Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [26]
Delivering emergency food can take up to six months. If famine is not anticipated well in advance, even a rapid and robust response will come too late, and thousands may die. The Meteorological Office’s most important mission is to detect early warning signs so that the famine-response system—including local administrators, the aid agencies, and transport companies—can prepare. Even subtle indications of late rains or sudden floods can trigger food-security early-warning and mitigation procedures. The gears of the mighty international aid industry will begin to turn—as fast as they can, but still rather slowly.
Life, Death, and Clouds
When Kenya’s climate follows a normal pattern, most of the country has two rainy seasons, or bimodal rainfall. The first season running from March to May is known as the “Long Rains”; then, from October to December come the “Short Rains.”
The planet’s climate system is extremely complex and interconnected, but if a single force could be said to rule East Africa’s weather patterns, it would be the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). In simple terms the ITCZ is a belt of high humidity, low pressure, and calm winds that girds the equatorial latitudes of the planet. It is produced by the collision of the northeast and southeast trade winds—masses of warm, moist tropical air—both of which move toward the equator. When they collide, the horizontal airflows give way to vertical rising air.2 The wet, warm air rises to form a belt of clouds that varies from about twenty to two hundred miles in width: it tends to move more over the landmass of Africa and narrow in the Americas and across the Pacific. These clouds produce rain.3
The point of maximum condensation and precipitation within the ITCZ—the zone’s core cloud belt—follows the path of the overhead sun. When directly overhead, the sun produces the maximum amount of heat on the ground below. That means more warm air rising, carrying more evaporated water and thus producing more condensation and precipitation.
That core belt of clouds oscillates north and south across the equator, following the sun’s annual transit from the Tropic of Cancer—which lies at 23.5 degrees north and is the northernmost latitude at which the sun appears directly overhead—down across the equator, to the Tropic of Capricorn—lying at 23.5 degrees south, which is, conversely, the southernmost latitude at which the sun appears directly overhead. As the sun moves, it pulls the ITCZ’s center of precipitation with it.4 On the ground in Kenya, this oscillation produces the two rainy seasons. But as average global surface temperatures rise, the ITCZ is falling out of rhythm.
“Key to it all,” explained Muhindi, hunched in front of one of the bulky old PCs, “is the Pacific. The Pacific is the mother of all oceans, and the other oceans, the children, obey her signals. When the Pacific warms and there is an El Niño effect off Peru, the monsoon and trade winds in the Indian Ocean increase, and there is strong wind, more rain, and flooding here in East Africa. With La Niña, the ocean off Peru cools, the winds weaken, and less water reaches East Africa, and we tend to have drought.”
Though Kenya is suffering more droughts in recent decades, it is actually receiving greater amounts of precipitation. But the rainfall is arriving in sudden bursts, massive shocks in which the rain falls hard and all at once rather than gradually over a season. This brings flooding that strips away topsoil, followed by drought. “We see it here from the weather station reports,” explained Muhindi. “Extreme weather events are more frequent, like the severe 1997–1998 floods and the 1999–2000 drought.”5 In short, the clockwork rains upon which Kenyan society depends are out of sync.
A bevy of local factors also shape Kenyan weather, among them deforestation. Logging of forests