Climate change has saved hundreds of thousands of Africans from extreme poverty, starvation and premature death, a study from Arizona State University has confirmed.

The study shows that the West African Sahel – part of the semiarid strip just south of the Sahara desert, which spans the African continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – has been steadily “regreening” since the severe droughts of the 1970s and 1980s which killed more than 100,000 people.

Among the reasons for the “regreening” are increased rainfall, the beneficial effects of increased atmospheric CO2 on plant growth and the ingenuity of farmers (“community-led conservation efforts) in this harsh, marginal region.

Skeptics have long been aware of these beneficial side effects of “global warming” – see, for example, this report from 2011 by the Global Warming Policy Foundation called The Sahel Is Greening.

But alarmists have fiercely resisted this good news because it so flies in the face of their doomsday narrative that “climate change” is making everything worse, in third world regions like sub-Saharan Africa especially, and that human beings are quite incapable of adapting to cope with it.

That stuck-vampire screeching you can hear in the background comes from the Soros-funded climate alarmist attack-dog website DeSmog. After The Sahel Is Greening report, it hurried out a furious, pseudo-erudite rebuttal drawing on all its favourite parti-pris sources.

It quoted a briefing paper by one of its greenie chums suggesting that ‘any greening of the Sahel and Sahara in the near future will eventually be reversed.‘

This led to its deliciously petulant conclusion: “The greening is unreliable. It is thus hardly an encouraging example of a ‘positive impact’ from global warming.”

In other words: ignore the good things that have definitely happened, and concentrate on the bad things that might theoretically happen if the scary computer models turn out to be accurate.

Aren’t they so cute, those greenie alarmists?