The irony of the climate alarmists’ narrative is as rich as the verdant deserts they never saw coming. Once upon a time, the world was supposed to be swallowed by an ever-expanding Sahara, with desertification hailed as the “greatest environmental challenge of our time.” Fast forward to today, and the alarmists have pivoted yet again, now fretting over the unexpected greening of these very same arid lands. It’s a classic case of moving the goalposts, and one can’t help but chuckle at the sheer absurdity of it all.
The Great Desertification Panic
Remember when desertification was the bogeyman lurking in the shadows of climate change? The narrative was simple: human activity, coupled with rising temperatures, would lead to the relentless march of deserts across the globe. Poor farming practices and overgrazing were supposedly turning fertile lands into barren wastelands. The alarmists painted a picture of a world where sand dunes would swallow cities whole, and humanity would be left to wander the earth like nomads in search of water. But then, a funny thing happened on the way to the apocalypse. The deserts didn’t expand as predicted. In fact, many of them started to green. Yes, you read that right. The very regions that were supposed to dry up and blow away are now experiencing a surge in vegetation growth. It’s almost as if Mother Nature decided to play a little prank on those who thought they had her all figured out.
CO2: The Unlikely Hero
Enter carbon dioxide, the villain of the climate change saga. For years, CO2 has been demonized as the primary driver of global warming. But in a twist worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, it turns out that this much-maligned gas is also a key player in the greening of the world’s drylands. As CO2 levels have risen, so too has the rate of photosynthesis, allowing plants to thrive even in some of the harshest environments. This phenomenon, known as CO2 fertilization, has led to increased vegetation productivity across vast swathes of arid land.Of course, the alarmists can’t let this unexpected boon go unchallenged. Instead of celebrating the positive impact of CO2 on plant growth, they’ve shifted their focus to the potential downsides. They warn that the extra vegetation could soak up scarce water supplies, disrupt local ecosystems, and even increase the risk of wildfires. It’s as if they’re determined to find a cloud in every silver lining.
Pivoting to Greening Concerns
With desertification no longer the existential threat it once was, the climate alarmists have had to pivot yet again. Now, the narrative is all about the potential dangers of greening. The fear is that as drylands become more vegetated, they could lose their unique biodiversity. Specialist species that have adapted to arid conditions might be displaced by fast-growing plants better suited to the new, CO2-rich environment.
As we pump yet more CO2 into the air, arid-land greening seems set to continue, according to two recent modeling studies. But ecologists warn that, despite appearances, going green may have downsides for arid ecosystems and for the people who depend on them. Desert plants and animals will often lose out, and the extra vegetation may soak up scarce water supplies.
Drylands cover roughly 40 percent of the planet’s land surface. The deserts at their core are surrounded by wide expanses of savanna grass, dry woodlands, and sometimes irrigated fields. They are home to more than a third of the world’s population and are among the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the international organization for conservation scientists.
https://thebulletin.org/2024/08/desertification-was-supposed-to-be-the-greatest-environmental-challenge-of-our-time-why-are-experts-now-worried-about-greening/
But let’s be honest: the greening of deserts is hardly the catastrophe it’s made out to be. In fact, it’s a testament to the resilience of nature and the adaptability of ecosystems. Yet, the alarmists seem intent on framing it as yet another crisis that requires urgent intervention. It’s almost as if they can’t bear the thought of a world where CO2 might actually have some benefits.
The Never-Ending Cycle of Alarmism
The irony of the situation is that the climate alarmists’ narrative is as adaptable as the ecosystems they claim to defend. When one crisis fails to materialize, they simply pivot to another.
The world was wrong to expect that climate change would trigger rapid and widespread desertification in the world’s arid lands. In fact, the reverse is happening. But it could be a similar folly to imagine that the dramatic greening now visible in satellite images across many of those same regions is a reason to declare their troubles over.
https://thebulletin.org/2024/08/desertification-was-supposed-to-be-the-greatest-environmental-challenge-of-our-time-why-are-experts-now-worried-about-greening/
It’s a never-ending cycle of doom and gloom, with each new threat conveniently fitting into their overarching narrative of impending catastrophe. But here’s the thing: the world is a complex place, and nature doesn’t always follow the script. The greening of deserts is a reminder that the earth is capable of surprising us in ways we never imagined. It’s a lesson in humility for those who think they have all the answers, and a call to approach environmental challenges with a little more nuance and a lot less hysteria. In the end, the irony of the climate alarmists’ narrative is that it often overlooks the very resilience and adaptability that make our planet so remarkable. Instead of constantly shifting the goalposts to fit a predetermined agenda, perhaps it’s time to acknowledge the unexpected ways in which nature can heal and thrive, even in the face of adversity. After all, the world is a greener place than we once thought, and that’s something worth celebrating.
