though clearly still a terrible event for the people there).
It seems more likely that the reports are referring to the horizontal distance of flooding encroachment rather than a rise in lake level. The distance from the lake edge on Google Maps to the centre of Kalokol is 545 meters on a rising slope of 0.9 degrees.
No, that doesn’t work either : 5.45 km is 5,450m. (my bad).
Let’s look at some recent satellite data for Lake Turkana instead to try and get a better picture on how much the lake has risen.
Here is the Eodis WorldView of the northern end of the lake on 27th October 2020
and here is the image from 30th October 2019 for comparison
There are floods this year and lives have been put at risk with livelihoods damaged, but the rise in lake level is likely to be of the order of a few meters.
and while we are waiting for the sahara to green, move all of the solar farms of the world there……… please