Scientists Link Somalia Famine To Global Warming
Somalia, East Africa – As millions of people struggle to survive a famine in East Africa, it’s hard not to ask whether anyone saw this disaster coming. Chris Funk, one of the leading researchers of rainfall in the region, would answer yes.
As a climate scientist based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Funk is part of a team of researchers who studies weather in East Africa, where the lack of rain this year has caused tens of thousands of people to die, most of them children.
He said he thinks of himself as a “drought detective,” an analogy that captures the clue-gathering aspect of his work, if not the scale of the destruction he deals with. In more straightforward terms, he collects information about the climate from a variety of sources and uses it to try to identify the causes of droughts and make predictions about where and how droughts will strike in the future.
Some detective. The article below is from 1935, and took me almost half a minute to find.
The. country is financially poor. Practically the whole of its capital at present consists of stock, and periodically nearly one-third of this capital- is lost through drought
Past drought relief in that region has lead to the current situation. How many charities are there whose main purpose is to help the needy in those countries have larger families. The country has been discouraged form ever being self sufficient just like a lot of citizens of this country.
The entire region is a powder keg and it appears the fuse was lit hundreds of years ago. It is no longer a matter of if but when and it is likely when is now!
Thanks Barry for bringing peace to the Middle East! In the last three years it has probably been set back one hundred years!
The climate detective appears to be beating his own drum just like the rest of the climatology genre. They give an amazing performance with their smoke and mirrors but no substance!
The Horn of Africa has always been a miserable place for human beans.
First, there are too many (even at their pathetic subsistance-level existence); second, governments are typically kleptocracies, despotic, and prone to tribal/religious factions that routinely kill “the others”; and third, they have never learned suitable agriculture.
No amount of Sally Struthers “Save the Children” campaigns will ever solve these problems. Islam is totally fatalistic (“Allah’s will”), so even the miserable wretches see no stake in trying to fix matters.
Sad, sad.
Easy to be a post facto person CNBC is full of such experts.
Even armchair detective Nero Wolfe had his Archie Goodwin to go out and actually look at the crime scene and talk to people instead of sitting in posh Santa Barbara, surf the Internet and excrete press blurbs.
As far as I remember there was always famine, drought and crop failure in the Horn of Africa. What I’ve been worrying about now is famine is Lisbon.
He was previously employed as a pet detective…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNk-kD2MTDo