Chemistry World Blog

If the politicians didn’t already have enough reasons to take the Copenhagen climate summit seriously, then Marshall Burke, from the University of California at Berkeley, has possibly given them one more.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Burke and colleagues suggest that armed conflict in sub-Saharan Africa can be linked to variations in temperature – with substantial increases in conflict during warmer years.

Food, well actually a lack of it, appears to be the reason behind this increase in conflict during warmer years. Bearing in mind that more than two-thirds of countries in sub-Saharan Africa have experienced civil conflict since 1960, doing nothing to reduce mankind’s impact on the world’s climate should be unthinkable.

Still under debate?

Of course there are still those that insist that climate change is not happening, but another paper published in the same journal describes how the glaciers sat atop the Africa’s highest point, Mount Kilimanjaro, are rapidly shrinking at a rate of about 2.5 per cent a year. According to the team, the last 40 years of ice accumulation has actually disappeared completely. Having seen the glaciers first hand this summer they are now so small that they actually look out of place.

— kibo-glacier

Matt Wilkinson