BAD NEWS FOR OBAMA, GOOD NEWS FOR AFRICA

We have good news for you, Mr. Obama!  You don’t have to worry about "climate change" being the "greatest national security threat our country faces" anymore! 

In your Coast Guard Academy speech on May 20, you said that "severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram."  You can retract that now – because the latest evidence, published yesterday (6/02), is that northern Nigeria and the entire area of the southern Sahara Desert is getting greener because of more CO2 in the atmosphere.

Yes!  Rising greenhouse gases has caused rains to return to the "Sahel" or southern Sahara from Senegal to Sudan, boosting crop yields since the 1990s and helping the population to feed itself again.  The journal Nature Climate Change found that Sahel summer rainfall was about 10 per cent, or 0.3mm, higher per day in 1996-2011 than in the drought period of 1964-93.

All that CO2 which we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere that’s been frightening you so much – well, it has achieved what Bob Geldof and Live Aid failed to do by ending the drought in the Sahel region of Africa that killed more than 100,000 people in the 1980s.

Aren’t you overjoyed?  Absolutely thrilled for those Africans who’ve been starving, scraping a marginal and precarious living on the edge of the desert?  I’m sure that you’re one of us who prefer to see Africa as an economic success story waiting to happen rather than a looming demographic threat.

What’s that?  You’re not?  You think this is terrible news – because it threatens your narrative of climate change as a national security threat?

OK – I understand that when the Global Warming Policy Foundation, back in 2010, produced a briefing paper entitled The Sahel Is Greening, it was a prediction, not confirmed, yet still based on a lot of evidence.  Thus the sphincter-poppingly furious crew of red-faced greenies at the rabidly left George Soros-funded website of DeSmog rushed angrily to trash it:

"It is wild speculation to assert that any recovery in the Sahel is a result of global warming — and to dangle the prospect of a future green Sahara is the exact opposite of the message provided by Mueller’s reference on the matter. However welcome the re-greening of parts of the Sahel, it cannot be relied on."

But now that 2010 prediction has been confirmed – in the very title of the peer-reviewed Nature Climate Change article: Dominant role of greenhouse-gas forcing in the recovery of Sahel rainfall. 

Professor Rowan Sutton at the national centre for atmospheric science at the UK’s University of Reading and co- author of the study, said: "Amounts of rainfall have recovered substantially. It was a surprise that the increase in greenhouse gases appears to have been the dominant factor."

Prof. Sutton and his colleagues, using a supercomputer climate simulator, said that heat-trapping emissions accounted for three quarters of the recovery in rainfall, rather than other suggested factors such as changes in sea temperature. 

They explained that warming by greenhouse gases means that air can hold more moisture, bringing more rains, and can shift winds, influencing the monsoon.

So, Mr. Obama, global warming means more rain not more drought – got that?  More rain, less drought, less famine and starving African kids – got that?  Are you still unhappy?

Yes, I know that this means you can no longer use the bogey-man threat of climate change to seize control of the entire economy of the US and of everyone’s life.  But look at the bright side.  Your brain can stop living along a river in Egypt.  Oh, what’s that – you like living there, your brain won’t let you live anywhere else?

Can’t help you on that, big guy.  Still, it’s such a shame that bad news for you is good news for everyone else – and vice versa.

British writer James Delingpole is the author of such "fantastically entertaining" books as 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy, and Welcome To Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future And It Doesn’t Work.

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