A Case Study about the Impacts of Climate Change on Africa
This paper considers the problem of determining future climate change in Africa due to human modification of the global atmosphere. natural climate variability in Africa, particularly rainfall, is large. This variability can be manifest regionally as severe droughts on yearly time-scales or as more prolonged desiccation over one or more decades. An increasing difficulty with interpreting the historic climate record is knowing the extent to which these modes of variability are truly natural or are being altered by human activities
The nature of future climate change for Africa is not known with any great confidence. Climate change scenarios have been constructed here in a systematic manner making clear their assumptions and uncertainties, but it remains impossible to attach specific probabilities to them. What is known is that temperatures are likely to continue to rise over most of Africa and that increases in rainfall will be necessary in order to compensate for the loss of moisture from the land surface due to elevated evaporation rates. Whether such increases in rainfall will occur continent-wide seems unlikely. Keep reading…