Tropic of Chaos (9 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 in the Congo Basin and across East Africa minimizes water storage, evaporation, condensation, and regionally generated precipitation. Higher local temperatures mean less snow on Mounts Kilimanjaro, Kenya, and Elgon, thus more sudden runoff, more flooding, and then lower dry-season river levels. “The best we can do to adapt to climate change is maintain our forest cover,” concluded Muhindi.

I was in Kenya in 2008, and when the Short Rains of that year finally arrived, they hit with tremendous force: flash floods left 300,000 people in need of relief aid. Landslides and floods displaced hundreds. Flooded pit latrines fouled many shallow wells, and typhoid was soon killing people. That year packed a one-two punch: drought chased down with violent flooding. By January 2009, 10 million people needed food aid to fend off starvation.
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According to the Kenya Meteorological Department, “aboveaverage temperatures in the Indian Ocean” had caused the heavy rains.
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Were the Kenyan calamities of that year definitively linked to climate change? No. The climate system is too complicated to blame any one weather event on anthropogenic climate change. But the trend lines all head in the same direction: as atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) rises, average temperatures increase and weather patterns become less stable.

Many civilizations have lived in the shadow of their own end-time narratives, and it is tempting to describe climate change as just such a vision, only played out in a secularized aesthetic. But climate change is real, and our understanding of how it is happening is based on very serious and reliable science. And the unraveling of the current climate system seems to be happening faster than scientists had predicted.

It is worth reviewing the facts once more. Researchers from a variety of disciplines—meteorologists, oceanographers, paleontologists, biologists, and so forth—are together arriving at fairly firm conclusions about how our climate works, what its history has been, and where it is probably headed due to our massive emissions of greenhouse gases. They note that Earth's climate is warming, and this will have consequences soon—for most of us,
within our lifetimes.

The outline of the scientific consensus runs as follows: For the last 650,000 years atmospheric levels of CO
₂
—the primary heat-trapping gas in Earth's environment—have hovered between 180 and 300 parts per million (ppm). At no point in the preindustrial era did CO
₂
concentrations go above 300 ppm. By 1959 they had reached 316 ppm and are now at 390 ppm. At current rates, CO
₂
levels will double by mid-century.

Climate scientists believe that any increase in average global temperatures beyond 2°C (35.6°F) above preindustrial levels will lead to dangerous climate change, causing large-scale desertification, crop failure, inundation of coastal cities, widespread extinctions, proliferating disease, and possible social collapse. They fear that beyond the 2°C threshold, climate change could become self-reinforcing due to positive-feedback loops.

Scientists now understand that ecosystems, and Earth's climate as a whole, do not always operate according to a smooth linear logic. Instead, natural systems are prone to rapid and sudden shifts. The population of a species can decline slowly or collapse rapidly, almost at once. Witness the near total disappearance of bat colonies in the northeastern United States due to the white nose fungus or the sudden decline of honeybee populations in recent years. Both problems can hopefully be reversed, but they illustrate how quickly natural systems can break down.

Throughout the climate system there exist dangerous positive-feedback loops and tipping points. A positive-feedback loop is a dynamic in which effects compound, accelerate, or amplify the original cause. Tipping points in the climate system reflect the fact that causes can build up while effects lag. Then, when the effects kick in, they do so all at once, causing the relatively sudden shift from one climate regime to another. The worst-case scenario, though not the most unlikely, would see positive-feedback loops accelerate climate change to a tipping point beyond which the process would be self-propelling and impossible to reverse, no matter what we do.
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Around 125,000 years ago, average global temperature was only about 1°C higher than it is today, but the sea level was fully four to six meters higher. Any heating beyond 2°C will likely cause catastrophic changes, transformations too sudden and radical for civilization to cope with. The 2°C threshold runs throughout the most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and it is the official stabilization target of numerous governments and the European Union.
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The question then becomes, What is the corresponding limit on atmospheric concentrations of CO
₂
? For years it was assumed to be around 450 ppm. To meet this goal, the IPCC recommends that developed countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to about 40 to 90 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. This would require global targets of at least 10 percent reductions in emissions per decade—starting now. Those sorts of emissions reductions have only been associated with economic depressions. Russia's near total economic collapse in the early 1990s saw a 5 percent per annum decline in CO
₂
emissions.
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Calculations by the United Kingdom's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research demonstrate that, without radical mitigation efforts, we are almost inevitably on course to reach atmospheric CO
₂
levels of 450 ppm. Even with drastic emissions reductions over the next 20 years, cumulative atmospheric CO
₂
could easily surpass 450 ppm.
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If that's not grim enough, James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University now believes the tipping point at which climate change becomes a runaway, self-fueling process is closer to 350 ppm. We are already at 390 ppm.
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In terms of adaptation, that would mean we must prepare to deal with a 4°C increase in average global temperatures and the massive social dislocations that will bring.

