The Greening of the Sahara

Thank you, global warming (h/t Gateway Pundit):

Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.

Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.

Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.

If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.

This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.

The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers).

Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.

The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan.

Whether or not you believe that global warming is man-caused (I don't) or is happening at all (climate change is always happening), we know that there have been periods in which the earth was much warmer than now and that it was in those periods that life flourished in its greatest variety. The doom-and-gloom scenarios portrayed by Al Gore and his disciples simply don't match up with the historical record of a warmer earth.