Scientists said that Sugar can be completely “green” in a hundred years
Margin and arid regions of the Sahara can in the next hundred years go green and turn into a Savannah in the result of the dramatic increase in rainfall associated with global warming.
“Global warming could really cause a radical restructuring of the climate. In most regions of the world it causes drought and reduce crop yields, but in the dry Sahel, on the edge of the Sahara, on the contrary, it will improve the situation with access to water and make it suitable for livestock and agriculture,” — said Jacob schewe (Schewe Jacob) from the Institute for climate research in Potsdam (Germany).
The Sahara desert was not always covered with sand. In the relatively recent past 10 thousand years, and about 30-50 thousand years ago — it was a gigantic green plain, covered with herbaceous plants and shrubs. Green Sugar, as do anthropologists, helped our ancestors to leave Africa and spread across the Earth, RIA Novosti reported.
Over the past few million years, it tells Sheva, Sugar several times was green and turned again into the wilderness, changing the shape together with fluctuations in the Earth’s climate, as generated by fluctuations in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and various geological processes.
Today the climate is changing as fast as in the days when Sugar turned into savanna or desert, what made Sheva and his colleague Anders Levermann (Anders Levermann) to check how it will look in the desert, and its southern margin, the so-called Sahel, in the next hundred years.
To do this, scientists have created 30 different climate models that took into account the change in the cycle of currents in the ocean and winds in the atmosphere over Africa with further increase in average temperatures.
About a third of the models shows that the Sugar will get to 40-300% more precipitation by the year 2100, and the increase occurs almost instantly, literally in five years or less after the transition of the climate system after a certain temperature threshold. As a result, the territory of Chad, Niger, Mauritania, Mali and many other desert countries of Africa is covered by savannas or jungle and will receive as much precipitation as sub-Saharan Africa.
The reason for the changes is global warming, which will affect the nature of the movement of the monsoons off the coast of Africa and move them to the side of the Sahel in particular, and all sugars in General. In addition, rising temperatures will cause more rapid evaporation of the waters of the Atlantic, which will strengthen the monsoons and force them to carry more moisture to the side of the continent. This, in turn, will increase the difference in temperatures between land and ocean and force of the wind to move faster and carry more water on the land.
Similar scenarios in several models, as noted by Sheva and Levermann, saying that Sugar really can go green in the current century, if the growth temperatures of the air and waters of the oceans will not stop. These changes, although it will be favorable, will affect the lives of more than 100 million people living in the Sahel and the Sahara, therefore, as emphasized by the climate scientists, the authorities of the countries of these regions should be ready for such a drastic change.
“We don’t yet know what exactly will be the consequences of this event, it goes far beyond our research. On the other hand, imagine the green Sahel and green the Sahara. The sheer scale of such changes is amazing, and this region of Africa will be the first point on the Earth where such changes will occur very soon,” — concludes Levermann.
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