{"id":249818,"date":"2023-03-26T21:18:26","date_gmt":"2023-03-26T19:18:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=249818"},"modified":"2023-03-26T21:20:35","modified_gmt":"2023-03-26T19:20:35","slug":"green-desert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=249818","title":{"rendered":"Green Desert"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Climate Scepticism<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By JIT<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As so often happens on the interweb, I found myself lost in a rabbit hole of complexity where naively I had expected to find simplicity. What began as a plan to explain to Cliscep readers the basics of the sceptic\u2019s favourite spicy sauce, \u201cglobal greening,\u201d soon became complicated because the facts themselves are complicated. For example, there is a vegetation index that I am familiar with and know how to calculate*, which is one that has shown greening in the satellite era. However, only now reading the wider literature on global greening, I soon found out that my simple index is actually fiendishly difficult to interpret. For that reason among others, I\u2019m not going to talk about global greening right now \u2013 that will have to wait for another day. Instead I\u2019m going to tell you about one of the innumerable side-branches of the rabbit warren I found myself in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was looking for a good place to illustrate the basic concept of a gradual change in greenness over time since the dawn of the satellite era. To that end I thought somewhere in the Sahel would be a good model. On Nasa\u2019s excellent Worldview website**, you can display many data layers, including vegetation indices. With Landsat you can go back to about 1983, and data from Terra\/Aqua become available I think in 2002. So I was looking at the NDVI record for North Africa from outer space, scrolling through time, looking for a place that might make an exemplar of the theme, when I spotted what looked like a sudden blossoming of life not at the join between Sahara and Sahel but in pure desert \u2013 once utterly lifeless sand in the middle of nowhere suddenly lighting up the NDVI scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

1986 \u2013 NDVI based on Landsat data<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

2010 \u2013 Aqua\/MODIS<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naturally I had an idea what was going on, but nevertheless it didn\u2019t seem to make a great deal of sense. So I turned to Google Earth in hopes that someone had helpfully uploaded geolocated photographs of the site, or else that it would be labelled with a place name that I could look up elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Google Earth \u2013 current image<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luckily for this puzzle, a contributor called Ragab Hafiez had uploaded some photographs of the area. The first photograph I saw was what looked like barley \u2013 a typical British crop growing in the middle of the Western Desert. Another photo showed what looked like alfalfa, and others showed workers harvesting\u2026 potatoes. What gives?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCultivated Desert\u201d by Ragab Hafiez on Google Earth (at about 22\u00b0
42\u2032 N, 28\u00b0 24\u2032 E).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, of course this is no natural greening caused by the CO2<\/sub> fertilisation effect. This is the result of irrigation. Under the desert sand, there is water. If you put a borehole deep enough, you can reach it. Then you can simply pump out water and make it rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The circles on the Google Earth image are at 1 km centres, and each is 800 m in diameter (i.e. the area of each is about half a square kilometre). The irrigation systems are giant booms \u2013 obviously 400 m in length \u2013 that sweep around a central axis. The whole site (East Owainat) is easily 50 km across.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is sucking water out of the ground to grow barley in a desert with essentially zero actual rainfall a good idea? Obviously it\u2019s harder to grow barley in the Western Desert than, say the flatlands of Cambridgeshire. I can imagine that sandstorms threaten to bury everything, for a start. The desert is obviously sunnier, but it\u2019s also hotter \u2013 Kharga, the nearby oasis (nearby-ish; don\u2019t try to walk it) has an average June maximum of 40\u00b0C and a record temp of 50\u00b0C. The aquifer is going to deplete over time (according to El Alfy (2014)^, the aquifer is going down at a rate of 0.5 m per year; its thickness seems to be quite variable). Aquifer depletion generally has the potential to cause sinkholes, but here my na\u00efve guess is that because the surface is \u201cobviously\u201d sandstone, there are no subsurface caverns primed to open up under the farm workers\u2019 feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why start farming in the middle of nowhere? Why not close to an existing oasis like Kharga? Well, the existing oasis already has water. And one presumes that Kharga sits at the level of the aquifer, such that local water extraction would rapidly cause obvious problems \u2013 the water at the surface would begin to disappear. No doubt the theory behind the choice of East Owainat is that it is far enough from anywhere that no amount of aquifer depletion will affect anyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why barley? Why not a plant with C4 photosynthesis, which is more productive in hot and dry conditions (maize for example)? I have no answer to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor do I know how long the desert at East Owainat will remain green. Triumph of human ingenuity, or hubristic folly?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This miniature has no direct link to climate change. Or does it? I will leave it to the reader to decide whether or not the cultivation of barley in the Western Desert might be relevant to claims about the way future agricultural productivity might be affected by the \u201cclimate crisis\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes & References<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

