Friday, April 2

A chance of Ethiopia's return to greatness but a threat from the Congo Basin could destroy it

 John Batchelor of the New John Batchelor Show at CBS Audio Network and Gregory Copley, Editor and Publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, in discussion last night about "Fragile Egypt and the Red Sea Wars of Somalia, Ethiopia, Tigray and Eritrea" (Audioboom free podcast). 

Gregory outlines the war situation and then explains that Ethiopia and Eritrea are talking about reunification; that is, the rump of Ethiopia and Eritrea rejoined. If this happens some of the Middle East's biggest problems will be resolved and Ethiopia will restore to a greatness it hasn't seen since the days of Emperor Haile Selassie.  

I hate to cast a pall over such hopeful news but I'm still in shock from revelations that relate to the Biotic Pump theory. With regard to Ethiopia I'll return to the June 2020 Science Magazine report I published March 31 headlined, "A controversial Russian theory claims forests don’t just make rain—they make wind:"

 [...]

Two years ago, at a meeting of the United Nations Forum on Forests, a high-level policy group on which all governments sit, David Ellison, a land researcher at the University of Bern, presented a case in point: a study showing that as much as 40% of the total rainfall in the Ethiopian highlands, the main source of the Nile, is provided by moisture recycled from the forests of the Congo Basin.
Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia are negotiating a long-overdue deal on sharing the waters of the Nile. But such an agreement would be worthless if deforestation in the Congo Basin, far from those three nations, dries up the moisture source, Ellison suggested.

“Interactions between forests and water have been almost entirely ignored in the management of global freshwater resources.”

The biotic pump would raise the stakes even further, with its suggestion that forest loss alters not just moisture sources, but also wind patterns. The theory, if correct, would have “crucial implications for planetary air circulation patterns,” Ellison warns, especially those that take moist air inland to continental interiors.
[...]

I'll interject that the Russian government wasted precious years ignoring the Biotic Pump theory so while the theoretical physicists who proposed it are Russian, it's a grim irony that the Science Magazine editor termed the theory Russian. Well the government has finally awakened from its slumber, we learn from the Science Magazine report.

The question with regards to Gregory's report, and Ethiopia's fate, is whether governments in the Congo Basin region will also awaken. They make quite a long list. From Wikipedia's article:

Congo is a traditional name for the equatorial Middle Africa that lies between the Gulf of Guinea and the African Great Lakes. It contains some of the largest tropical rainforests in the world.

 Countries wholly or partially in the Congo region:

I understand from Gregory's discussion that Ethiopia's government has a lot on its plate but I'd say they need to emphasize to Congo governments of a gravest danger that might not be fully apparent to them at this time, or one that they've pushed to the bottom of the list in favor of 'development' and 'modernization' projects. This is not about modernization. This is life or death.  

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