At XR and FFF rallies, speakers like telling outright lies with the aim of trying to get the masses of people to stampede in mass panic and blind anger.
One of these activists in Germany is Carola Rackete, reports Michael Krüger here at Science Skeptical.
Rackete, the award-winning refugee rescuer and sea vessel captain, has found a new field of activity: now she is active for Fridays for Future and XR (the radical climate fighters who block streets and stick to things with superglue, or climb drones at airports) and block streets in Berlin and make speeches there.
Not long ago Ms. Rackete made some astonishing climate claims before an audience in Berlin, as the following video (in German) shows:
But let’s do a fact check.
On the claim Lake Chad and the Sahel are drying
Lake Chad on the southern edge of the Sahara is not drying out as a result of global warming, but is once again growing and greening. Here are satellite pictures and water level data:
Desert regions have also become greener, such as the Sahel on the border with the Sahara, the Fertile Crescent, which stretches across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, and the former region of Carthage in North Africa, which used to be the granary of Rome.
These areas were already green and fertile in the climate optimum of the Holocene directly after the last ice age. From there, agriculture spread to Europe and Northern Europe in the course of the Neolithic revolution.
During the last ice age, the Sahara was a desert. In the period of 9,000-6,000 years before today, we had the warmest time of the Holocene, the sea ice of the Arctic had almost disappeared in summer and large parts of the Sahara were fertile grasslands.
There were large groups of crocodiles and there were even crocodiles where there is desert today. Even today rock paintings of the natives in the today’s desert testify to it.
The rock paintings of the Sahara have been created in North Africa for 12,000 years, at the end of the last ice age. For millions of years, the Sahara was a desert subject to extreme climatic fluctuations and at times turned green again during the warm periods.
3,500 years ago, the desert began to dry out, a process that continues intermittently to this day.
For a good four decades, however, the Sahel has since been greening.
This is shown by various studies which show the greening of the Sahel zone with the help of satellite data since 1982.
In 2018, Venter et al. recorded an eight percent increase in wood vegetation in sub-Saharan Africa over the last three decades using satellite images.
According to Wikipedia, the Sahara covers an area of around 9.2 million square kilometres. Eight percent of this corresponds to more than 700,000 square kilometres, an area that is almost as large as Germany and France put together!
2018, Venter et al.
On the ice-free Arctic
Arctic sea ice reaches its smallest annual extent and area at the end of summer. At the end of summer 2007 and 2012 particularly low values were reached, which caused the climate alarmist press to discuss the topic in the throughout the media.
In 2007 some media and experts even speculated over an ice-free Arctic Ocean by summer 2013. But at the moment the picture is completely different.
Source: Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI)
An ice-free Arctic in summer is therefore still far off. Carola Rackete fancies a world as it pleases her. Yet, the “activists” like claiming they listen to science!