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Shallow minds do have a tendency to vaccilate so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
Anything possibly anthropogenic is evil!! As that is the basic premise for greens, any such change must be bad.Questioning the basic tenets of a faith is dangerous.
It is as likely to draw rhetorical fire as debunking The Labor Theory of Value to a Marxist.
‘It is as likely to draw rhetorical fire as debunking The Labor Theory of Value to a Marxist.’
Clearly the example you chose to debunk did not involve socially productive work. /s
Marxists are so stupid they are unable to grasp the difference between value and cost.
Incorrect. Most Marxists, yes, but the elites and advocates understand value and cost and strive to enrich themselves while impoverishing the masses.
We must repent, as we are a fallen species! /s
The post head picture is a sub story itself. Cloud nucleation agents include terpines produced by conifer forests, and isoprenes produced by deciduous and tropical forests. The ‘foggy’ clouds in the photo valleys are induced by morning summer humidity plus copious deciduous isoprenes. They are why the southern Appalachians (where we had her mountain cabin until she passed late May) are also known as the ‘Great Smokey Mountains’. It isn’t smoke. It’s forest level cloud.
In the bigger picture, greening in dry areas (think Sahel) caused by the greater ability for C3 plants to keep their stomata less open (to inhale sufficient CO2) and so lose less water to transpiration, has been a scientific fact for many decades. Just one (of many) conveniently ignored by climate alarmists.
Some others include methane not being a potent GHG in the real world averaging about 2% specific humidity, and polar bears not depending on summer Arctic ice—nobody ever claimed there would not be sufficient Arctic sea ice during the spring seal whelping season when they consume ~80% of annual caloric intake.
“isoprenes produced by deciduous and tropical forests.”
Don’t know if eucalypts do the same thing, but I have driven through eucalypt forests where the air was so thick with aromatic oils as to make your eyes water.
How do you think the Blue Mountains west of Sydney got their name?
Yep, the blue haze over them in summer.. 🙂
And the scary thing about eucalyptus laden air is that when the bushfires are raging at full tilt, the air itself becomes part of the fuel load.
Iirc, California and other places have “imported” eucalypts from Australia,
That can’t have helped their fire risk !!
They imported a variety back in the early 1800s to use as railway line sleepers, but it turned out to be the wrong variety for that purpose.
And as eucalypts do, they out-competed the conifers and ran rampant ever since.
The road to Muir Woods Monument National Park near San Francisco is lined solid with eucalypts.
Walking there on a warm humid day, can be a heady experience with some species of Eucalypt.
Remember in my teens, we lived next to 10ha of bushland, was great sitting outside in the evening, really cleared the sinuses.
Long walks in the Royal National Park etc etc, swim in the Woronora River
Yup. The greening of dry lands as a function of increased CO2 concentration in the lower atmosphere is surprising only to those who don’t understand how green plants function. The same ignoramuses also don’t understand that plants exposed to higher CO2 do a better job of conserving water in the root zone, hence evapotranspirate LESS water per pound of biomass created.
The irony of ironies is that the warmunists keep telling everyone that they are the true believers in science, when in fact few of them actually understand science.
“…when in fact few of them actually understand science.”
Ignorance is not just a lack of knowledge, it is in itself a powerful weapon.
When it is combined with ideology and a blind faith in thought leaders (elites).
“Cloud nucleation agents include terpines produced by conifer forests, and isoprenes produced by deciduous and tropical forests.”
Good stuff too, breathed in those chemicals for half a century- got high off them! Really, walk for several hours breathing them is good for your health.
The Earth may be “greening” but I don’t think it is warming. I keep cutting brush to reduce the fire hazard, but I still can’t ripen tomatoes. Gaia is unfair.
Helpful hint. The Tococoa River restaurant near our north Georgia mountain cabin serves real southern fried green tomatoes with their poached trout and a side of fries. You don’t need a salad. Yum.
Perhaps you need a greenhouse with CO2 levels over 1000ppm as in all the commercial greenhouses. 😉
Perhaps he needs a hot house that keeps the warm air from dissipating into the atmosphere.
Tomatoes doing fine here in Wokeachusetts- been a warm and wet summer. Usually, so much rain isn’t good for the tomatoes due to disease, but mine are doing great.
Plant them under the dryer vent
Funny how climate science is settled.
I don’t like alarmists, not even alarmists I may agree with.
They are members of a climate CULT which is why they never absorb baseline evidence; they treat it like holy water which is why they are stupid and ignorant.
holy water- I’ve always found that term to be odd and funny- not sure why- raised Catholic- I recall dipping my fingers in holy water then blessing myself- back around ’60- never since
Holy water: water with a bit of salt added and some words spoken over it (aka a prayer).
