Bishop Hill Shrinking sand
Aug 17, 2011 Climate: WG2 Philipp Mueller, who is Benny Peiser's deputy at GWPF, has written an excellent short paper about the recent greening of the Sahel.
The Sahara is actually shrinking, with vegetation arising on land where there was nothing but sand and rocks before. The southern border of the Sahara has been retreating since the early 1980s, making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa. There has been a spectacular regeneration of vegetation in northern Burkina Faso, which was devastated by drought and advancing deserts 20 years ago. It is now growing so much greener that families who fled to wetter coastal regions are starting to come back. There are now more trees, more grassland for livestock and a 70% increase in yields of local cereals such sorghum and millet in recent years. Vegetation has also increased significantly in the past 15 years in southern Mauritania, north-western Niger, central Chad, much of Sudan and parts of Eritrea. In Burkina Faso and Mali, production of millet rose by 55 percent and 35 percent, respectively, since 1980. Satellite photos, taken between 1982 and 2002, revealed the extensive re-greening throughout the Sahel. Aerial photographs and interviews with local people have confirmed the increase in vegetation.
I wonder what the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report had to say about the Sahel?
Reader Comments (31)
Yup, it's that old death spiral again.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg2/index.php?idp=403
It's only weather........
weather I tells yer....
Including the blisteringly cold winter to hit the Northern Hemisphere imminently......
Looking at the GWPF article, & then looking at the "data" periods for the IPCC extract by Rick Bradford, it looks to me like we're back to how & where we choose our start dates & end dates again to produce the desired results! :-)
Climate change is causing us to lose the desert habitat of the gerbil! This must be stopped!
IPCC/Met Office spokesman:
'Climate change modelling is consistent with and robustly predicts that in the colder and/or wetter parts of the world it will be less warm and/or dry. The wetter parts will be found where it rains more and the colder parts where the average temperature is not so high.
That these predictions are yet again proved correct by the latest observations from the Sahel merely illustrate how profound our climate understanding now is and highlight our desperate need for more funding and/or career advancement. Send more money now.
"It's never dry when it rains,
And it never rains when it's dry."
Old farmers' weather lore.
Sounds like time to mention
Thomas, D.G. and Middleton, N.J. (1994). "Desertification: Exploding the Myth". Wiley.
Reads like a practice run for AGW IMO
IPCC: 'No, no - its not happening, I tell you..! It doesn't fit the models..! Can't hear you - lalalala....'
There is a very lovely volcano in the Taranaki region of NZ which rivals Mt Fujiama for it's cone shape and is named Taranaki, formerly Mt Egmont.The locals use it for weather forecasting, which is always dead accurate - 'When you can see the mountain, it's going to rain. When you can't see the mountain, it IS raining.' More reliable than the official local forecasts.
A few decades ago the local Ngati Awa tribe successfully petitioned the government to have the mountain removed from the ownership of Crown Lands and handed back to the Ngati Awa as the original owners. The tribe also petitioned to have the name changed back to the original, pre-European name, 'Taranaki'. When this was achieved, the tribe gifted the mountain in perpetuity to the people of NZ as a gesture of goodwill.
There was a recent BBC 10 o'clock "News" story about how the Sahel was becoming so much drier that even camels couldn't survive now and the locals were being forced to turn to trucks. Reading between the lines it was obvious that what was really happening is that technical progress is making trucks more affordable even in central Africa, but that would have been good news and not supportive of the catastrophic warming scam so naturally the BBC journalists lied.
it's all in the eye of the beholder!
25 July: Christian Science Monitor: Report: Climate change will have huge impact on Sahel
A report on the impact of climate change predicts that Mali's agricultural output will suffer greatly, which could exacerbate problems such as unemployment and security problems.
by Alex Thurston, Guest blogger
A new report, “Mapping Hotspots of Climate Change and Food Insecurity in the Global Tropics,” contains some grim news for the Sahel. Greg Mills and Terence McNamee of the Brenthurst Foundation write in the Independent Online about the report’s implications for Mali. Noting that the report “predicts that global climate change will curb agricultural output in Mali more than any other country, except its West African neighbours Niger and Burkina Faso,” Mills and McNamee outline the interlocking challenges Mali faces. These include security problems (such as AQIM), rapid population growth, weak employment prospects for youth, and entrenched poverty. The authors see potential for economic growth in mining and cotton, but they recommend serious political and economic reform, such as passage of the new family code....
