Friday, December 01, 2006

Africa's Misery

The Stern report suggests that global warming will hit Africa the hardest, and that we must spend billion of dollars to stop the temperature rising 1 or two degrees instead of, for example, spening billions of dollars on education, clean water, and disease control.

But never mind, according to this article,

Although the 1990s were reported to be the warmest decade of the past millennium, this was not reflected in an unusual increase in the numbers and magnitudes of exceptional hydrological events in South Africa. More recently, the 2005 global temperatures were proclaimed to be higher than any in the recent geological past. Yet again, no exceptional rainfall, river flows, floods or droughts occurred during the year.

neither South African climatologists, nor their overseas counterparts, have produced evidence that links increased carbon dioxide emissions to South African rainfall patterns

and records show a significant 21-year periodicity in the South African annual rainfall and river flow records that is synchronous with solar activity.

As their natural water consumption increases, more focus is put on Africa's energy-consuming seawater desalination of which only coal power is the most econimical to run.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The changing rainfall patterns are theoretically well motivated. It would be unwise to question that just because it is currently difficult to verify from the statistcs.

Most of the warming caused by CO_2 emissions has yet to happen, we only have available the statistics up to now which includes a temperature rise of only 0.6 °C.

Anonymous said...

A "theoretically well-motivated" rise of more than 0.6C should already have been observed, and that "observed" increase of 0.6C is widely known to be an overestimate.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps widely known in the climate change skeptics community, just like Darwinian Evolution is "widely known" to be false in the creationist community :)

Anonymous said...

Neatly Orwellian, and total non-sense. A pre-programmed response.

(On the other hand, if you're being tongue on cheek, touche.)

Jonathan Lowe said...

agreed kevin, that last post count iblis was a waste of time reading.