this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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[–] FlyingSquid 74 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Good news for any 10,000-year-old hunter-gatherers! It's back, baby!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

[–] ChicoSuave 24 points 1 month ago (3 children)

A green Sahara would be nice. Too bad it took a planet wide catastrophe to see it happen.

[–] TeoTwawki 32 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

the sahara turning fully green could actually be another kind of disaster - parts of the food chain rely on dust from the sahara blowing over the atlantic to provide essential nutrient/minerals for smaller organisms that slightly less small organism feed on.

https://www.popsci.com/environment/sahara-dust-atlantic/

migrating dust clouds originating in the Sahara Desert are crucial to fostering life in the Atlantic Ocean as far away as the Amazonian basin

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It's okay, the Amazon will die off from other things first. (/s but only on it being okay)

As far as the human food chain goes, a single round of fertiliser will easily match millennia of windblown desert dust.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It's actually not nice, not for local wildlife, for example. Biomes exist for a reason and if anything changes abruptly, evolution can't keep up with these changes, resulting in extinction of several species. Just like flowers are blooming in Antarctica, a rainy and green Sahara is as beautiful as a rose with thorns under its petals: really beautiful, but ominously dangerous.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Biomes exist for a reason

Yessuh.

That's why I always dug quarantine tunnels in Terraria.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Hmm. Given how much it's gone back and forth already, I wonder how much worse it would be this time. It is happening a lot faster.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Serious questions here. The world, by design, has arid zones around the tropics. If we heat up the planet, does that mean deserts pop up in other places? Like, will the Sahara and Cape Town turn green, but Spain and Italy and Argentina turn to desert? And if that’s the case, will hurricanes more often frequent New England, but less frequent Florida? Also, isn’t one of the major reasons we have hurricanes in the first place due to Sahara seeding them? If less desert then…?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yes.

IIRC in the green Sahara scenarios the arid band moves north into the Mediterranean, and so southern Europe and North Africa get messed up. On other continents, it's already getting noticeably weird and dry where I am on the western great plains.

There's still a lot of uncertainty about whether agriculture, for example, will benefit, worsen or break even due to climate change. Total global precipitation increases, but so does variability both through time and location, and then the heat and the CO2 itself has an effect. It's all very complicated.

Also, isn’t one of the major reasons we have hurricanes in the first place due to Sahara seeding them? If less desert then…?

A good chunk of this current hurricane season just didn't happen, and it was all down to unusual conditions in Africa. On the flip side, each hurricane will be more intense due to hotter seas (which, again, we're probably seeing right now).

There's a pattern here. A different climate isn't bad, per se. It's the rapid change to a different climate. This sort of thing is supposed to take hundreds of thousands of years, not a century or two. As a result we're creating a mass extinction.

[–] FlyingSquid 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I don't have a good answer to your question, but I do know lengthy droughts in certain areas are a likely fallout from climate change, so I'd say that would be a good possibility.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Egypt bout to make a comeback!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Fun fact, it never left. It's been one of the most populous areas all along, and it's still the third most populous country in Africa (after Nigeria and Ethiopia). It's just that it's not the only happening place anymore.

[–] pyre 69 points 1 month ago (1 children)

and finally, proof that the Sahara is not a desert. just like when it snows outside it's proof that global warming is a hoax, rainfall proves that deserts are a hoax. the Sahara is a rainforest, wake up sheeple.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

we'll see how rare is the new "rare" event. Next thing you know Sahara is a well-known rainforest and amazon is the well-known desert.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

During the ice age, the Sahara was savanna, and it's though to be possible it could go back due to climate change.

That would be a nice silver lining on a mostly very bad mistake, I guess.

[–] Regrettable_incident 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Isn't there no soil there now?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Sand is a kind of soil. Actually, besides possibly salinity, deserts tend to be pretty fertile once you add water, because evaporation concentrates things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

It will again in the future, but not because of climate change hopefully. It's originally caused by the earth's axial tilt, and which way is pointing towards the sun during the Earth's parihelion and aphelion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I'm not making this up. It wasn't caused by anthropogenic climate change before, obviously, but more than one thing can shift rains.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago

Those photos are gorgeous.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

I wonder if this is due to gobal climate change or local efforts towards sustainable farming and forestry to reclaim areas the Sahara has encroached on in recent years. Could be both.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Credit where due - this is a rare example of an article that contains pictures of the fantastical thing noted in the headline. Was this written by a journalism student or something?

[–] Baphomet_The_Blasphemer 3 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Anyone else get irrationally angry when someone calls it the Sahara dessert? No, just me?

It bothers me because "Sahara" is Arabic for desert, so the headline to this article is calling it the desert desert, and apparently, that's a pet peeve of mine.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, but I get irrationally angry when someone calls a desert dessert.

[–] Baphomet_The_Blasphemer 15 points 1 month ago

I'd fix it, but I am kind of enjoying this newfound power to affect your emotional state.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] P1nkman 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In my dialect in Norwegian, the word for another and tea is the same, so a direct translation one can use (and I have) when ordering a second chai tea is "Can I have tea tea tea?".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So what's that like in your Norwegian dialect?

[–] P1nkman 2 points 1 month ago

Kan eg få ein te te te? Can I have another chai tea?

[–] Glitterbomb 2 points 1 month ago
[–] BowtiesAreCool 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

La Brea Tar pits, Milky Way Galaxy, Lake Tahoe, El Camino Way.

[–] icedterminal 4 points 1 month ago

I was under the impression that Tahoe translates to "big water" which is funny.

But "Tar pit Tar pit", "Way Way" and "Desert Desert" are indeed infuriating.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

You forgot bo staff to refer to the quarterstaff that Donatello uses

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Are there fennec foxes in the Sahara desert? Please advise while I enjoy my naan bread

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Meh, not everyone speaks Arabic and there are probably people who don't know that the Sahara is a desert.

Minor redundancies are a small price to share information with a wider audience.

[–] Feathercrown 1 points 1 month ago

It's describing the type of desert by specifying its name. Even in situations where it's not rhe proper name (ie. chai tea), there are equivalent English formations (ie. "tea tea" to distinguish "traditional" tea from other varieties).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Woah. It's like a giant oasis! I feel like I'd want to swim in it! 😃

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I hope they had swales ready to capture it