Not trying to ridicule the faith, just presenting the basic facts.
Cyberspace is so huge to fill and so many trying to fill it….that to stand out in the crowd and maybe have enough clicks to get another gig payday, article authors now fabricate story lines around a single truthy sounding word pair…..
Convective potential has been building off Italy. The Med is primed to send more storms southward to the northern Sahara again this year.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2024/08/19/0800Z/wind/surface/level/overlay=cape/orthographic=10.93,35.70,980/loc=19.279,37.493
The Med is the fastest warming body of water that can support convective storms due to the increasing summer sunlight and essentially being land locked. Summer convective storms that head south to the Sahara will exhibit an increasing trend.
Convective indeed in the Med. Luxury yacht sunk by tornado:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ce38n4egqwzt
“the alarmists seem intent on framing it as yet another crisis that requires urgent intervention” i.e. requires urgent grants to fund “research” i.e. more models, to prove why they got it so wrong in the first place. Net overall scientific outcome = net zero.
a new gold mine for “researchers”
No, it is net negative science; it will take decades to clean out the CliSciFi debris.
That’s because they have to keep the money rolling in. That’s how they are able to maintain their cushy jobs, entire departments, organizations — a complex web of bureaucratic architecture. The entire “climate science” industry is a well-oiled machine. It’s philosophical underpinnings are anti-human and shrouded in billionaire urges to control society in their image. The lower level grunts like the “climate scientists” and media apparatchiks are there to fudge the numbers in their immutable quest to hold fast to a variable theory.
“Instead of constantly shifting the goalposts to fit a predetermined agenda…..”
*********
If only they could keep moving the goalposts in football and soccer…
Moving goalposts (youtube.com)
Remember in 1970 when Global Cooling was the lurking bogeyman? But then, a funny thing happened on the way to the freezing apocalypse. The Cooling didn’t occur as predicted. In fact, by 1980 the world began to warm up. Yes, you read that right. The Cooing that was supposed to happen turned into a warming trend. It’s almost as if Mother Nature decided to play a little prank on those who thought they had her all figured out.
Remember when polar bear extinction was the bogeyman du jour?
Remember when the looming death of the great barrier reef was the bogeyman of the day?
Remember when ….
Tick tick tick tick tick …
Remember ozone hole increasing?
Remember acidic rains?
In addition to those pesky floodroughts, we now have that even peskier desertigreenification.
time for Stephen King to write a horror story about it- it does sound scary! 🙂
Movie title: “2030.”
The alarmists aren’t flip-flopping. They just can’t conceive of a world changing under their feet. They want everything to remain exactly as it was at some magic time ago, usually around the beginning of the industrial revolution. That was when everything was supposed to be in perfect balance, including the deserts.
What they don’t realize is that the world is always changing and it has very little to do with mankind. But that’s scary. We can invent cellphones and cure diseases – why can’t we stop nature from changing? They miss the irony in their own hubris – if we’re smart enough to make the modern world then we’re smart enough to adapt to whatever changes nature brings. Especially since the timeframe for most of the changes is really slow compared to our ingenuity.
But where’s the money in that? How do you get a cushy academic job saying “it’s all natural and we’ll deal with it”? Chicken little stories and appeals to their special knowledge have worked so far so they’ll stick with it until the end. What would happen if everyone simply ignored these fools? That’s what we should be figuring out how to accomplish.
“That was when everything was supposed to be in perfect balance, including the deserts.”
Everyone was extremely happy living on farms!
But.. my Italian grandmother said she never wanted to go back- even for a visit- as it would remind her of working on their farm all day 7 days a week with little to show for it- and of course, the horrible boat ride.
Humans are naturally averse to change.
Been that way since the dawn of time.
Now, try to tell one of these cultists that their thermostat can regulate their room temperature no better that +/- 2F (or 3F) and get them to explain with all of our knowledge and technology we can control the planet to less that 1.5 F.
Said Hanrahan“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
In accents most forlorn,
Outside the church, ere Mass began,
One frosty Sunday morn.
The congregation stood about,
Coat-collars to the ears,
And talked of stock, and crops, and drought,
As it had done for years.
“It’s looking crook,” said Daniel Croke;
“Bedad, it’s cruke, me lad,
For never since the banks went broke
Has seasons been so bad.”
“It’s dry, all right,” said young O’Neil,
With which astute remark
He squatted down upon his heel
And chewed a piece of bark.
And so around the chorus ran
“It’s keepin’ dry, no doubt.”
