Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in Africa’s Sahel belt, population 20 million, is being overcome by drought and desertification (IPS News Agency). This fine article paints a clear picture of what that means. “As time went by, we noticed that temperatures kept unusually rising and the sun became harsher and the rain disappeared. The crops became stunted while others dried out, as the land started to turn into something like sand.” People have little choice other than migration. Their situation is not unique.
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A comprehensive review of the current hunger crisis in 18 other African countries (Oxfam). “More than 52 million people in 18 countries across southern, eastern and central Africa are facing up to crisis levels of hunger as a result of weather extremes, compounded by poverty and conflict…..We are witnessing millions of already poor people facing extreme food insecurity and exhausting their reserves because of compounding climate shocks that hit already vulnerable communities hardest…..The scale of the drought devastation across southern Africa is staggering.” The report has plenty of details.
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A new study tells us that warmer temperatures projected for South Asia will make conditions much drier than those expressed in prevailing models (IOP Science). The full study is available at this link but there are no outside reviews online that could provide extra judgment, and maybe it suffers by having only two authors. It does make full use of a long list of references as sources of information. If the evaluation is correct the numbers of people who would be seriously affected by water shortages runs well into the hundreds of millions as temperatures rise toward and past 1.5C. I think the study should be given much more attention.
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Australian farmers are also facing extreme and extended drought conditions (The Guardian). The one big difference is that they are better off than many who farm elsewhere in terms of having the means to find new opportunities for personal recovery.
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Three authors, writing for The Conversation, add more insights into the meaning of their study of sea level rise in the last interglacial period. (See the second story in yesterday’s Climate Letter.) They clearly wish to show support for the theory of ice-cliff instability, which is currently highly controversial, thinking it is the best explanation behind the ability for Antarctica to raise sea level by as much as three meters in a single century—something for which they have found sound geological evidence. “When these cliffs get very large, they become unstable and can rapidly collapse…..This collapse increases the discharge of land ice into the ocean. The end result is global sea-level rise. A few models have attempted to include ice-cliff instability, but the results are contentious. Outputs from these models do, however, predict rates of sea-level rise that are intriguingly similar to our newly observed last interglacial data.”
They also note that the warming which caused Antarctica to break down, but not Greenland at the same time, was due to strong solar insolation exclusive to the South Pole, per a regular 22,000 year astroomical cycle. There was no increase in CO2 above 280 ppm at that time, just the same as the high figure for our own pre-industrial era. Today, with much higher global CO2, and while only cruising in the middle of a long solar cycle, we are getting an equivalent amount of increased warming except that now it is spread out over both hemispheres, affecting the ice sheets associated with both poles at the same time, thereby adding an extra element of danger. (There are other complicating factors but this one shows an important fundamental difference.)
Carl