Similarly I regard the Sahara desert as the ‘signal environment'. As well I view the fate of the forests of the Western United States as a kind of ‘canary in the coal mine'. Since the 90s I have been observing both of these ecosystems and have noticed the growing deterioration of the American forest and conversely the growing improvements in the Sahara region.
Now if we consider the Sahara to be a ‘signal environment' we can keep in mind that only 8,000 years ago the Sahara was an Eden and not the miserable desert it is now. At that time the global temperature was only between one and two degrees warmer than the average over modern times. Just a small change like this is enough to make all the difference in the world, and we also know that over the course of the last century we are told that already enough CO2 has been pumped into the atmosphere to result in an upward change in the average global temperature of between one and two degrees. Most people consider something like that to be a small change, but as the history of the signal environment I have chosen to highlight suggests, this results in major changes on earth.
The major climate shifts of the earth are controlled by the CO2 cycle. The ocean is the major sink of CO2 on the planet, and over the course of time it sends CO2 to the bottom in the form of sediments, locked into the shells and bodies of dead organisms. Here gradually over time these sediments form sedimentary rock which is where the vast majority of the CO2 on this planet is presently trapped (thus preventing this planet from being a burning hell like Venus). When the ocean sinks to much CO2 an ice age results. The surface of the ocean is reduced by ice cover. This reduces the ability of the ocean to participate in the carbon cycle by sinking CO2 and thus the CO2 level gradually increases, and the resulting higher temperatures melt the ice cover, ending the ice age, exposing the ocean surfaces once again, and the process begins anew. Smaller climate variations can also occur due to such events as major volcanic eruptions or changes in the ocean.
Study of the climate indicates that climate shifts have occurred at times in the past with the shift between one prevailing climate condition to another taking place in about ten years. I found this rapid sudden shift from one climate condition to another over the course of a decade to be just fascinating, since this seems to be the process we are experiencing right now. Since the late 90s the American forest has been deteriorating and the Sahara region has been improving. As I have studied the phenomena over the years I was puzzled by the strange oscillations that were taking place. The forest would deteriorate, then improve a little, then deteriorate a lot more, then improve a little, then deteriorate even more. The same pattern was evident around the Sahara. The rains would increase, and crop yields around the margins would break all records, and then rains would fall back, and crop yields would be average, then once again the rains and crop yields would increase and break the previous records. The rains would push north into the Sahara, with farmers migrating into previous barren land to take advantage of the opportunity to plant crops on land no one else was using. Then the next year the pattern would not repeat, and then the year after that the rains would push a little farther north, until this year the rains have pushed hundreds of miles north, and have also broken all previous records of the years before, causing flooding and calamity (the rains have increased so much this year that the Niger river, for example, is currently swollen with eight times as much water as in a typical rainy season.)
Now that I understand that shifts between climate conditions takes all at once, suddenly, in about a decade period of time, this strange pattern of the previous years has finally made sense to me. Now I understand that the climate is oscillating since we are currently, at this very present time, right smack in the middle of one of those decade long climate shifts. Actually this process began in the latter 90s so we are actually coming up to the end of the process when much to everyone's shocked surprise I am sure, the climate suddenly shifts and nothing is ever the same again. Currently, the climate is unstable, in that atmospheric winds have remained the same, but the temperature has risen, and this oscillation I have been observing is part of the process of nature rebalancing itself after which time it will enter into a new equilibrium, and we will enter into a new climate age. All this is taking place now, not in 50 or 100 years as people have been (mis)led to believe by the conservative programming of those climate computers (which, it turns out, gave everyone a false sense of security by making them believe they still had plenty of time).
Now we have heard that the average global temperature over the last century has risen by somewhere between one or two degrees, and interestingly enough, that is enough to take us back at least 8 or 10 thousand years in time. So given that climate change means going ‘Back to the Future' I have been interested in doing some research to give me some idea of just what hopping onto the climate time machine will mean for planet earth (after all, its not like we haven't been here before). My travels have taken me to such places as the CATO Institute (global warming is good for you...globalization, that's also good for you). 'You should not worry about global warming' according to the apologists for global warming, who, incidentally, are also apologists for the American dream (you know, the dream of ever increasing levels of growth in mass consumption).
Now this might sound strange, but I have found the arguments of these apologists for big oil and the American dream to be quite convincing, with a few caveats. You see, over the long run, global warming is good, for the third world. Its real lousy for Americans, particularly for Americans in the Western half of the continent, but it does have some decided advantages for parts of the third world, in particular Africa.
