By P Gosselin
Climate tipping points are much more fantasy than science
Austrian AUF 1 has posted a video interview with prominent German geologist and Sahara expert Dr. Stefan Kröpelin,
Sahara has been shrinking over the past decades. Image: NASA
Dr. Kröpelin is an award-wining geologist and climate researcher at the University of Cologne and specializes in studying the eastern Sahara desert and its climatic history. He’s been active out in the field there for more than 40 years.
In the Auf 1 interview, Dr. Kröpelin contradicts the alarmist claims of growing deserts and rapidly approaching climate tipping points. He says that already in the late 1980s rains had begun spreading into northern Sudan and have since indeed developed into a trend. Since then, rains have increased and vegetation has spread northwards. “The desert is shrinking; it is not growing.”
Kröpelin confirms that when the last ice age ended some 12,000 years ago, the eastern Sahara turned green with vegetation, teemed with wildlife and had numerous bodies of water 5000 – 10,000 years ago (more here).
Later in the interview Kröpelin explains how the eastern Sahara climate was reconstructed using a vast multitude of sediment cores and the proxy data they yielded. According to the German geology expert: “The most important studies that we conducted all show that after the ice age, when global temperatures rose, the Sahara greened”…”the monsoon rains increased, the ground water rose”. This all led to vegetation and wildlife taking hold over thousands of year.
Then over the past few thousands of years, the region dried out. It didn’t happen all of a sudden like climate models suggest.
Modelers don’t understand climate complexity
When asked about dramatic tipping points (8:00) such as those claimed to be approaching by the Potsdam Institute (PIK), Kröpelin says he’s very skeptical and doesn’t believe crisis scenarios such as those proposed by former PIK head, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber. He says people making such claims “never did any studies themselves in any climate zone on the earth and they don’t understand how complex climate change is.”
Except for catastrophic geological events, “it’s not how nature works,” Kröpelin says. “Things change gradually.”
The claims that “we have to be careful that things don’t get half a degree warmer, otherwise everything will collapse, is of course complete nonsense.”
“I would say this concept [tipping points] is baseless. Much more indicates that they won’t happen than that they will happen.”
Late last year in Munich, he called the notion of CO2-induced climate tipping points scientifically outlandish. He also called the prospect of the Sahara spreading into Europe preposterous.
H/T bnice2000
The ever increasing stream of reports about tipping points is reaching a tipping point, when it falls of a cliff and disappears.
That sounds right to me.
However, until you publish a MODEL of the tipping point propaganda reaching a tipping point, in a peer-reviewed journal, then your statement should be censored from the internet since it is not supported by the “scientific consensus”.
/sarc off
Each new alarmist paper could be summarized as –
“I’ll see your tipping point and raise you 10 points”
The children won’t know what sand dunes are.
It was funny. I wish. Unfortunately, true believers demonstrated ability to wait for Christ’s imminent second advent for centuries. So, expect the hysteria until the next glaciation is obvious.
Diverse perspectives contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the subject. How come I never hear perspectives from scientists like Dr Kröpelin? It’s always the same people: Mann, Hausfather, Dessler, Maslin, etc. It makes me question the authenticity of the supposed consensus. Real scientists wouldn’t bring it up and would rightfully emphasize the complexity of the subject instead.
You, and everyone else, never hear perspectives contrary to AGW dogma because the Marxists control the media and hence the narrative.
There is a consensus. It’s just that the reporting of the consensus rarely matches the definition used to reach consensus. All the papers showing a 97-98% agreement define the consensus as humans contributing at least something to natural variation – with that amount not really specified. The same papers used to support the consensus also show that more scientists were certain humans are not the main cause of warming than those stating humans were driving temperature rise.
Odd.
Most of the 97%-98% consensus claims that I’ve seen never mention “contributing at least something to natural variation” portion of your statement. They simply refer to the 97% consensus, period.
Usually, their reason for mentioning the consensus is to shut down questions and criticisms or to discredit a sceptic.
WUWT has discussed several of the specious research actions and faux statistics and we noted the lack of proofs, by those involved, and their utter failure to reach anywhere near 90% or even 50% of an alleged consensus.
Instead, the alleged researchers that calculated a 97%-98% consensus first engaged in selecting a narrow range of studies, using extremely vague parameters for determining “consensus”. One of the studies was followed up by them reselecting the papers they were using and eliminating studies that didn’t agree with them. Their continued winnowing relevant papers until they could miscalculate 97%.
Most of the climate claims for a 97% consensus then proceed to demonize CO₂ and blame humans for the majority of the alleged CO₂ in the atmosphere causing the temperature to increase.