You might have noticed another change between the 1986 and 2010 images. Over to the right of the second image, there is a dark area that wasn\u2019t there in the first. These are the Toshka Lakes, fed by an overflow from Lake Nasser. These might give rise to a rapid bounty of fish and crops, but one suspects this will be temporary. The lakes are filled occasionally, and of course rapidly evaporate. Naturally over time this will lead to the concentration of minerals in the water going up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*NDVI. \u201cNormalised Difference Vegetation Index.\u201d I think this was the first one invented for use with Landsat images in the 1970s. It is based on the idea that plants absorb more red light and reflect more infrared than bare ground. Now, I know what you\u2019re thinking. Plants are green, so why do we need an index involving red and infrared? Why not just measure green? Well, if you remember those far-off days in gloomy classrooms, playing with triangular prisms and watching dust motes swarm in the gleam cutting in around the edge of the blinds, you\u2019ll also remember that white light contains green. Plants appear green because they have preferentially absorbed blue and red light. What I am trying to get at is that a white surface (e.g. snow) has as much green light coming off it as, say, a municipal lawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

**Worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov<\/p>\n\n\n\n

^El Alfy, M. (2014). Numerical groundwater modelling as an effective tool for management of water resources in arid areas, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 59:6, 1259-1274. [Gettable from Google Scholar.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nor do I know how long the desert at East Owainat will remain green. Triumph of human ingenuity, or hubristic folly?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":249829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-249818","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-uncategorized","9":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image-1142.png?fit=1568%2C980&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-12Zk","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":337365,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=337365","url_meta":{"origin":249818,"position":0},"title":"Yale Environment 360 Pushes Alarming Carbon Dioxide Story, Despite Beneficial Global Greening","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"23\/07\/2024","format":false,"excerpt":"A July 16th article published by Yale Environment 360 claims global greening is not a positive, but rather a negative because it will harm water supplies. This claim is at best amusing, and at worst, misleading. While acknowledging that many scientists see the greening of the Earth due to rising\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"climate alarmism\"","block_context":{"text":"climate alarmism","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=climate-alarmism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/0-BG.jpeg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/0-BG.jpeg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/0-BG.jpeg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/0-BG.jpeg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/0-BG.jpeg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":401120,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=401120","url_meta":{"origin":249818,"position":1},"title":"Oh noes! 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Objective satellite measurements of vegetation, however, show increasing\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/0NASA-greening-1-696x392-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/0NASA-greening-1-696x392-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/0NASA-greening-1-696x392-2.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":374989,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=374989","url_meta":{"origin":249818,"position":5},"title":"Greening Without CO2? More Selective Science","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"13\/04\/2025","format":false,"excerpt":"In their lengthy and data-rich paper,\u00a0Mishra et al. (2025)\u00a0examine the notable \u201cgreening\u201d of India\u2019s Thar Desert from 2001 to 2023. They credit this transformation to a combination of increased monsoon rainfall and human-driven groundwater irrigation. Precipitation is said to contribute 45% to this greening, and groundwater pumping 55%\u200b. While this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"carbon dioxide (CO\u2082)\"","block_context":{"text":"carbon dioxide (CO\u2082)","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=carbon-dioxide-co%e2%82%82"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/0desertsgreen.png?fit=1200%2C480&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/0desertsgreen.png?fit=1200%2C480&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/0desertsgreen.png?fit=1200%2C480&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/0desertsgreen.png?fit=1200%2C480&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/0desertsgreen.png?fit=1200%2C480&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/121246920"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=249818"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249833,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249818\/revisions\/249833"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/249829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=249818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=249818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=249818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}