Increased Human Activities Heating up the Earth, as July Recorded the Hottest Day Ever, Scientists

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Scientists have placed an increase in human activities in the environment at the centre of severe drought and raising temperatures that have seen Kenya and Horn of Africa Nations record a sixth failed rain since 2020.

This comes as the earth recorded the hottest day ever in the month of July with temperatures rising to a high of 63.01 Fahrenheit.

World Meteorological Organisation says of the 30 hottest days on record, 21 occurred in July this year.

Scientists from Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, the US, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom teamed up to assess the extent to which human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the low rainfall that led to drought.

The study reveals that low rainfall events like those observed in the main March-April-May season in Kenya have become about twice as likely due to human activities such as an increase in the emission of greenhouse gases and cutting down of trees.

However, when the short and long rains are combined there is no attributable change, according to the report that was released recently.

“To formally attribute these trends to climate change and to try to quantify its contribution to the drought, we used climate models and looked at similarly low rainfall events over the same region in the model data. We found that the models show similar results to the observations,” said the report.

The study says the ongoing dry condition in the Horn countries which also include Ethiopia, Somalia, Eretria and Djibouti, is now classified as an exceptional drought that has led to major crop and pasture losses and widespread water shortages.

This change in drought severity, says the report, is primarily due to the strong increase in evaporative demand caused by higher temperatures.

“We found that, as a result of human-induced climate change, the combination of low rainfall and high evapotranspiration as unusual as the recent conditions would not have led to drought at all in a 1.2°C cooler world,” the report says.

In the short rains, say the scientists, models where the effect of La Niña is taken into account show that a low rainfall season like the one observed in the previous seasons has become less likely, making the increased precipitation in the short rains attributable to human-induced climate change.

Scientists say climate change has made events like the current drought much stronger and more likely with a conservative estimate indicating that such drier conditions have become about 100 times more likely.

The drier weather conditions, said the report, have impacted negatively on food security, health, and income of pastoralists and households that rely on rain-fed agriculture.

“When rains fail these households are forced to spend their limited assets on buffering losses and damages, and are consequently pushed further into poverty,” said the scientists.

The finding has raised concern about how governments and international agencies are prepared to handle the severity of impacts linked to the long duration of the drought in the future.

As one of the world’s most impoverished regions, the Horn of Africa is home to millions of people facing chronic food and water insecurity, malnutrition, and limited access to basic services such as infrastructure, health care, education, and social welfare.

The study analysed rainfall over regions in the Southern Horn of Africa, for 24 consecutive months, from January 2021 to December 2022 to find whether human-induced climate change was a driver of the low rainfall.