A fact never proven conclusively, i.e., no one has actually and repetitively measured CO₂’s increase of the temperature or been able to repetitively calculate temperature with or without the increase in CO₂.
Calculations and results not just within a laboratory environment, but every day of the year anywhere in the world.
Three of the four most discussed papers do reach 97% with a definition in basic agreement to what was described. Most of them hide the definition of consensus, which is why is didn’t put the phrase in quotes. Oreskes comes closest to making that statement, but does bury her definition deep in her paper.
“First, let’s make clear what the scientific consensus is. It is over the reality of human-induced climate change. Scientists predicted a long time ago that increasing greenhouse gas emis-
sions could change the climate, and now there is overwhelming evidence that it is changing the climate and that these changes are in addition to natural variability.”
Doran & Zimmermann reach 97% via merely asking if humans are contributing to warming. Cook et al. divided papers into seven categories of ‘attribution’. They reached 97% by combining Category 1 – Humans are responsible for at least 50% of warming- with Categories 2 and 3- which included papers that endorse AGW without quantifying the human contribution.
Of the four studies most cited by the IPCC and NASA on the consensus, only Anderegg did not have data to support a 97% figure.
The problem was not that the studies didn’t find 97% agreement, but that the authors went on to lie to the press, and sometimes within their own papers about the definition and implication of the consensus that was. As you pointed out, 97% agreement with humans adding some amount really doesn’t mean anything.
If I recall right the NASA report on CO2 greening said the Sahara is shrinking. That was 2019?
Oops I see Steve case has posted it
There’s a similar one from NOAA
From the article: “Late last year in Munich, he called the notion of CO2-induced climate tipping points scientifically outlandish.”
It *is* outlandish.
There is no evidence of a CO2-induced tipping point in all of Earth’s history. Expecting one now because of 400-800ppm of CO2 is ridiculous.
The Vostok ice core data shows many tipping points to the dangerously cold phase of the Quaternary Period over the last 400,000 years.
I fear those tipping points far more than a tiny bit of beneficial warming.***
***(Despite being an Idiot, I am at least a rational being – unlike most of the CAGW alarmists.)
Earth entered the tipping point into glaciation about 500 years ago when the northern hemisphere peak sunlight bottomed. It has been increasing ever since. More intense sun increases ocean surface temperature in September; trending up at over 2C/century. That puts more moisture into the atmosphere over land in October that drops out often as snow in November.
Snowfall records will be a feature of weather reporting for the next 9,000 years:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12703681/US-weather-snow-rocky-mountains-great-lakes-record.html
The only place currently gaining permanent ice extent and altitude is Greenland so a while yet to the tipping point being obvious. I calculate around 200 years before the permafrost moves south again.
I thought permafrost and the Arctic tree lines have been steadily moving south for some time now?
Glaciers’ melt has exposed trees they covered that no longer can grow within a 100 miles of the ones the glacier tried squashing.
I looked at data about a year ago and convinced myself that the permafrost was still retreating northward. If you have contrary data I will be interested.
Retreating northward?
Northward seems like it is not retreating, but expanding.
Good news that the Sahara is shrinking and greening up. Now the Climate Refugees from Tuvalu will have some place to go. What a wonderful world.
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom, for me and for you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white
The bright blessed days, dark sacred nights
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
The genius Louis Armstrong, agrees with you!
You can hear Louis Armstrong singing that song just by reading the lyrics.
Wiki says this about the song. It was written by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss. Thiele used the pseudonym of “George Douglas”. Graham Nash, in a book that he wrote about songwriters, says that Weiss wrote the song for Louis Armstrong. He released the first version of it in 1967 and it topped the pop chart in 1968.
Actually, everybody’s covered “What a Wonderful World”. Here’s Greta Thunberg’s (slightly modified) version:
I see trees of blood, dying too
I see them whither, because of you
And I think to myself
You have ruined my world
I see CO2, and deserts bleak
The scorching days, I cannot speak
And I think to myself
How you’ve ruined my world
What’s going on here is perfectly hideous…..
Initially I went to open a bookmark of mine at NationalGeopgrapic, but it now needs me to sign in
See if you have any better luck..
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/invasive-mesquite-spreads-across-east-north-south-africa
But basically it said that vast areas of this globe, notably the southern edge of the Sahara, are being overtaken by an (introduced by man) invasive horror called Mesquite
i.e. farms are being abandoned on the southern edge of the desert due to overgrazing/soil erosion and the farmers are decamping to much better lives living on landfills and rubbish dumps around large cities.
Mesquite is moving in, nobody can do anything with it and it is intensely invasive.
