Slashdot Mirror
Northern Hemisphere Pollution a Cause of '80s Africa Drought
vinces99 writes "Decades of drought in central Africa reached their worst point in the 1980s, causing Lake Chad, a shallow lake used to water crops in neighboring countries, to almost dry out completely. The shrinking lake and prolonged drought were initially blamed on overgrazing and bad agricultural practices. More recently, Lake Chad became an example of global warming. But new University of Washington research shows the drought was caused at least in part by Northern Hemisphere air pollution. Particles from coal-burning factories in the United States and Europe during the 1960s, '70s and '80s cooled the entire Northern Hemisphere, shifting tropical rain bands south. That meant that rains no longer reached the Sahel region, a band that spans the African continent just below the Sahara desert."
The cooling is the warning, obviously. Cooling is warming, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, Comrade!
Coriolis effect. Next FUD!
And personally I'm sick and tired of Americans pretending that their fucking awful country isn't responsible for the shitty state this world is in. 70 years of fucking with other people's shit, America. 70 years, America, of really not giving a fuck about what's yours and what not yours. 70 years of acting like you own the fucking world, America. 70 years of bullying other countries to do it your way, America. You are totally and utterly responsible for this fucked up mess, America. If you had minded your own fucking business, kept your ignorant fucking noses out of everyone else's fucking business, and just basically pissed the fuck off, the world would not be in such a shitty fucking state. Fuck you, America.
See, the way this works is: (1) take a large collection of randomly varying measurements, loosely and intuitively related to climate, (2) select the subset that correlates vaguely with some aspect of human behavior or economics you are ideologically opposed to, (3) write a paper about how the behavior causes the measurements and proclaim that it is a statistically and scientifically proven fact that one causes the other.