Data, Satellite Photos Expose Climate Activist’s Lies. Facts: Sahara Shrinking, Arctic Ice Robust, Lake Chad Growing

At XR and FFF rallies, speakers like telling outright lies with the aim of trying to get the masses of people to stampede in mass panic and blind anger.

One of these activists in Germany is Carola Rackete, reports Michael Krüger here at Science Skeptical.

Rackete, the award-winning refugee rescuer and sea vessel captain, has found a new field of activity: now she is active for Fridays for Future and XR (the radical climate fighters who block streets and stick to things with superglue, or climb drones at airports) and block streets in Berlin and make speeches there.

Not long ago Ms. Rackete made some astonishing climate claims before an audience in Berlin, as the following video (in German) shows:

But let’s do a fact check.

On the claim Lake Chad and the Sahel are drying

Lake Chad on the southern edge of the Sahara is not drying out as a result of global warming, but is once again growing and greening. Here are satellite pictures and water level data:

05-107-1

Desert regions have also become greener, such as the Sahel on the border with the Sahara, the Fertile Crescent, which stretches across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, and the former region of Carthage in North Africa, which used to be the granary of Rome.

These areas were already green and fertile in the climate optimum of the Holocene directly after the last ice age. From there, agriculture spread to Europe and Northern Europe in the course of the Neolithic revolution.

dia-98-3 data6-africa-veg

During the last ice age, the Sahara was a desert. In the period of 9,000-6,000 years before today, we had the warmest time of the Holocene, the sea ice of the Arctic had almost disappeared in summer and large parts of the Sahara were fertile grasslands.

There were large groups of crocodiles and there were even crocodiles where there is desert today. Even today rock paintings of the natives in the today’s desert testify to it.

Gilf_Kebir_jan_2007_rock_carvings

Sahara

The rock paintings of the Sahara have been created in North Africa for 12,000 years, at the end of the last ice age. For millions of years, the Sahara was a desert subject to extreme climatic fluctuations and at times turned green again during the warm periods.

3,500 years ago, the desert began to dry out, a process that continues intermittently to this day.

For a good four decades, however, the Sahel has since been greening.

11c_05 pages-from-un-sahel-report-1982-2003-trend Overall-trends-in-vegetation-greenness-throughout-the-period-1982-2003-based-on-monthly

This is shown by various studies which show the greening of the Sahel zone with the help of satellite data since 1982.

In 2018, Venter et al. recorded an eight percent increase in wood vegetation in sub-Saharan Africa over the last three decades using satellite images.

According to Wikipedia, the Sahara covers an area of around 9.2 million square kilometres. Eight percent of this corresponds to more than 700,000 square kilometres, an area that is almost as large as Germany and France put together!

Wald-Afrikawarmermedite

2018, Venter et al.

On the ice-free Arctic

Arctic sea ice reaches its smallest annual extent and area at the end of summer. At the end of summer 2007 and 2012 particularly low values were reached, which caused the climate alarmist press to discuss the topic in the throughout the media.

In 2007 some media and experts even speculated over an ice-free Arctic Ocean by summer 2013. But at the moment the picture is completely different.

Meereis-Arktis-2019

Source: Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI)

An ice-free Arctic in summer is therefore still far off. Carola  Rackete fancies a world as it pleases her. Yet, the “activists” like claiming they listen to science!

6 responses to “Data, Satellite Photos Expose Climate Activist’s Lies. Facts: Sahara Shrinking, Arctic Ice Robust, Lake Chad Growing”

  1. bonbon

    Ms. Rackete, who rammed an Italian naval vessel, might have a problem with this :
    https://schillerinstitute.com/media/italy-china-alliance-transaqua/
    Italy-China Alliance for Transaqua
    Franco Persio Bocchetto , Foreign Director for Bonifica S.p.A, Italy

    The idea is to refill the Lake, with massive infrastructure. China is on-board.
    Why wait for rain or the sleeping EU? Even climatologists, nor the EU Commission cannot get anything right. Let’s rebel against the XR anti-human nuttiness with grand projects!

  2. John F. Hultquist

    Ice floats on the Arctic Ocean. In 2007 ice-arches gave way and allowed ‘bergs to sail south into warmer water and melt.
    Such an event is unlikely to be a one-time-only episode.
    Interesting to watch, but it does ‘salt’ the shipping lanes with large ice bergs.
    Waiting.

  3. tom0mason

    The magic of CO2 — greening deserts. There is NO down side to atmospheric CO2 rise, there are (thus far) only benefits.

  4. MGJ

    I don’t know whether Frau Rackete would claim that what she says is based on science but I assume she would. Unfortunately Science has followed the Humanities headlong into the sewer of mysticism and post-modernism, so undoubtedly it will all be ‘true for her’ and that’s all that seems to matter.

    The only arguments that can change such beliefs are not based on reason or evidence but on how they interact with her ‘feelings’. You would somehow have to find a way to make her ‘feel’ that her current beliefs make her a bad person.

  5. pochas94

    If you put two billiard balls, one white and one black, in a 400 degree oven and wait long enough for their temperature to stop changing, then take their temperature, you will find both at the same temperature, 400 degrees. Their albedo makes no difference. This is why I suspect that cloud albedo makes no difference.

  6. Weekly Abstract of Local weather and Power Data # 384 – Next Gadget

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