Kim. I don't believe they ever thought their climate narrative false. In their hubris they thought they could know God's (or Gaia's) mind and condence it into computer programme. They believed they grasp the power of Nature. One of these days they will get bitten on their arse.

AK, I don't much believe in the conspiracy thing with respect to the green blob, rather it is an Extraordinary Popular Delusion and a Madness of the Crowd. Nevertheless, there are some among the populace who've breathed together quite malignantly in pursuit of money, fame, and/or power with respect to climate, energy, and governance. There are fewer among them who understand the artifice necessary to promote the deluded narrative, but this is not an insignificant few. It is long past time to expose the fictional exaggeration and the exaggerators for what it, and they, is and are..

Perhaps designating all the 'conspirators' as victims of a narrative bigger than they are can elicit the sympathy necessary to pity them adequately. In the meantime, as world class victimizers, what they'll get is ridicule.
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AK 5:52 the science was settled, it was just a case of waiting for the evidence to show up. Gergis 2016 proves it still hasn't.

Having lived/worked/sailed/visited many parts of the Mediterranean coastline, I find it difficult to understand how the great classical civilizations of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Carthage, Phoenicians etc could have developed and fed themselves. They can't today, so I am inclined to guess that the climate may have changed, and I don't think it was manmade CO2. If only we knew why.

Last time Ken Rice was seen at Climate Audit was...circa

https://climateaudit.org/2016/07/21/joelle-gergis-data-torturer/#comment-770054

Still struggling and failing to understand. Now he pops-up here with "What I was trying to understand..." after running away from SteveM and Willis.

Green sand. The land around Naples goes up and down and sometimes has done both. It is unstable because of movements of magma beneath the several volcanoes in the region. At Puzzoli there is a roman marketplace (although it is confused with a temple) with vertical marble columns. Half way up them is a dark band where the marble was penetrated by rock-boring molluscs that only live just below sea level. Their presence indicates the land subsided since Roman times and the market flooded. Later the land rose back to just above sealevel, and around 2000 when I took a pilgrimage to see it, it was beginning to flood again. This famous site was described by Charles Leyll, one of Darwin's friends and author of Principles of Geology that popularized modern concepts of geology. Hence my pilgramage. The place was deserted. The town regularly is evacuated and must represent one of the most unstable places on Earth.

kim. My comments related to climate scientists not the Green Blob in its entirety. I believe there was no initial conspiracy in climate science but once they had something to protect a conspiracy quickly developed, as proven by Climategate. With respect to the GB ii believe it has been convincingly demonstrated that its precursor was a conspiracy originating out of UN agencies. But whether the GB now is a conspiracy, I also doubt, and have read opinions that suggest it doesn't really exist.

golfCharlie. Much of the changes affecting the dryer parts of the Levant can be attributed to human activities - felling forests (probably more like woodlands) and intrroducing goat herds. Goats eat everything including roots, they strip protective vegetation, exposing the bare soil to erosion and to direct heating by the sun, drying it out or exposing bare rock. The land cannot recover. The "Land of Milk and Honey" was probably marketing hype by Moses, but was not a myth. The Israelis have shown that by careful husbanding, parts can be restored. This change can even be observed on GoogleEarth if you look at parts of the border with unchanged arab lands.

AK, I appreciate the destructive power and scavenging nature of goats. But, I am not convinced that goats are the cause of desertification, a consequence yes.

The re-greening of the Sahel has been observed by satellites, and has not resulted from goat extinction.

Petra, in modern day Jordan, not a million miles from the Biblical "Land of Milk and Honey" was not built in the middle of barren desert. Even with clever water management, it is not possible to irrigate crops with non existent water .For Petra to flourish as part of a trade route, it must have been the source of reliable water.

"Sphinx Water Erosion" (see Wikipedia) is an interesting argument between academics in different disciplines, initially involved in trying to date original construction. Climate scientists have subsequently intervened. I have no idea what the truth is, but the erosion patterns were not those of wind blown sand!

golfCharlie. I did not discount climate change, I merely advanced the idea that the climate change that has occurred has been exacerbated to a very high degree by man's activities, especially by goat introduction. Removal of vegetation cover is a surefire way of causing substantial AGW (even on a local level CAGW). Removal of vegetation means the land is heated directly by the sun and is not moderated by the cooling associated with evaporation or evapotranspiraton. Air humidities fall, adversely affecting rainfall. You don't need climate change to cause deserification. Worldwide human activities have caused marginal lands to deteriorate beyond repair.

I have little direct evidence to bring to the table. I spent several years doing research in the Eastern Desert near Safaga on the Egyptian Red Sea. This is an area of hyperaridity. I noted that highly soluble rocks (gypsum) were truncated by latest Pleistocene or early Holocene wadi gravels containing gypsum boulders. These are similar to modern wadi gravels. If the area had suffered more humid episodes, as some people argue, then I think the flat base of the older wadi gravels would have suffered dissolution and been converted to a karst surface. I concluded that the region had not experienced significant climate changes and has remained hyperarid. Whether this conclusion of little climate change can be transferred northwards several hundred miles to the south east of the Mediterranean I cannot say.

golfCharlie. Re Sphinx weathering. I briefly met some of the protagonists in this dispute but they didn't want to know when my then wife and I pointed out that similar weathering affects widened joints in the rocks of the Giza Plateau where the Sphinx "lives". Much of the Sphinx consists of these already existing weathered joints, wheras the carved bits lack such weathering. In my opinion the older dating of the Sphinx interpretation is utter rubbish. It has no bearing on climate change. The plateau shows no evidence of being anything other than arid. Even in arid (or even hyperarid) climates it does rain and, over time, this will cause limestones to weather. In fact the absence of abundant rain means that weathering products remain on the rock surfaces and are not removed as they are in wetter climates, making things very difficult for geologists.

There is a drought orientated study covering the last 300 years for the western end of the Mediterranean, the Iberian peninsula being discussed at NoTricksZome that may interest. Mentions drought studies for Romania and Turkey that suggest extreme drought periods occurring at similar periods as those for Iberia.
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http://notrickszone.com/2016/07/27/new-paper-shows-no-precipitation-trend-on-iberian-peninsula-over-past-300-years/#comments

AK 10:01, I have never doubted the climate changes either! I don't think anyone ever did, until Mann came along with his shonky Hockey Stick, that Gergis has failed to fix.

The ability of goats to survive, where most animals fear to tread, is impressive. Man will exclude goats from terrain more profitably used for other forms of agriculture. Other crops and animals will not survive in terrain where goats can. Between "good" land, and "bad" land, there is "goat" land. If the historic expansion/contraction and movement of goatland, could be measured, it would be a more reliable indicator of historic climate changes, than banal survey data from lonesome pines in the Arctic fringes.

AK 10:19 Sphinx weathering and erosion. I am interested in your views and opinions! I do have some practical experience around weathering and erosion of stone in the built environment. Egyptology was instigated to prove the veracity of Biblical events, and major mistakes were incorporated into the accepted chronology. Climate science has tried to recalibrate history and archaeology to prove the veracity of climate science, and has made major mistakes.

With re