With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

TROPICAL HEAT
THE FALL
The end of Africa's golden age
If there was a golden age for humans on Earth—a Garden of Eden that
flowed with milk and honey—then it was the high point of the Holocene, the
era that followed the end of the last ice age. From around 8,000 to around
5,500 years ago, the world was as warm as it is today, but there appear to
have been few strong hurricanes and few disruptive El Ninos; and it was
certainly a world in which the regions occupied today by great deserts in Asia,
the Americas, and especially Africa were much wetter than they are now.
Optimists suggest that such conditions might await us in a greenhouse world.
As we shall see, there are celestial reasons why that might not happen. But
the Holocene era, and its abrupt end, may still offer important lessons about
our future climate in the twenty-first century.
No place on Earth exemplifies the fall from this climatically blessed state
better than the Sahara. The world's largest desert was not always so arid.
Where seas of sand now shimmer in the sun, there were once vast lakes,
swamps, and rivers. Lake Chad, which today covers a paltry few hundred
square miles, was then a vast inland sea, dubbed Lake Megachad by