This picture popped up in my newsfeed this month. Lord only knows why but this is what the algorithmic gods of chance thought I would be interested in. As always, when I see these things and I have 10 seconds free I will play the game of ‘find the source data’. Almost every time the source data tells a different story and most times it betrays the polar opposite to the headline graphic or story.

So if this graphic was incorrect and a good proportion of China was not undergoing ‘desertification’ then this would be another monumental lie to add to the errrrr…. monument of lies. This is the source: https://earth.org/what-is-the-great-green-wall-in-china/

As the source data is phrased and obscured with nuance and adjustments, and hard to find (it reminds me of the joke reference we used to try to use in stress reports – from books I have read…) I had to go elsewhere.

You would think that desertification would be easy to spot from aerial photographs – deserts consist of sand, non deserts consist of ‘not sand’. A landscape undergoing desertification should therefore consist of part sand and part ‘not sand’ (apologies for my simple topographical theories but I was brought up when men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. HT Douglas Adams), It follows that a landscape undergoing reverse desertification would also consist of sand and ‘not sand’ but I will give the authors of this report the benefit of the doubt and any land that I found to be trans-desert I would assume to be undergoing the change in line with the assertion of document.

Armed with my V1.0 Human Eyeball and my beta test wetware topographic recognition algorithm applicator (brain) and the excellent aerial photography library that is google earth/maps I took my first pass at an analysis of the hypothesis of the paper reference above.

Imagine my surprise when every area that I checked that was purported to be in the midst of a desertification crisis turned out to be farm land. Not only that, to my largely untrained cranial cellular learning unit a lot of the land in question looked like rice paddies. After querying my offline mobile biological relational database I discovered that rice paddies are one of the dampest things known to man, woman and men who dress as women and still call themselves Ken.

This is an image from one of the regions undergoing desertification

And here is another one

I came to the shocking conclusion that a rice paddy is not a desert and it is not likely to be one soon.

I checked the average yearly precipitation in China, and this is the first reference that popped up: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/precipitation

The powers that be are mystified why there is a steady and significant ongoing erosion of trust in the institutions that purport to represent us. It is clear that they don’t read their own publications and that there is not the most cursory checking for accuracy before these things are ejected in our direction from the data sphincters of our rulers. If an engineer who reports to me presents a piece of work directly opposed to reality in this way I would fire them on the spot.

Of course I am making the assumption that this type of document is a product of extreme yet innocent incompetence. It is easy to make a presumption of the intent to mislead, or lie as we call it in the real world. All the errors are constantly and consistently in the same direction which, I guess, could be an invisible, metaphysical force bending the incompetence of thousands of independent idiots all in one direction. Or could it be that they are mid-wits who are taking money for lying and using the internal justification of being part of a moral cause.

In the end, the reasons do not matter. Any data issued by any official body must be assumed to be incorrect. By that I mean you have to assume that it is not just erroneous but it is likely to be diametrically opposed to the truth and the opposite of the headline summary is more probable.

If you take this inverse approach you can restore reliability and integrity to the output of these government bodies. You just have to take the polar opposite to be true – give it a go and let me know how you make out.