[A-List] Westâs Pollution âLed to African Droughts

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is from:  http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2007/12/13/past-the-tipping-point/#comments



âWestâs Pollution âLed to African Droughtsââ

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2042856.stm 

Want to raise your blood pressure? Read this article. There is a big pile of evidence now that the Sahel famines that ravaged Ethiopia and the Sudan in the 1970s and 1980s (the source of those images of famished children that became a stereotype of Africa) were largely caused by sulfur dioxide from factories and power plants in Europe and the U.S.

If anyone is interested, here are links to two scientific papers providing evidence:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/50/17891?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=simulation+sahel+drought&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT 
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006â/2006GL026067.shtml 

If yields from rainfed agriculture do fall by 50% in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia and Latin America by 2030 or so, as the IPCC projections say is quite possible even with moderate emissions cuts, people are going to be talking about a very different kind of genocide in the coming decades.