Dust Storms...

This story is pretty interesting to me. At first glance, you probably said, "so there was a dust storm in Karthoum, who cares?"

It isn't interesting in that way. What is interesting is what causes the storm. You see, everyone out there is getting all upset and worked up over global warming. However, GW isn't the biggest environmental problem out there.

A bigger one is deforestation and over farming. You see, when you cut all the trees down and over farm land, what you end up with is land that won't grow anything. Over farming is quite easy, you just farm the same crops over and over. Eventually the chemicals required for those crops are depleted, and the crop won't grow. This is why farmers rotate crops.

Much of Africa was forested, but is now desert. What does deforestation cause? Well, other than salinization of land (because the plants aren't there to absorb water) and erosion (which can be severe enough to cause the water table to get deeper)... Dust storms! And they take all the soil, much of which is still good for some purposes and can be farmed if the right crops and plants are planted and allowed to rebuild depleted chemicals, and blows the soil into the ocean. When that happens, it is very hard to get the soil back. One major example of this outside Africa is Iceland, which used to be forested and lush looking, but because of a very thin layer of top soil, over farming and grazing, much of the top soil blew off, causing massive erosion and the inhospitable land we see now. The Icelanders are now very careful with their land.

Over farming, deforestation and over grazing are happening all over. If you are interested in reading more, check out Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed".