If you look at all the climate models regarding global warming, you see a trend of desertification … but why is this? Just because it’s getting warmer? Are there no other factors?
To a lot of people this question is puzzling because the unspoken question is: but if more heat equals more water evaporating, doesn’t that mean more clouds & rainfall?
To find the answer, let’s look back in the earth’s history a few billion years.
When we look back in the geological record, we find the continents grouping into a supercontinent then parting ways again before regrouping … and at present, we’re on the way towards another regrouping to form a new supercontinent.
At one stage in the past, the world was a lot warmer, and this supercontinent was covered by a global rainforest.
So why rainforest then but desertification now if the temperature is rising? Well … like many other complex systems, our climate has so many factors & variables that it’s hard to say with any certainty, but my educated guesstimate goes something like this:
- As the planet heats, some things mostly absorb energy, while others mostly reflect;
- Clouds are a bit of a combination depending on their type … thinner clouds mostly reflect & refract sunlight, while thicker (taller) clouds reflect from their upper surface, but then absorb what is not reflected within their thick bodies;
- Deep water absorbs a great deal of energy, as do forests;
- While land both absorbs & reflects depending on the density & albedo of materials / minerals present … so something dark like basalt will absorb a great deal & reflect very little, but lighter coloured sand will reflect a lot more, and salt flats reflect an amount similar to snow & ice (very high).
So to recap, solar energy hits the planet, and various proportions of the spectrums of energy are absorbed or reflected depending on what they encounter as they make their way to ground (or into water/water-vapour).
The bit that makes the difference to our big question, is “what does it do when it is absorbed?” … because IF it is reflected back into space, we can ignore that energy as its no longer heating the Earth, thus it is effectively out of the equation.
In simple terms, two main things happen to energy that is absorbed, it is either:
- Re-radiated or spread into the environment (in the evenings and at night) from things like water, rocks, dirt & sand;
- It is converted from the kinetic energy of charged particles & so forth, into stored chemical potential energy by living organisms.
… and herein lies our answer.
DEFORESTATION is thus the difference between getting desertification versus rainfall.
Why? Simple:
- IF a continent is covered in trees, the trees effectively suck that energy out of the air, and convert it to stored chemical potential energy, thus lowering the air temperature and pressure, which are two of the conditions likely to produce rainfall, one of the others being the life-cycle of bacterium which live in the forest, get swept up into the clouds and seed rainfall via their own respiratory processes;
- ELSE IF a continent is NOT covered in trees, THEN it just becomes a big radiator, producing high pressure, dry air, and all the conditions required to reduce rainfall (alongside the lack of the afore mentioned forest bacterium life cycle);
- THEREFORE even if global temperatures were to cause increased evaporation & clouds, those clouds would be squeezed tighter at the equator and pushed outward to the poles, THUS the temperate and subtropical climates (where most of our liveable land masses are) exist in precisely the locations getting drier & hotter.
CONCLUSION:
We must green the deserts … NOT for commercial purposes either, because crops won’t produce what we’re after, what we want is dense forest, with vast biodiversity of species, and thus resilience via complex networks of symbiosis.
FURTHERMORE: it would be highly advisable if we cease all further deforestation, place all roads underground, and begin switching from the construction of above ground habitats, to below ground, tree-houses & “Earth Ships”; because we need to maximise the capacity of human waste water to support the recovery & resilience of forests, and these forests MUST be friendly for other species, so the toll of “road-kill” on their numbers must also cease.
This is the degree of extreme action we need to see in order to have any significant hope of survival as a species, because while we are piss-farting around with unnecessary wars, power struggles, manufactured poverty, modern day slavery etc., there’s an extinction level event on our way which will be too great for us to handle if we do not have a united planet … AND JUST TO BE CLEAR: united DOES NOT MEAN “under one authoritarian ruler” … such a thing is not in the least way united; what it means is that all privilege is put aside so that no one struggles unnecessarily, because the fact is the universe is big, there’s always a bigger event out there, AND we are artificially manufacturing additional potential extinction events such as nuclear war & environmental degradation … the bigger such events are just less frequent in the time-space continuum, thus we talk about 50 year events, 200 year events etc. … so one day there will be an event (man made or otherwise) that no one can solve, because the person who was going to solve it was never born, or lives in poverty, or some other such circumstance preventing them from being the person whom they were meant to be; sure there’s other intelligent people out there, but the events & other variables required to trigger (or develop/implement) the idea that saves our collective bacon from this possible extinction, were only ever likely to happen on a particular timeline for an individual that never occurred.
Ok, now of course the above is a hypothetical argument, but it’s a valid one nonetheless.
- As we increase the amount of unnecessary poverty & struggle, we distract people from their potential;
- As we distract people from their potential we lose their gifts to the world;
- As we lose those gifts, we increase the probability & quantity of consequential further losses.
ALSO: people whom are employed by the status quo, with all the education to invent solutions, tend to agree with that status quo because it supports them, therefore they’re frequently blind to anything caused by the status quo which they’re biased in favour of … and their focus is also effectively corrupted by the vested interests of the profit motive, as are their solutions; they tend to underestimate the problem (because they don’t want to look foolish as a “panic merchant”, they tend to misread the problem (because they don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, including their own), and thus they tend to offer non-solutions which make money but do little more than presenting an image of solving something, but which inevitably is never solved … they just make an ongoing business out of “managing” the problem, which is more profitable.
Here again is the reason for Open Empire, because the system is completely screwed, and needs to be opened up, have its guts ripped out, and over time be entirely dismantled & replaced … in the process we can turn the very concept of “empire” into something anarchic, non-species-biased, and thus shared by all.