So then global warming may very well turn out to be ‘good for the planet' over the long run. Over the short term, it could be sheer hell. I say this because currently the world is being run by multinational corporations and international capital. Now sudden climate change is going to require social changes and lots of humanitarian assistance, and some cases will involve the mass migrations of untold numbers of people. And if anyone has any delusions about international capital being the kind of people you want to have managing disruptive social change in the interests of humanity, well maybe you should pause for a few moments of serious reflection.
Let me give you one classic example. Now Great Depressions were a constantly repeating fixture of the capitalist system up until the time of Roosevelt. After Roosevelt and all those New Deal ‘Reformed Capitalism' regulations, all you got were recessions rather then depressions. This was hardly a perfect solution, since millions of people get ruined by recessions, but at least the whole works didn't head down the crapper like in a depression. Now depressions are caused when wealth gets concentrated in the hands of international capital. As you have heard ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.' The end result of this process is that the economy becomes top heavy, and because it is based on the concept ‘to market to market to buy a fat pig, home again, home again, jiggity jig', well when the base of the market is destroyed by wage cuts and lay offs and unemployment, and all the money concentrates at the top, the end result is that the economy capsizes, and you wind up with a great depression. When the base of the market is eroded there is no longer anyone to buy and sell, and this unequal distribution of wealth then leads to a depression and deflation and ongoing job losses, which only makes matters worse. The Roosevelt solution was to adopt ‘Keynesian economics'. When one of these crashes was imminent the idea was the government would pump money into the economy. This practice together with progressive taxation resulted in a redistribution of wealth, and smoothed out the bumps in the road, so you just got one of those recessions, instead of a depression.
Now, left to themselves, like they were after Reagan undid the New Deal stuff, capitalists always cause Depressions in the economy. This happened again and again throughout the history of capitalism and capitalists running the world. For example, in the mid 1800s there was a nasty Great Depression that lasted for twenty years. Twenty years of terrible poverty and misery. The solution was to redistribute the wealth, but the politicians were all bought off and in the pockets of big business, even back in those days, so everyone just suffered, and those capitalists, known as ‘Robber Barons' back in those days, just kept all the money throughout the whole twenty years. It was around this time that you had Karl Marx writing up Das Capital, and the communist revolution taking shape around the world (you know, one thing led to the other).
Now the reason I am bringing this up is not just to remind you of the massive transfer of wealth that took place in the twenty years after Reagan, or the massive transfer of wealth taking place right now in Reagan Two, although the very real possibility of a Depression taking place exists for the reasons stated above. No, my point in mentioning this in a piece discussing climate change, is to point out to you that when the globe is in crisis, and people are suffering, and there are mass migrations, and people need help to adjust and adapt to the effects of the change climate, the last ones you want to rely on are multinational corporations and international capitalists. Those who would like to throw the fate of the earth onto such tender mercies, well let me just say to you right now, GOOD LUCK.
Now such places as the CATO institute and other apologists for big oil, will tell you that ‘global warming is good for you', and over the long term, there are positive things to say about it (as long you are an African, for example, and not an American, since Global Warming means hell for America). Over the short term, what the CATO institute and other such places won't tell you is that Global Climate Change could turn out to be absolute hell, since all the money is being concentrated in the hands of international capital, and you can go straight to hell and suffer there for twenty years before they'll ever consider parting with even so much as a dime of the loot they have been piling up over the last twenty years. That's the downside of climate change right there in a nutshell, as far as I can see it right now.
Now, returning to the discussion of how good climate change is going to be for everyone except Americans...
8,000 years ago, when the temperature was only between a degree or two warmer than in the following millennia (like it is now, in other words) the Sahara was an Eden. Among the animals that lived on the Sahara were such herbivores as elephants, buffalo, antelopes, giraffes, and deer. There were swampy lands and reed marshes where rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and crocodiles could wallow. In the driest part of the Sahara the average annual rainfall was estimated to be around 15 inches. After the ocean sank enough CO2 to lower the temperature that all important degree or two the place became the barren waste land we have all been so familiar with in this particular climatic era. Thankfully, since big oil has so kindly raised the temperature on the planet by that all important one or two degrees, the Sahara is even now undergoing the transformation back to what it once was, and thus climate change will prove to be really good for marginal African subsistence farmers, and also for stressed populations of endangered elephants, rhinos and the rest of them.