The thrust of Mills and McNamee’s suggested reforms makes me uneasy – will further privatization of key industries really benefit Mali, and is it really to Mali’s advantage if politicians force through unpopular reforms? – but their point about Mali’s challenges is irrefutable. Moreover, their argument that “there is nothing Mali can realistically do to mitigate climate change either, but it can adapt to it” sounds ugly, but is correct to the extent that Mali cannot force more powerful countries to stop polluting...
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/Africa-Monitor/2011/0725/Report-Climate-change-will-have-huge-impact-on-Sahel
The Brenthurst Foundation
http://www.thebrenthurstfoundation.org/index.htm
[When you learn to write things without flinging insults, I'll let your comments stand]
The quotation in comment (1) above is from TAR not AR4.
STOP PRESS:
The shark attack in the Seychelles that resulted in the death of a tourist was caused by........wait for it........actually, you've probably guessed by now - climate change!
The Minister for Tourism was interviewed on Sky News this morning and stated, words to the effect: 'cooling waters, caused by climate change had driven the sharks into waters that they had not previously inhabited'.
It was only a matter of time really.
Gee, Zed, you are being particularly nasty today. Fourteen comments from a random selection of readers is hardly the entire readership of the Blog.
"When you learn to write things without flinging insults, I'll let your comments stand]"
Aug 17, 2011 at 2:37 PM | Unregistered CommenterZedsDeadBed
Keyboard coffee occurrence again! ZDB...The only one that is permitted to let a comment stand is the blog owner! Go back to your insults in the D.M. over the last couple of years and then come back! Simply another comment from you with no scientific bearing!
Let me refer you to an old guy, who said to a person practising a religion in a debate that also included climate change.., "He would rather have had a miserable ape for a grandfather than a man possessed of great means of influence and yet employs ridicule into a grave scientific discussion".
Today the D.M.headline would be.. I would rather be an sceptic than a green BBC supporter from Truro!
The shark attack in the Seychelles that resulted in the death of a tourist was caused by........wait for it........actually, you've probably guessed by now - climate change!
It was only a matter of time really.
Aug 17, 2011 at 2:58 PM | Unregistered CommenterDougS
Dam! I was hoping it would have been toothache like the polar bear attack!
The greening of the Sahel is a well known process that has been taking place in recent decades. There is ample evidence both from satellite images and from field studies. A simple Google search with those terms will yield several references in the peer-reviewed literature as well as other less formal sources.
However, the evidence suggests the process is occurring mostly in Central and Western Sahel regions, and not so much in the Eastern parts covering such countries as Northern Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia, parts of which are now suffering a prolonged drought.
Greening of the Sahel- basic plant physiology at work here. Increased CO2 reduces unit transpiration relative to unit photosynthesis. This means that plants can exploit areas that were previously too arid to support their growth.
This process has been well-documented in the literature (and many standard texts) for years, but is clearly too complex/"controversial" for the Warmistas to understand/accept.
Don Keiller,
it is true that increased atmospheric CO2 is good for plant growth, increasing yields and requiring less water. Global warming is also expected to increase global precipitation, although not necessarily over the Sahel.
But the greening of the Sahel is a relatively recent phenomenon. During previous decades of increasing CO2 the Sahel became drier and drier, with increasing desertification in countries such as Mali or Mauritania. Thus the explanation is not so simple. Multidecadal cyclical processes, and possibly remote teleconnections with ENSO or PDO may be at work, not necessarily CO2 emissions (though the latter would also be a factor in the long term). Scientists apparently do not know, and are still trying to figure out what is going on in the Sahel. As in many other things.
"These include security problems (such as AQIM), rapid population growth, weak employment prospects for youth, and entrenched poverty"
It would seem that the Sahel is rather similar to many european suburbs.
