If asked to imagine what global warming actually looks like, the majority of people picture a soulless wasteland of dead trees, baked, cracked earth and sand-blasted deserts extending into eternity. However, a growing segment of the scientific world has a vastly different opinion.

According to scientists working at Boston University, deserts such as the Sahara, that vast wilderness I ambitiously dreamt of sand-skiing across at the tender age of 12 years, are more liable to turn green than to expand into surrounding areas.

The reason for this is astonishingly simple as the planet warms up, which it is doing at a frightening pace, the evaporation rate of the oceans increases likewise and this naturally leads to more, rather than less rainfall and this, albeit on an extremely small scale, is already happening. Combined with a noticeable shift in weather patterns around the globe, the result is that places which traditionally get little, if any rainfall have, over the past 15 years or so, slowly been getting a little wetter. True to say that other areas have also become more drought-prone, particularly, or so it seems, overexploited agricultural lands in too many countries to mention.

Yet, satellite images record that at least the southern belt of the Sahara Desert has experienced enhanced vegetation cover during this period, not enough to magically turn it fertile but, given time, this may well happen.

Deserts do not have fixed boundaries at any time; shrinking and growing in relation to how much of the sun's energy reaches earth's surface over a period of thousands of years. Yet initial pointers do indicate that deserts are slowly getting greener.

Over the last 60 years since rainfall measurements began there, the Namib Desert had an average annual rainfall of only 12mm but 80 mm was recorded in 2008 and in the last 10 years dry river beds in the vicinity have suddenly gushed with unexpected floods at a time when day temperatures of 47C exceeded previous records.

The global increase in CO2 pollution, measurements being taken in isolated, undeveloped regions as well as in industrialised zones, clearly show how pollution affects all parts of the planet rather than merely close to where it originated with poisonous black carbon fallout on the once pristine Himalayas being a pivotal example.

This CO2 is just one of the prime instigators of global warming and even in the unlikelihood of the much touted Copenhagen climate protocol being unanimously agreed this December, existing climate damage is not suddenly going to switch into a reverse trend.

Arid deserts being naturally transformed into lands of 'sweetness and honey' will, if it happens, take hundreds if not thousands of years. But, as always, mankind is not averse to giving the situation a helping hand.

Egypt, with its ever increasing population of teeming millions, requires a tremendous increase in agricultural production if its citizens plan to continue to meet even their basic needs, waiting for global warming to green up its deserts is simply not possible and a controversial Egyptian government programme aimed at 'reclaiming' 3.4 million acres of desert is already underway.

This ambitious programme was made possible when radar imaging from space, begun in 1981, revealed that a huge network of reservoirs lay hidden underneath the sands of the Egyptian Sahara and scientists; controversially fast in developing plans to tap in. The extracted water is being utilised to turn selected areas of unproductive sand into fertile agricultural units.

The far sighted government of that country then set about reversing the trend of rural people migrating to overcrowded cities by actually paying them to settle on these newly created farms which are now producing food and cash crops, including citrus fruits and mangoes on a commercial scale.

In Turkmenistan the scenario is somewhat different. Recently, President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov personally took up the shovel to launch the $12 billion 'Golden Age Lake' project which channels water across thousands of kilometres of desert to create a huge inland sea, covering 2,000 sq km, in the Karakum Desert which occupies roughly 80 per cent of this Central Asian country.

This grandiose project, intended to 'make the desert bloom', initially got underway nine years ago with the construction of two canals to transport drainage water from Turkmenistan's huge cotton fields to fill up the new sea. It is  a process which will take many years to make an impression as much of this waste water, heavily polluted with pesticides and chemical fertilisers, is realistically expected to either sink beneath the sands or evaporate and fall as, possibly polluted rain elsewhere.

Having caused global warming through uncontrolled industrialisation and insatiable greed, man is now on the verge of attempting to redesign the natural geological/geophysical life of the planet itself.