More news from the Climate Change studies:

“Researchers from University of Bergen have found that trees, which are a main resource for desert people and their flocks, are in significant decline in the hyper-arid Eastern Desert of Egypt.

In places more than 50% of the mature trees have disappeared between 1965 and 2003, while almost no new trees have been recruited. Despite extreme aridity the main cause of tree mortality seems not to be climate, but commercial charcoal production. This indicates that the traditional and sustainable indigenous resource management, which desert people have developed through millennia, is changing. “

Ironically this desert is dying due to what is commonly called “global warming” at the same time that the east coast of the US is being pounded by a winter ice storm. But the point of what’s happening is that the global climate is being changed – local climates change too – but not always in the same way. Some get hotter, some get colder, some more arid, and some get wetter.

The problem is that by stressing fragile eco-systems like the desert or the tundra, there are cascading and unpredictable effects happening in the biosphere as well.

Read the rest here: The desert is dying