So I took a circuitous route to find what I thought I wanted and found this
https://bora.uib.no/bora-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/3013134/Master-s-thesis-.pdf
It is an epic but not especially hard reading. The guy here looked art what the (Landsat) Sputniks saw and then picked himself to go see for himself.
He actually explains how the Sputnik works
(Yes you can believe it, the Sputnik looks for the colour red then makes some assumption about how much green is there based on that)
But buried in tehre is an epic gem, it blows Global Greening completely apart and positively states what I’ve been saying since forever…
i.e We are witnessing Global Soil Erosion but especially, Global Aridification.
This is from Page 72 of the pdf: (P Jukliflora is = Mesquite)
“”This may be due to the expansion and spread of P juliflora plants,
as indicated by the respondents, as most of the natural annual plants disappear by the end of the
autumn season, and their appearance period has become short. A previous study on the prevalence
of P. juliflora in Africa also (Maundu, Kibet, Morimoto, Imbumi, & Adeka, 2009), indicates that
an acceleration of the decline in natural grazing resources in the region as a result of the expansion
of P.juliflora.
The increase in NDVI values corresponds to the influence of the vegetation index
by the greenness or dryness of plants; Especially if the vegetation is a mixture of green and dry
vegetation (Compton J. Tucker, 1979). The degradation in vegetation cover occurred between
1984 and 2000 in the tree areas and this is consistent with (Alzubair, Nuri, & Ahmed, 2020). who
stated that the drought period affected the Red Sea State and led to the deterioration of natural
resources, especially the vegetation. This is in agreement with(Sulieman & Elagib, 2012) who
indicated that the eastern Sudan region is experiencing a drastic change in LULC, which has led
to a significant decrease in grazing resources, as the region witnessed a decrease in natural
vegetation cover in the period between (1999-2006), and that the assessment Quantification of
climate and LULC changes in Gedaref and their potential interactions have far-reaching impacts
on grazing and ecosystems across eastern Sudan.
NDVI is the calculated value of Global Greening
:
My highlight above:
What he says there is that the Sputnik can not tell the difference between Greenness and Dryness
The Global Greening Sputnik is telling us that we are NOT greening the planet, we are desiccating it
Could this get any worse……………
See what else he says.
He went to look for greenery, he talked to farmers and graziers, and didn’t find any apart from very brief spells in the year, after it had rained and, surprise surprise, along the sides of watercourses following that rain
The entirety of NASA People should be in jail and their entire premises razed to the ground.
“He went to look for greenery, he talked to farmers and graziers, and didn’t find any …”
So the people that would be eligible for billions of dollars of foreign aid if they stated they were suffering from “global warming” stated that they were suffering from global warming?
Further, do you think the sensors and imaging equipment from pre-1979 Sputnik satellites are better than the current equipment?
Wow!
Peta of New York, NASA utilizes multi-and-hyperspectral sensors in its imaging satellites. Chlorophyll has an energy reflectance peak at about 720 nanometers. This has nothing to do with the color green, which has a reflectance peak at about 550 nanometers. Sputnik?
The Soviet Union only named its first 3 satellites “Sputnik”, a word they made up meaning “travelling companion” (roughly). It became common in the US to refer to all Soviet spacecraft as “Sputnik”, at least until our massive space accomplishments made theirs look like kids playing with water rockets. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone refer to an American spacecraft as a “Sputnik.”
I was once involved in a “Club 375**” discussion around another aspect of this problem –
The blokes from South Africa agreed to take back the species like Acacia nilotica that are invading Australia but we had to take back the Australian eucalypys and acacias that were doing the same to South Africa
(** 375 ml in a beer stubby)
Africa is infamous for not being able to apply western farming practices. It is no surprise that areas with ranching experienced overgrazing. The observation is this induvidual’s master’s thesis is countered by Dr. Kröpelin’s decades of fieldwork in the Sahara, along with others in central South America and mid-Africa that confirm greening.
“What he says there is that the Sputnik can not tell the difference between Greenness and Dryness”
That inference is incorrect. What he says is that the in the small area he investigated, the green area has changed from grazing plants to mesquite trees. He confirms the LANDSAT accurately showed the amount of greenery, the ‘degredation’ was in the type of greenery for use by migratory ranchers, not the amount greenery in the area.
I don’t have a link nor will search for one where National Geographic stated they were no longer earning enough to fund research from the paper publications.
So, Natgeo decided to make their website require a subscription.
I believe Natgeo promised their publications would be available online, but I have no proof nor desire any.
Mesquite?