Well of course global warming will cause greening of the Sahel.
I know, because Time magazine told me years ago that global cooling was what was causing the droughts. (They even quoted "Scientists", whom the savants now tell us never existed.)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
Would Time magazine get climate science wrong?
Hector, In fact average rainfall in the Sahel has been less less over the last 40 years than in the period preceding this (http://jisao.washington.edu/data/sahel/).
Despite this the Sahel has "greened up" in recent years- how else do you explain this other than by increased CO2 reducing the transpiration/photosynthesis ratio?
You do not need "remote teleconnections" to rationalise this.
the main reason for (increasing) desertification in countries such as Mali or Mauritania is overgrazing- Man made climate change.
Very often "simple" is correct.
Off topic I know but having just got back from the USA, it is blindingly obvious why America is a more competitive, dynamic and business friendly economy than the UK.
Fuel price. In the US it is about $3.60 (£2.20) per gallon and in the UK about £6.50.
Since energy costs underpin much of the economy it is clear that the current UK tax regime is a serious impediment to business and growth.
In the US the media is reporting that recent crude oil price falls may cut the cost of petrol by 50 cents (about 30p) per gallon.
Why do I suspect we won't see more than a 2-3p adjustment here?
Don
I've just been doing some very quick and dirty calculations which I shall post shortly in Unthreaded. There is an economic argument to be made for reducing fuel duties but not one that politicians seem astute enough to make.
This has been well known for many years. Even National Geographic had a full feature about it a few years ago, as well as a very upbeat news item in 2009 (but linked to the 'climate change' meme, of course!):
'Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change?'
James Owen
for National Geographic News
July 31, 2009
Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.
Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.
Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.
If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.
This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.
The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers).
Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.
The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan.
More from that National Geographic news item:
While satellite images can't distinguish temporary plants like grasses that come and go with the rains, ground surveys suggest recent vegetation change is firmly rooted.
In the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan, new trees—such as acacias—are flourishing, according to Stefan Kröpelin, a climate scientist at the University of Cologne's Africa Research Unit in Germany.
"Shrubs are coming up and growing into big shrubs. This is completely different from having a bit more tiny grass," said Kröpelin, who has studied the region for two decades.
In 2008 Kröpelin—not involved in the new satellite research—visited Western Sahara, a disputed territory controlled by Morocco.
"The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years," Kröpelin said. "They have never seen so much grazing land."
"Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass," he said.
"Now you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, gazelles coming back, even sorts of amphibians coming back," he said.
"The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is indisputable."
An explosion in plant growth has been predicted by some climate models.
For instance, in 2005 a team led by Reindert Haarsma of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, forecast significantly more future rainfall in the Sahel.
The study in Geophysical Research Letters predicted that rainfall in the July to September wet season would rise by up to two millimeters a day by 2080.
Satellite data shows "that indeed during the last decade, the Sahel is becoming more green," Haarsma said.
There are three areas on earth which inevitably engender massive human disasters, and they all have to do with arability of land. Low-lying land of the Ganges delta becomes populated despite prohibition, and then a cyclone wipes out masses. Land at the Southern Edge of the Sahara alternately becomes greener, then browner, and more masses starve. The Chinese River valleys are the third, and I guess I'll add Pakistan to that.
People will settle arable land. It is difficult to prevent that, thus, the holocausts are difficult to prevent, even with foreknowledge of the possibility.
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Mike, WRT your "quick and dirty calculations"- keep me posted, I am very interested.
My take is that reducing fuel taxes will more than pay for themselves by stimulating investment in manufacturing, increasing employment and thus reducing the bill for unemployment- plus bringing more taxpayers.
Love to see figures on this.
Don
I posted a comment on Unthreaded yesterday Page 2 about third post down.
I said mainly what you've just said. There is an immediate and permanent upside and my theoretical downside (Income Tax goes up to 24%) is partly nullified immediately and in the near term by increased economic activity.
I see it as win/win.
This must be worth a debate somewhere, surely???
Thanks, Mike- my thoughts exactly.
The question is how can this debate be moved forward?
manybe via Lord Lawson?
I'll see what I can do.
Don