Greening The Sahara--The Wrong Way

                                      Greening The Sahara --The Wrong Way
                                                  By Joel Carlinsky


There is a project underway in Algeria to green the Sahara Desert . It is attempting to use the Reich cloudbuster to bring rains to the south side of the Atlas Mountain Range. The project is being done by a group based in Berlin , who are fans of Wilhelm Reich and enthusiasts for the promotion of his work.

The organizers of this project are well-intentioned. But they are hopelessly out of their depth when it comes to proper planning and carrying out a cloudbusting project. None of them has any training or qualifications in ecology, or in fact, in any of the biological sciences. They seem to be under the impression that training in physics and engineering constitute qualifications for work in this field.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The most important qualifications for successful work with the cloudbuster are a complete understanding of orgone biophysics and a very extensive knowledge of ecology. The participants in this ill-advised desert-greening project in Algeria lack both of these qualifications and must be regarded as laymen in the field.

The Sahara desert is the largest desert on earth. It has been a desert for only the last 5,000 years or so, and before that, in the period known as the Climatic Optimum, 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, it was a relatively lush and well-watered grassland, including some forested areas and vast wetlands, lakes, and marshes known to modern geologists as the Chad sea, of which Lake Chad is the last shrunken remnant. This wetland area was known to the ancient world as Lake Tritonia , from which the name of Triton, the junior sea god comes.

About 5,350 years ago, the earth intercepted a swarm of highly-charged meteors in space. The barrage of meteors were mostly detonated in the air by huge discharges, bolts of cosmic lightning, which destroyed the incoming meteors in flight. The discharges reduced the net charge of the earth to a fraction of it's former value, and the global climate was significantly altered as a result.

This shift in global circulation patterns, combined with a high concentration of residual DOR from the discharges, caused North Africa to become a desert. Over the last 2,000 years, the original area of desert has been almost doubled by the introduction of goats and other livestock by humans.

More recently, between 1958 and 1963, the French government set off a number of nuclear tests in Southern Algeria . This added to the DOR barrier that blocks moisture from the Gulf of Guinea from traveling northward into the desert. There were droughts in the Sahael region on the southern fringe of the desert at the time, and they have sporadically continued ever since.

There are several different ways in which a cloudbuster could be used to change the desert into a more fertile land. Unfortunately, most of these ways are wrong. In considering how to intervene in a climate situation of long-standing, many factors must be taken into account.

The modern climate regime is one of sparse winter rains from off the North Atlantic reaching Morocco and passing on east over Algeria . The first thing many people would think of in planning a cloudbuster project would be to draw from the North Atlantic in winter to augment the usual seasonal rainfall. This however, would be a serious mistake.

The seasonal winter rains are an artifact of the modern climate regime that has only existed for around 5,000 years. That is an insignificant time in terms of the development of an ecosystem. Most of the native vegetation that still survives in spite of the desertification is still adapted to warm summer rains from the south, and subjecting it to cold wet winters would only add to the stresses upon most native species and drive them farther toward extinction.

In every region where desertification has taken place, there are small areas of greater water availability, called "refugia" by biologists, where native life-forms have managed to hang on, as if patiently waiting for the return of the wetter conditions, so they could spread out and recolonize their former range. These refugia act as seed beds from which the lands which have become deserts will be repopulated with life if the climate ever returns to what it once was. If they are destroyed by cold to which they are not adapted, they will be unable to do that if the ancient climate is ever restored.

It is certainly true that bringing cold winter rains down from the north will cause a greening of the desert, but most of that greening will be invasive, cold-tolerant species humans have imported from Europe over the last 2,000 years, not native species. There will be an increase in biomass, but at the expense of biodiversity. Many more species of native plant life, adapted to the ancient pattern of warm summer rains coming up from the Sahael, will be subjected to more cold and wet than they can handle and will decline and possibly die out.

At the very minimum, for a cloudbusting project to be considered responsible would require a botanical census beforehand, counting the number of plants and the number of different species in a few randomly selected sample acres before, during, and after the project in order to determine what the effects on the biodiversity of the region might be. Without such a preliminary study, it will be impossible to know if some species are being driven to extinction by the changes in climate. No such study by a botanist was commissioned by the organizers of this project in Algeria .

Also, since the current pattern of winter rains from the north is a result of the pathological climate created by the meteor storm, and is maintained by the DOR fields that block the otherwise normal circulation of the atmosphere, to draw from the north at that time of year would only increase the pathological pattern of atmospheric armoring, making it that much harder to eventually reverse when a properly-done cloudbusting project is finally implemented, if one ever is. 

And, of course, drawing from the north in winter would bring the cold, wet weather down across Europe, causing unwanted cold in most of Europe .

So the next thing that would occur to the would-be cloudbuster operator is to draw from the south in the summer, bringing  up the summer monsoon from the Gulf of Guinea across the Sahael to the Sahara . That would avoid the destruction of the local native species of plants, and not subject Europe to an unusually harsh winter. It also would not be reinforcing the current pathological climate pattern, but would be replicating the ancient pattern, therefore helping the atmosphere recover to it's normal behavior.

 At first glance, this would seem the best way to conduct a cloudbusting project in the desert. After all, it would be duplicating the original climate of the area, and what could be wrong with that?

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. A prolonged draw from the south in the summer will bring up summer rains, and the desert will benefit, but the hot, dry, desert air that was formerly over North Africa will move north until it is over Europe . There will be a heat wave and drought in Europe . Then, due to the normal west-to-east motion of the atmosphere, the hot dry air mass will move eastward until it is over Russia , bringing an unprecedented heat wave and drought to Russia .

If such long-distance downstream effects are considered, it become obvious that a summertime draw from the south will not be a good solution to the desert problem in North Africa either.

Both of the above methods have been tried in recent years. And both have caused harm. The ecosystem of North Africa has been subjected to extra stress, native plant species have been decimated, the damaged atmosphere has been subjected to more damage, and the climate of Europe has been disrupted.

Both the above methods are based on mechanistic thinking. The proper way to do a desert-greening project for North Africa would be to concentrate on removal of the DOR blockages that obstruct the inflow of moisture into the region. If those blocks are reduced or eliminated, the movement of moisture will take care of itself. And if the areas of high DOR concentration are broken up and eliminated, there will be no shifting of a hot dry air mass containing a high concentration of DOR from North Africa to Europe, and then on to Russia, as apparently happened this past summer.

But to do that, and to do it correctly, with a minimum of long-distance downstream side-effects, the work would have to be done from the right locations. And the right locations happen to be a long distance away from where the current project is underway.