It is a very hard wood tree. I am aware of mesquite tree trunks that were large enough to supply backs and sides for luthiers to make into excellent guitars. The wood has a beautiful grain and makes lovely objects, though it is rarely long enough to make houses.
People love using mesquite scrap for fires and cooking as it provides a hot very low ash fire and it’s smoke add delicious flavor to foods.
Mesquite is a legume. Just as peas, beans and green beans are legumes. Native Americans have used mesquite for thousands of years from harvesting and consuming the fruit, using the resin as medicine and wound cover, collecting the sap annually much like people collect maple sap with which they made syrup, making tea and poultices from the leaves.
As a legume Mesquite is great for the soil, both fixing nitrogen into the soil and acting as a soil break where winds drop carried dust.
Then, there is the Sahara mesquite:
“The mesquite tree is native to the Sahara Desert over time it has adapted to the desert by extending its long roots and drawing water in deep underneath the plant.”
A research paper about invasives in Ghana was published in April 2023. They mention Honey mesquite as one of the invasives. Honey mesquite is one of America’s favorite mesquites as the ‘honey’ references that the beans, seed pods and sap are sweet.
The Sahara is a desert because of its latitude….a 40000 year cycle of the earth’s axis tilt will result in the African “monsoon” moving northwards and turning it green again in the future. Patience….lots of it.
An hypothesis is not scientificly collected data from a well-conducted study.
A model is an hypothesis, nothing more.
An hypothesis should be tested, in which a well-designed and well-conducted study will provide data to falsify an hypothesis or be consistent with it.
Some reading on things like that from a while back –
http://www.nickmiddleton.net/project/desertification-exploding-the-myth/
I saw a paper not long ago that said the Sahara has greened hundreds of times in the past several million years. The Earth’s climate is tremendously dynamic.
Will Greta be kayaking in for a “Save the Desert” protest?
She could do a practice run at the “Henley on Todd Regatta” that they have in Alice Springs
https://www.henleyontodd.com.au/
Will that be down from Sahara’s sand dune peaks or up from the troughs?
Very nice.
From the above article:
“According to the German geology expert: ‘The most important studies that we conducted all show that after the ice age, when global temperatures rose, the Sahara greened’…’the monsoon rains increased, the ground water rose’. This all led to vegetation and wildlife taking hold over thousands of year.
Then over the past few thousands of years, the region dried out. It didn’t happen all of a sudden like climate models suggest.”
Now, given the above, do any of the climate alarmists—including those who regularly post here at WUWT—want to again chant how accurate the 30-plus IPCC multi-million dollar, supercomputer computers models (ref: ICMP6/7 and earlier: wcrp-cmip.org/cmip7/ ) are in both hindcasting and forecasting “worldwide” climate.
Just a reminder from that late, great, objective scientist Richard Feynman:
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, if it doesn’t agree with observation, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
The Earth is still in an ice age named the Quaternary Glaciation with about 20% of the land either permafrost or covered by glaciers. The last glacial period ended about 11,700 years ago. The Earth is in a warmer but still cold interglacial period that alternates with very cold glacial periods.
Yes . . . the nomenclature is a problem: many people refer to glacial periods as “ice ages”, whereas scientifically “ice ages” (sometimes capitalized) refer to much long climate periods of “snowball” Earth, with glacial ice extending toward the equator to latitudes as low 40 N and as low as 45 S, and over intervals ranging from 30-300 million years. All scientifically-defined “ice ages” have been interspersed with brief periods of warming, called interglacials . . . in the current Quarternary glaciation (aka Quarternary ice age), now only some 2.6 million years in duration, the interglacial periods have occurred with a frequency ranging from about once every 30,000 years to about once every 100,000 years.
“An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth’s surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth’s climate alternates between ice ages and greenhouse periods, during which there are no glaciers on the planet. Earth is currently in the ice age called Quaternary glaciation. Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (or, alternatively, glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials.
“In glaciology, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres. By this definition, Earth is in an interglacial period—the Holocene.”
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
The Romans were said to have captured lions from the northern Sahara for their Coliseum entertainment.
The bible references that David scared off lions from his sheep.
That part of scripture is thousands of years old.
There are also writings and art about Greeks wrestling lions. Nor were the local peoples shocked there were lions about.
I presume that it is likely, many of Africa’s animals lived around the warmer parts of the Mediterranean.
Hundreds of years of ‘Venators’ hunting/capturing animals for the circus probably put a large dent in the northern populations of favored circus animals.
Venator, a specialized gladiator to captured animals for Rome.
