The Carbon Brief is doing one of those "news management" pieces that inevitably follow anything that could reasonably be construed as representing good news on the climate change front. As readers are aware, a recent paper pointed to increases in rainfall in the Sahel, seeking to link these to global warming.
This of course was rather off-message and such heterodoxy has to be dealt with. Step forward Roz Pidcock and Robert McSweeney whose factcheck (a monicker that is presumably facetious) put forwards a corrective from the paper's lead author:
...claims that climate change is "helping Africa" are misleading and that a temporary respite from the Sahel drought is no reason to slow action on tackling climate change.
However, when you parse what is actually being said it all becomes a bit bizarre. Sutton claimed at the time of the paper's publication that:
"Amounts of rainfall have recovered substantially...[and] the increase in greenhouse gases appears to have been the dominant factor".
Yet now he is saying that it is "misleading" to say that greenhouse gases are helping. How can this possibly be? Is he suggesting that increases in Sahel rainfall are harmful?
It seems that the argument is twofold. Firstly that "past performance is no guide to the future". Another scientist working in the areas is quoted as saying that:
There is absolutely no need to extrapolate from this model result about the 20th century and say something about the next decades.
However, she then completely contradicts herself by saying that the models tend to prefer more rainfall in future anyway. So if the models are to be believed (and obviously this is not my position) then in terms of the effect on rainfall, climate change is a good thing for the Sahel.
But, Pidcock and McSweeney say in their second line of argument, the higher temperatures are going to lead to higher evaporation and so drought conditions are still going to prevail. So it's going to be a disaster anyway!
This is a bit odd. The experience of the recent decades has been a substantial greening of the Sahel. So I wonder why this evaporation-trumps-rainfall argument doesn't apply now. I also wonder, if we have more rain and more evaporation, whether we simply have a job for microirrigation, an adaptive measure the use of which is already accelerating in the developing world.