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Will climate change turn the Sahel green?
[DW] Climate change can be a good thing. At least for the arid Sahel region... North Africa's answer to the Pak tribal areas... in Africa, where rainfall has been increasing as the world warms up. But to avoid dire negative consequences, precautions must be taken now. The Sahel region could go from one of the driest areas in the world to a very wet one in a couple of decades. That is one conclusion reached by a research paper just published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate research (Potsdam-Institut fur Klimafolgenforschung). "What is new is the observation that there are some scenarios where you get not just a little more rain, but substantially more rain, and it may happen quite suddenly," Jacob Schewe, co-author of the new study, told DW. This does not come as a surprise to Emmanuel Oladipo, professor of climatology at the University of Lagos, in Nigeria, who emphasized the high degree of volatility of the climate in the region."What appears to be happening now is that the system is tilting to what happened in the sixties. We are getting more rainfall than what we used to get." Data for the last hundred years, compiled by theJoint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, in Washington, USA, show unusually high rainfall from 1950 to 1970. This was followed by years of drought until 1990. Rainfall then returned to almost the former average, although there is now a high variability annually. Nevertheless, experts like Schewe and Oladipo agree that in the last years, rain intensity has increased. Posted by: trailing wife 2017-07-19 |
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