One of the extinctions that humans can probably claim credit/blame for is the European Lion. An apex predator, they were comparatively scarce and when the Romans started industrial level lion harvesting for games in cities throughout the Empire, their population dropped too low. The survivors were too isolated to breed successfully.
story tip
The Net Zero Myth. Why Reaching our Climate Goals is Virtually Impossible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bJTOymi3eo
a video by Sabine Hossenfelder
Seems like she likes the idea of net zero- only that we can’t accomplish it by 2050.
This woman is an idiot.
Everything she says may not be wrong, but why bother trying to sort it out.
Over and yet over again, we find very competent scientists saying the climate crisis is non-existent and that the predictions of collapse are not credible. Such as the Sahara jumping the Mediterranean and beaching itself in Europe.
But despite these disconfirmations the alarm continues unabated.
After all, were there no climate crisis, how would the World Wildlife Fund get its donations? Or GreenPeace? What would spark those million dollar grants? How would the doyens of the IPCC continue to receive their salaries and major universities get their big-money bequests for that new Institute of Sustainability?
So, on it goes, an unabated torrent of climate money, cascading into the pockets of the pious. The people benefiting from the fake crisis control its money knob. One can’t expect them to turn it off.
Richard Lindzen has advised defunding climate science. That’s a start. For myself, I’m now tending toward defunding government; except for Defense, Interior, and State.
GreenPeace gets a lot of funding through sue and settle, so its got a back-up source. The others will find a new crisis, perhaps the WHO pandemic apparatus.
‘Tipping points’ are a key tool in the alarmists’ toolbox. They need to be able to tell you “It’s not bad now, but it’s going to get really bad really soon… We’re at X right now and things are fine. But once we hit X+1, everything will go to hell.”
The Sahara should be called the ‘CO2 Starvation Zone’.
Once CO2 increases enough the ecosystem will revive. It’s self-reinforcing so once we hit a TIPPING POINT with enough CO2-fertilized vegetation, the climate will naturally get wetter and promote more plant growth in a virtuous cycle.
The Mediterranean is close to achieving monsoon conditions now. The storm that flooded Derna was a convective storm created in monsoon type conditions over the Med.
The August ITCZ tracks across northern India but heads southwest across the Arabian Sea to central Africa. As the Sahara greens from both north and south, the Sahara will become the region with the highest convective towers and draw in moisture from the Arabian Sea, Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean. It needs to sustain at least 45mm of atmospheric water to achieve cyclic convective instability. Much of the Sahara is now getting up to that atmospheric moisture level.
Biomass is crucial to water retention over land. Once there is water it will draw in more water
This is what “global warming” looks like. NH will continue to warm until the snowfall outpaces the snow melt again.
If the nomadic herders and their goats would just settle down on irrigated pastures and not keep eating the scrub vegetation, the desert would green a lot faster. Of course, they are “indigenous” so they can’t be messed with.
Israel did mess with nomadic herders in the Sinai, and you can see the effect from space. Egypt, on the left has goats and Israel on the right doesn’t. I have posted this in comments before, but now Google Earth lets us make a link for folk to click on (or should I say that I’ve only just discovered how to make a link to a Google Earth view). Israel has controlled this part of Sinai since 1967, so this is the change in just 56 years. Let’s hope Israel gets to continue greening the desert..
And of course it pales by comparison with the 260 million trees that Israel planted, but it shows what can happen if you just let nature have its own way.
Oh. My. Gawd. The desserts are shrinking! Think of the chi’drens!
I thought it was a goal of the UN to shrink deserts and create vast new tracts of arable land. What happened to that?
Tipping points have always made me suspicious about their reality . .
I remember the Arctic supposedly being a “ticking timebomb” due to the methane trapped in the permafrost. It was all so laughable. You hardly ever hear about it any more. Sad. Oh well, the Alarmists do keep inventing more nonsense to laugh at, so it’s all good.
The climate “tipping points” are just as real as the phantom “sandbag” that tripped Pedo Joe as he shuffled across a bare, flat stage.
I suspect the increased C02 has contributed to the greening of the Sahara – just as would be expected since C02 is required for plants to grow (any greenhouse operator knows this which is why they pump C02 into their greenhouses).
Not really relevant to the immediate dispute, but the cave paintings (actually just rock wall paintings) in the Tassili n’ajjer national park of Algeria give a view of what the Sahara must have been like a few thousand years ago. Here are four screencaps from a very good video you can see on youtube here. It’s not encumbered by any annoying voice-overs.
You can see elephants, giraffes, horses, cows and other herbivores.
Deserts can be helped by “sand duning” drainage areas that can collect and conserve rare rainfalls.
https://youtu.be/Wkq540gsq2M