It's a finding that shocks no one who knew that climate models have no predictive skill with rainfall, and that a warmer world means higher global precipitation. Plus there's the awkward clue that for the last forty years the arid regions of the world have been getting greener instead of more deserty.

Looks a bit different?
The top map (below) shows the deserts expanding — but that's the old predictions which are based only on "atmospheric data" like temperature and rainfall. The bottom map is the new work which uses soil and vegetation data too. Red means growing deserts. Blue means shrinking.

Remember, all contradictory conclusions are based on expert opinions using worlds best practice and done by Nobel-Prize-winning people. Shame about all the farmers and investors making decisions based on junk models.

The new study is based on modeling too so it is still wrong, but less useless than previous studies.

The hugely different forecasts show how vaporously thin the past doom and gloom was, and how so many headlines were generated out of a banal omission from an inadequate model.