Human farming claimed to have created the Sahara Desert etc.

[TylerDurden]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4315796/How-humans-created-Sahara-desert-8-000-years-ago.html

[Iguana]

I'm not surprised at all. It's well known that the desert in what was Mesopotamia and Assyria (today Irak, Syria, Jordan) is due to agriculture. Sheep and goats herds do the final work. 

The original article of David K. Wright "Humans as Agents in the Termination of the African Humid Period"
is here http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/feart.2017.00004/full

[dariorpl]

Sounds like a bunch of nonsense. Even the article itself claims they believe the amount of rainfall went back and forth several times over the past 9 million years. So why do they blame humans for the last of those turnarounds? And why did this not happen in the rest of the world? How long have the east asians been farming? They seem to be doing alright.

And excuse my ignorance, but how is this theory that the more warm the air is, the less rain will fall? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Also, what do they mean by exposing the soil? By farming you cover the soil in green, then you expose it temporarily during harvest/grazing, (except in the case of fruits or nuts in which case you may never expose the soil fully). then you let the green grow back. Also, how does heat turn dirt into sand in so little time?

I think the climate always changes, and these "scientists" can't deal with that fact, so they make up stories and try and find someone to blame. It's what they're paid to do, after all.

[TylerDurden]

If you had read the article in full, you would have noticed a reference to East Asians also altering the climate in the past so that monsoons could not reach so far inland(and therefore less water would be dumped inland).

http://www.rferl.org/a/1069318.html

Human desertification has been going on for a long time. Australia, full of desert now,  for example, was heavily forested  in prehistory until the Australian Aborigines arrived and wiped out the megafauna and most of the forests with the help of massive fires etc. The future is dire, with billions of humans destroying the last few outposts of Nature in the 3rd World, and then all coming to the West for handouts.Reminds me of Jean Raspail's "Camp of the Saints".