Now 8,000 years ago Europe was much hotter than it is now. For example, you didn't find snow covered Alps like you do today. Now, given how hot it was Europe this summer, I am sure Europeans won't be happy to hear that Europe will be hotter than it is now, especially when you consider that there were 11,000 heat related deaths in France, the Dutch suffered 1,000 deaths, the Italians reported 4,000, and I still don't have the complete total at this time, but we can be sure that tens of thousands of deaths occurred in Europe this summer due to that heat. This is a fine example of how much money its going to cost to help people make the adjustment to new climacteconditions, and so one can anticipate death waves in the future of Europe since currently humanity is being ruled by international capital, as I mentioned above, and that is the worst system to rely on to manage the humanitarian disasters caused by climate change (for the reasons I mentioned above).
The ice cap in Europe was much farther north then than it is today, and the forests were also much further north than they are now. Now we now that South Western Europe contains semi- Arid regions, such as in Spain and Portugal, and we also know that the French Forests are dying, and so we can anticipate a possible expansion of the these arid regions, to include France. This will be offset by the opening up of land in the Northern regions, which could be considered ‘good for Europe' if it wasn't for the fact that migration will cost money, and there won't be any money forthcoming, for the reasons I mentioned, so the results will be mass suffering and sheer hell and chaos. The result of this could very well be the appearance of a second Karl Marx in Europe to write up things even worse than what was written after all those terrible Depressions in the 1800s, but who can really say for sure.
The deserts of China received rains and were fertile 8,000 years ago, and this would be good news for China, since they need all the fertile land they can get, with their huge population. The arable land was also hundreds of miles further north into China than it is now. As well, those areas of India which are now deserts, were also rained on and fertile in those days, and that's also good news, given how desperate hard up India is, being so poor and having such a huge population. Winters in the northern hemisphere will be milder.
So already we can see that Climate Change could very well prove to be good for Africa, China, and India. The results are mixed for Europe, but then they can always migrate north if someone can find the money in Europe to migrate people north, and the government can find the money to buy really poor people air conditioning so they won't die by the tens or even hundreds of thousands every summer.
Now the really bad news is reserved for the Western half of America. You see, even a one or two degree warming of the Pacific causes terrible droughts over the western half of the continent. Already, if you look down from space, you can see the results of the last decade in that the entire western half of America looks like a giant scab on the planet. In the future, no doubt it will look even worse, that extra degree or two of global warming just being a disaster for Americans, even if it proves to be good for the world's poorest countries. Swimming pools will of course have to be drained in Phoenix. The great age of sucking up ground water to fuel irrigation fed agriculture will not last forever. Then there is the problem of migrating that many Americans out of the Sahara, which will now be located in the western half of America. You know, people just do not live on the Sahara today, and they won't tomorrow either. Just where Americans will find the money to adapt to global warming is anyone's guess, and so perhaps they will just do like they did during the last Great Depression, and become half starved Okies, who wander east by their millions to the great anger of the Americans out East who don't want them.
The pro big oil propaganda which teaches that ‘global warming is good for you' is therefore something I can see big oil selling to the third world, but why any American would want to listen to such talk is a really good question...but then time will tell, and it won't be much time either, from what I have seen...these are interesting times in which we live...
I realize that what I am saying is controversial here, but then that is why I am using the Sahara as the 'signal environment' and the Forests of the Western United States as the Canary in the Coal Mine. You see, for a time , one could say, 'its just another drought', but then one will also have to say 'and its just another rejuvenation of the Sahara desert, that's all'...
Happens all the time...
By the way, did you know that its been flooding on China's deserts...Back to the future...
So then today I am controversial, and the real telling bit will be when we find out whether or not the rejuvenation of the Sahara turns out to be the climactic conclusion to the ongoing debunking of global warming (or whether the rejuvenation of the Sahara turns out to be anti-climactic)....Since the process is already underway, and has been for several years, the way I see things it is just a matter of time before the issue is settled, and the rapid (climatic) reversal of the Sahara becomes the climax which concludes the discussion of global climate change (and also verifies the historical climate research which indicates that the climate reaches critical mass and then flips suddenly in about a decade, just like its doing right now).
Sunset over the Sahara, August 28th to September 12th
Global Warming and Climate Change - links to pages on this site
America's Unhealhy Forests
The retreating Sahara
The Sahara moves north into Europe - the heat wave of 2003 Global Warming is good for you (unless you are an American)
Sudden Climate change is the historical norm
Antarctic ozone hole sets record
Sahara storm may threaten Africa with famine