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”
“The crops are done; ye’ll have your work
To save one bag of grain;
From here way out to Back-o’-Bourke
They’re singin’ out for rain.
“They’re singin’ out for rain,” he said,
“And all the tanks are dry.”
The congregation scratched its head,
And gazed around the sky.
“There won’t be grass, in any case,
Enough to feed an ass;
There’s not a blade on Casey’s place
As I came down to Mass.”
“If rain don’t come this month,” said Dan,
And cleared his throat to speak —
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“If rain don’t come this week.”
A heavy silence seemed to steal
On all at this remark;
And each man squatted on his heel,
And chewed a piece of bark.
“We want an inch of rain, we do,”
O’Neil observed at last;
But Croke “maintained” we wanted two
To put the danger past.
“If we don’t get three inches, man,
Or four to break this drought,
We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”
In God’s good time down came the rain;
And all the afternoon
On iron roof and window-pane
It drummed a homely tune.
And through the night it pattered still,
And lightsome, gladsome elves
On dripping spout and window-sill
Kept talking to themselves.
It pelted, pelted all day long,
A-singing at its work,
Till every heart took up the song
Way out to Back-o’-Bourke.
And every creek a banker ran,
And dams filled overtop;
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“If this rain doesn’t stop.”
And stop it did, in God’s good time;
And spring came in to fold
A mantle o’er the hills sublime
Of green and pink and gold.
And days went by on dancing feet,
With harvest-hopes immense,
And laughing eyes beheld the wheat
Nid-nodding o’er the fence.
And, oh, the smiles on every face,
As happy lad and lass
Through grass knee-deep on Casey’s place
Went riding down to Mass.
While round the church in clothes genteel
Discoursed the men of mark,
And each man squatted on his heel,
And chewed his piece of bark.
“There’ll be bush-fires for sure, me man,
There will, without a doubt;
We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”
Excellent poem, John. Did you complose it?
“Said Hanrahan” is a poem written by the Australian bush poet John O’Brien, the pen name of Roman Catholic priest Patrick Joseph Hartigan.
The poem’s earliest known publication was in July 1919
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Said_Hanrahan
He knew his cockies 🙂
He would most likely have seen the effects of the Federation Drought in his parish.
Said Hanrahan – Wikipedia
Not sure if John in Oz has altered the lyrics.
In the header “Why are experts now worried about greening?“, someone forgot “so called” in front of “experts”.
“Self-proclaimed.”
“We’ll all be rooned said Hanrahan”
Finally the FF industry is fighting back against the spurious lawfarists demanding costs from the losers causing them to chicken out-
Australian Conservation Foundation drops lawsuit against Woodside’s Scarborough gas project (msn.com)
Note:
The Bulletin is from the doomsday cult …
“Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board“
Who gleefully tell us we are at –
“A moment of historic danger: It is 90 seconds to midnight”
One of its frequent contributors is the parasitic ‘Michael E. Mann’
Just so you know.
“It is 90 seconds to midnight””
And it is morons like Mickey Man and his scumming AGW cohorts that have put us there… with their anti-science, anti-CO2 nonsense.
The world is perfectly able to function with COAL , OIL and GAS
Net Zero, unsustainable fake “renewables”, and the anti-CO2 agenda are the absolute MAJOR causes of basically all economic problems in western countries.
Add to that all the far-left human depravity such as confused-gender, woke, racism, islamist-apologists, and other far-leftist agenda crap.
If not stopped, western civilisations will cease to exist in a few decades.
nailed it!
Not decades. Sadly much sooner.
“they can’t bear the thought of a world where CO2 might actually have some benefits”
But… but… we’re told it’s a POLLUTANT! OMG!
When Earth formed billions of years ago, there was no water, no atmosphere, no plants, no animals.
Yet here we are.
That is why I always bet on life as life always finds a way.
Where is Chris Peckham when you need someone to campaign to burn back the new greening and restore the pristine shifting sands? Oh, I forgot, he’s encouraging Barclays customers to ‘stick their heads in a bucket of fuel and set fire to it’. That’ll learn’em.
The next alarm will probably be due to model studies showing that coral reefs (especially the GBR) are growing and this will result in slowing and blocking ocean currents.
The Church of CAGW is descending into pure theological absurdity. It is utterly impervious to reality. It is a core dogma advocating the suicidal submission of the West to modern day (New! Improved!) socialism – a variant of Trotsky’s drivel – especially in the UK. Meanwhile the rest of the world outside the West is typically struggling to free itself from socialism – and its catastrophic consequences – imposed on them through post-colonial intellectuals in Western universities and development agencies. They are climbing out of the rabbit hole while the West is sliding ever deeper into it.