Across northern Kenya there are various responses to drought and flooding—some more violent than others. In the Turkana, people live amidst the gun culture and raiding cycle. But further east, near the desert outpost of Garissa, despite devastated herds and brutal drought, violence is relatively uncommon.
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To find out more about that equation, I drove the 375 kilometers out to Garissa with an American photojournalist, Dan McCabe, and a Kenyan friend of his named Tim. We reached Garissa as the sun was setting. The town begins at a checkpoint and a narrow bridge over the wide, shallow waters of the river Tana. Its waters rise hundreds of miles away, among the snows, rains, and mist of Mount Kenya. By the time it drains to Garissa, it is the desert's main lifeline.

Guarding the bridge were huge, blue and white, buzzard-like creatures called marabou storks; massive flocks of them perched everywhere. They look like pelicans, have ten-foot wingspans, and do not sing or squawk. The only sound they make comes from the occasional clacking of their huge beaks.

Marabous are “colony breeders,” and they like to live near people. The storks scavenge carrion from the drought-felled cattle and are known to carry bones high into the sky, then drop them onto rocks to break them open and scrape out the marrow. In town, perched on the bare, desiccated acacia trees, the birds seemed to be the mascots of drought. As if to highlight the theme of scarcity even further, it was Ramadan, the month of fasting and nicotine withdrawal; in Garissa most people are ethnic Somali Muslims. Not only was it hard to find beer, but there was no food or coffee available by day.

The next morning we pushed out past the town into the desert. The road soon turned soft and sandy. Again, the flattop acacia trees were all dead and bleached, like standing driftwood, and cast an eerie blue sheen, the empty sky reflecting off the pale wood. Shepherd boys waved us down with their empty plastic jugs hoping we were from an NGO with water.

About fifty kilometers north of Garissa, on the road toward the lawless border with Somalia, we reached Shambary, a Somali village—or, really, a nomadic pastoralist camp that was turning into a village as the herds died and were replaced by aid. The village consisted of little more than a collection of stick-and-burlap huts clustered around a big tree and two small adobe buildings: a one-room schoolhouse and a clinic, both empty for lack of staff. Not far away was the water pan, a football-field-sized pit of dust that was supposed to catch rainwater. The only things keeping these people alive were the occasional relief handouts and a barely functioning borehole well. In the pounding heat, one felt as if the sun itself hated Shambary.

The headman said the rains had not come for two years. His herd had dropped from fifty cows to three. Twenty men had, as he put it, “gone mad and just walked away,” abandoning their families. Some of the other men listening to the interview laughed nervously when he said this.

Interestingly, there had been no violence here. When I asked about this, people attributed the relative peace to Islam. A combination of other factors is, I believe, more important: Proximity to a mostly paved road linking Nairobi and the port of Mombasa allowed aid to reach them and offered avenues of escape for men seeking waged work. Proximity to the Tana River and its thin border of flood plain allowed some to farm. Also, the village had organized a water committee to manage the borehole and hash out who got water, when, and in what amounts, and to raise money to buy diesel for the pump. Perhaps this collective organization helped prevent violence by keeping the community united rather than allowing young men to peel off in small groups to raid.

But the most powerful factor limiting violence, I suspect, is simply the physical barrier of the desert. The dying savanna around Shambary is vast and so dry that transiting stolen cattle across it would be very difficult. Trapped by the pounding heat and sandy wastes, rival clans are essentially quarantined to their boreholes, the banks of the Tana, and the roadside “aid camps” that have formed around food-relief distribution points. These pastoralists were peaceful because they were essentially dropouts, in the process of giving up the cattle-centered nomadic life—raiding and everything else.

Evidence that peace is a by-product of ecological and economic collapse (rather than the pacific teachings of Islam) is found seven hundred kilometers further north, in the small city of Mandera on the Somalia-Kenya border. There, Kenyan Somali pastoralists, also Muslims, are engaged in all-out cattle raiding and a bloody little resource war. Every day brings new reports of clans fighting pitched battles and burning down each other's villages: the Garre clan against the Murulle. Both are attempting to control the overstretched Lulis Dam. The violence has been intense since 2005, punctuated only by occasional punitive military operations and failed peace talks. Over one thousand families have fled the area.
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