For the next few weeks, I’ll post a daily #RegenesisFact: an astonishing thing I learnt while researching the book. Here’s #1.
Up to 40% of the rain in parts of East Africa seems to be caused by farmers watering their fields in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, 4000-6000 km away.🧵
Up to 40% of the rain in parts of East Africa seems to be caused by farmers watering their fields in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, 4000-6000 km away.🧵
When farmers pump water out of a river or the ground, then spread it across their fields, they greatly increase its surface area. Evaporation and transpiration from their crop plants cause a vast release of water vapour.
From Feb to April, the vapour released from the irrigated fields is picked up by the prevailing winds, blowing SW across the Arabian Sea. After travelling 000s of kilometres, this air hits the coast of Africa, rises and cools. The vapour condenses, and some of it falls as rain.
This extra rainfall might now be crucial to the survival of farmers and herders in arid parts of East Africa. The water vapour also reduces temperatures by about half a degree, through evaporation and cloud cover.
Source: Philipp de Vrese, Stefan Hagemann and Martin Claussen, 2016. Asian irrigation, African rain: Remote impacts of irrigation. Geophysical Research Letters, volume 43, issue 8, pp. 3737-3745. doi.org/10.1002/2016GL…
Sorry the rest of the thread took so long to post: wifi failure on the train.
Oh blimey, I've seen some of the responses to this thread. Talk about hostility to knowledge!
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