by Michael Grimm
Bullets instead of food: A child holds bullets picked from the ground, in Rounyn, a village located about 15 km north of Shangil Tobaya, North Darfur. (Source: Reuters)
While aid agencies
struggle to feed millions of hungry people in East Africa, two new
studies have unearthed disturbing new evidence linking climate change
not just to drought but also to civil war.
For the last 20,000 years climate variability in East Africa has followed a pattern strongly influenced by the ENSO
During La Niña, a phase when surface temperatures of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean are cooling down, there is marginal rainfall and stronger winds in East Africa, while the El Niño warm phase leads to weak wind conditions with frequent rain.
Both phases have left marks in the ground. Layers of sediment in Lake Challa in southeastern Kenya, at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, serve as a climate archive.
The samples show that in contrast to the relatively stable and dry conditions during the last ice age some 20,000 years ago, the last 3000 years were warmer and more volatile, characterized by intense droughts and intense rainy periods, says a study published in August 2011 by researchers from Germany, Switzerland, the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium in the journal Science.
"A comparison of temperature measurements in the tropical Pacific over the last 150 years shows a strong correlation between ENSO cycles and the rhythms of droughts and floods in East Africa,” said Christian Wolff from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam in a press release.
So what does this mean for the future? Climate models are not very promising. They show that in a warming world this trend towards an increase in extreme dry and wet phases will continue. And this is what we have seen with widespread flooding in Africa in 2007 after unusually heavy rains followed by the current period of extreme drought.
Some 12.4 million people in the Horn of Africa are now affected by the worst drought in decades. Tens of thousands have already died in a famine.
This catastrophic combination has been seen before.
Changes in climate could have plunged past societies into conflict and decline, suggests a study recently published in the journal Nature. Historians and climate specialists led by Solomon Hsiang from the Columbia University in New York found remarkable links between civil unrest and El Nino patterns, for example in Peru in 1982 and Sudan in 1963, 1976 and 1983. In fact, between 1950 and 2004, one out of every five civil conflicts was influenced by El Niño, they said.
“We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought, “ said Hsiang. But “the most important thing is that this looks at modern times, and it’s done on a global scale.”
Bullets instead of food: A child holds bullets picked from the ground, in Rounyn, a village located about 15 km north of Shangil Tobaya, North Darfur. (Source: Reuters)
For the last 20,000 years climate variability in East Africa has followed a pattern strongly influenced by the ENSO
During La Niña, a phase when surface temperatures of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean are cooling down, there is marginal rainfall and stronger winds in East Africa, while the El Niño warm phase leads to weak wind conditions with frequent rain.
Both phases have left marks in the ground. Layers of sediment in Lake Challa in southeastern Kenya, at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, serve as a climate archive.
The samples show that in contrast to the relatively stable and dry conditions during the last ice age some 20,000 years ago, the last 3000 years were warmer and more volatile, characterized by intense droughts and intense rainy periods, says a study published in August 2011 by researchers from Germany, Switzerland, the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium in the journal Science.
"A comparison of temperature measurements in the tropical Pacific over the last 150 years shows a strong correlation between ENSO cycles and the rhythms of droughts and floods in East Africa,” said Christian Wolff from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam in a press release.
So what does this mean for the future? Climate models are not very promising. They show that in a warming world this trend towards an increase in extreme dry and wet phases will continue. And this is what we have seen with widespread flooding in Africa in 2007 after unusually heavy rains followed by the current period of extreme drought.
Some 12.4 million people in the Horn of Africa are now affected by the worst drought in decades. Tens of thousands have already died in a famine.
This catastrophic combination has been seen before.
Changes in climate could have plunged past societies into conflict and decline, suggests a study recently published in the journal Nature. Historians and climate specialists led by Solomon Hsiang from the Columbia University in New York found remarkable links between civil unrest and El Nino patterns, for example in Peru in 1982 and Sudan in 1963, 1976 and 1983. In fact, between 1950 and 2004, one out of every five civil conflicts was influenced by El Niño, they said.
“We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought, “ said Hsiang. But “the most important thing is that this looks at modern times, and it’s done on a global scale.”
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