From the article: Needed some good news, and this counts with qualifications. Climate changes are bringing back the weather regime which made much of the African continent the cradle of humanity....
From the article:
Near-extinct oryx are returning. Farms are prospering as irrigation water reaches fields for the first time in decades. Farmers are even nurturing new trees on their land. Once a byword for drought and famine, the African Sahel region on the southern flank of the Sahara Desert now has more water than it has for decades. Wells are filling as water tables have risen by 13 feet or more in places. Lake Chad, which was one of Africa’s largest expanses of water before shriveling during the droughts, is recovering.
Over years of drought in the late 20th century, the sun hard baked the soils of the Sahel. Now, erratic but extreme rains are returning to this semi-arid region, causing lethal floods but also replenishing rivers, filling desert depressions, restoring water to dried riverbeds known as wadis, and sluicing rainwater off impermeable soils directly into aquifers. The process began in the 1990s but has accelerated in the past five years.
“Across the Sahel, from Ethiopia to Senegal, we have evidence of increased terrestrial water storage,” says Richard Taylor, a hydrogeologist at University College London who has led ground teams investigating the relationships between climate, land use, and groundwater recharge in the region.
Needed some good news, and this counts with qualifications. Climate changes are bringing back the weather regime which made much of the African continent the cradle of humanity. Humans are resilient, and ingenious ancestral techniques are helping to restore the groundwater tables in the Sahel now that the rainfall permits.
That's... Fascinating. I had no idea that coal usage in North America and Europe was interfering with the monsoon and causing drought in Africa. It makes me think, again, of the arguments for and...
Why the revival of the rains? An assessment published in 2021 by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found “high confidence” among climate scientists that it is a result of strong warming in the North Atlantic, caused by a combination of global heating and a reduction, in Europe and North America, of sulphate aerosols from coal burning, which once created a thin haze that cooled the ocean. That cooling prevented the northward migration of the West African monsoon into the Sahel, resulting in drought. But the clean-up has warmed the ocean and pulled the monsoon back into the Sahel, strengthening its ability to produce deluges.
That's... Fascinating. I had no idea that coal usage in North America and Europe was interfering with the monsoon and causing drought in Africa. It makes me think, again, of the arguments for and against using terraforming to addrees climate change. Yet another example of how we unintentionally terraformed the planet in the past, causing untold damage, and are now doing it again (by simply using less coal) to attempt to mitigate that damage.
That's fantastic. Much of the ethnic conflict in West Africa has been pastoralist vs agriculturalist as the two groups/professions clash over increasingly scare fertile land -- turning that around...
That's fantastic. Much of the ethnic conflict in West Africa has been pastoralist vs agriculturalist as the two groups/professions clash over increasingly scare fertile land -- turning that around could well reduce the ethnic conflict and potentially the spread of terrorism as well. (Terror groups in the region prey on the ethnic fault lines to radicalize and recruit).
From the article:
Needed some good news, and this counts with qualifications. Climate changes are bringing back the weather regime which made much of the African continent the cradle of humanity. Humans are resilient, and ingenious ancestral techniques are helping to restore the groundwater tables in the Sahel now that the rainfall permits.
That's... Fascinating. I had no idea that coal usage in North America and Europe was interfering with the monsoon and causing drought in Africa. It makes me think, again, of the arguments for and against using terraforming to addrees climate change. Yet another example of how we unintentionally terraformed the planet in the past, causing untold damage, and are now doing it again (by simply using less coal) to attempt to mitigate that damage.
That's fantastic. Much of the ethnic conflict in West Africa has been pastoralist vs agriculturalist as the two groups/professions clash over increasingly scare fertile land -- turning that around could well reduce the ethnic conflict and potentially the spread of terrorism as well. (Terror groups in the region prey on the ethnic fault lines to radicalize and recruit).