• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Cities & Communities
  • Electric Mobility
  • Heat & Power
  • Community Climate Finance
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Cities & Communities
  • Electric Mobility
  • Heat & Power
  • Community Climate Finance
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Cities & Communities
  • Electric Mobility
  • Heat & Power
  • Community Climate Finance
  FEATURED
BREAKING: Don’t Attend COP 28 Unless You’re There to Help, Figueres Tells Oil and Gas September 21, 2023
Thorold Gas Peaker Plant Won’t Be Built After Unanimous City Council Vote September 20, 2023
Indoor Heat Leaves Canadians Unsafe with ‘No Escape’, CBC Investigation Finds September 20, 2023
Agrivoltaics a Win-Win for Farmers, Communities, Solar Developers, and Alberta’s UCP September 20, 2023
‘Beginning of the End’ for Oil and Gas as IEA Predicts Pre-2030 Peak September 19, 2023
Next
Prev

Pollution in the north shrank Lake Chad

June 15, 2013
Reading time: 3 minutes
Primary Author: Tim Radford

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE The bad habits of the locals have been blamed for the decline of Lake Chad in Africa but it was pollution from people far away that caused rain patterns to shift. LONDON, 16 June – American scientists have a new explanation for one of the great ecological disasters of the 1980s. The alarming near-disappearance of Lake Chad – a giant body of water that nourished crops in the Sahel region – was, they say, caused by air pollution: old-fashioned smog and soot from factory chimneys and coal-burning power plants in Europe and America. The initial explanation had been a much simpler one, and pinned the guilt on the locals. Lake Chad, which extended over 25,000 square kilometres in the 1960s, shrank to a 20th of its former area by the end of the last century, all because of overgrazing and too great a demand for water for irrigation, geographers had once argued. The consequences for the local peoples of Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger were devastating, and triggered global concern, especially as the summer rains repeatedly failed and the lake was not seasonally replenished. Another culprit Later, Lake Chad became an awful example of the possible consequences of global warming. In the latest twist in the story, scientists at the University of Washington in the US have pointed to another culprit: the sulphate aerosol. Aerosols pumped from chimneys and exhaust pipes in the developed world scattered in the atmosphere and reflected sunlight back into space, to cool the entire northern hemisphere, the region with the greatest land mass, the highest economic development and the most factory chimneys. In response to a small change in overall conditions the tropical rain belt shifted southwards with a steady decrease in precipitation in the Sahel from the 1950s onward. The lowest ever recorded rainfall in the region was during the early 1980s, “perhaps the most striking precipitation change in the 20th century observational record,” say Yen-Ting Hwang and colleagues in Geophysical Research Letters. In fact, the authors are careful to say this is “in part” an explanation of the drought in the Sahel: complex natural changes have complex causes, and both global climate change and pressure from human population growth remain implicated. Hwang’s study used six decades of continuous data from rain gauges to link the drought to a global shift in tropical rainfall, and then used 26 different climate models to make the link between hemisphere temperatures and the pattern of rainfall. The Sahel was not the only region affected: northern India and parts of South America experienced drier decades, while places at the southern edge of the tropical rain belt, such as north-east Brazil and the African Great Lakes, were wetter than normal. Rain shifts again As clean air legislation passed both in the US and Europe slowly cleared the skies, the northern hemisphere began to warm faster than the southern hemisphere, and the tropical rain belt began to shift north again. A team at the University of California, Berkeley, in April reported in the Journal of Climate, published by the American Meteorological Society, that temperature differences measured over a century coincided with changes in the pattern of tropical rainfall. The largest difference – a drop of about half a degree Celsius in the northern hemisphere in the late 1960s, coincided with a 30-year drought in the Sahel, the growth of the deserts in the Sahara and the failures of the monsoons in India and east Asia. The research is a reminder that climate patterns are sensitive to even very small average shifts in temperature on a very large scale; that what happens in one region can quite dramatically affect conditions in another part of the globe; and that human actions in some of the richest regions of the planet can have cruel consequences for those trying to make a living in the poorest places. Meanwhile, although the rains have returned, Lake Chad is still very much diminished. – Climate News Network

  • The climate news you need. Subscribe now to our engaging new weekly digest.
  • You’ll receive exclusive, never-before-seen-content, distilled and delivered to your inbox every weekend.
  • The Weekender: Succinct, solutions-focused, and designed with the discerning reader in mind.
Subscribe



in Climate News Network

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

moerschy / Pixabay
Biodiversity & Habitat

Planetary Weight Study Shows Humans Taking Most of Earth’s Resources

March 19, 2023
53
U.S. Geological Survey/wikimedia commons
Biodiversity & Habitat

Climate Change Amplifies Risk of ‘Insect Apocalypse’

December 1, 2022
67
Alaa Abd El-Fatah/wikimedia commons
COP Conferences

Rights Abuses, Intrusive Conference App Put Egypt Under Spotlight as COP 27 Host

November 14, 2022
34

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

UN Climate Change/flickr

BREAKING: Don’t Attend COP 28 Unless You’re There to Help, Figueres Tells Oil and Gas

September 21, 2023
203
Jon Sullivan/flickr

Thorold Gas Peaker Plant Won’t Be Built After Unanimous City Council Vote

September 21, 2023
517
Asurnipal/wikimedia commons

Agrivoltaics a Win-Win for Farmers, Communities, Solar Developers, and Alberta’s UCP

September 20, 2023
108
Cullen328/wikimedia commons

Manufactured Housing Could Dent the Affordable Housing Crunch with Energy-Efficient Designs

September 20, 2023
81
Mr Renewables/Wikipedia

Californians Fight for New Community Solar Plan

September 20, 2023
80
Kristoferb/Wikimedia Commons

Canadians Could Save $10.4B, Cut Climate Pollution by Replacing Central Air with Heat Pumps

August 28, 2023
669

Recent Posts

Rewat Wannasuk/Pexels

Virtual Power Plants Could Cut Peak Demand 20%, Save U.S. Grid $10B Per Year

September 20, 2023
66
Jeremy Bezanger/Unsplash

Indoor Heat Leaves Canadians Unsafe with ‘No Escape’, CBC Investigation Finds

September 20, 2023
32
Wesley Fryer/flickr

Smart Thermostats Boost Grid Stability Amid Intense Heat

September 20, 2023
31
Plug'n Drive/Wikimedia Commons

Rural Carshares Ensure EV Push Leaves No One Behind

September 20, 2023
24
/Piqusels

‘Beginning of the End’ for Oil and Gas as IEA Predicts Pre-2030 Peak

September 19, 2023
405
Clean Creatives

‘Turning Point’ for PR Industry as Clean Creatives Targets Fossil Industry Contracts

September 19, 2023
256
Next Post

Acid seas make corals feeble but they survive

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
The Energy Mix - Energy Central
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Cities & Communities
  • Electric Mobility
  • Heat & Power
  • Community Climate Finance

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}