Local Archeology in Kenya colony.

Volume: VI

The beginning of time? Evidence for catastrophic drought in Baringo in the early nineteenth century

New developments in the collection of palaeo-data over the past two decades have transformed our understanding of climate and environmental history in eastern Africa. This article utilises instrumental and proxy evidence of historical lake-level fluctuations from Baringo and Bogoria, along with other Rift Valley lakes, to document the timing and magnitude of hydroclimate variability at decadal to century time scales since 1750. These data allow us to construct a record of past climate variation not only for the Baringo basin proper, but also across a sizable portion of central and northern Kenya. This record is then set alongside historical evidence, from oral histories gathered amongst the peoples of northern Kenya and the Rift Valley and from contemporary observations recorded by travellers through the region, to offer a reinterpretation of human activity and its relationship to environmental history in the nineteenth century. The results reveal strong evidence of a catastrophic drought in the early nineteenth century, the effects of which radically alters our historical understanding of the character of settlement, mobility and identity within the Baringo–Bogoria basin

The impacts of climate change across the globe: a multi-sectoral assessment

The overall global-scale consequences of climate change are dependent on the distribution of impacts across regions, and there are multiple dimensions to these impacts.This paper presents a global assessment of the potential impacts of climate change across several sectors, using a harmonised set of impacts models forced by the same climate and socio-economic scenarios. Indicators of impact cover the water resources, river and coastal flooding, agriculture, natural environment and built environment sectors. Impacts are assessed under four SRES socio-economic and emissions scenarios, and the effects of uncertainty in the projected pattern of climate change are incorporated by constructing climate scenarios from 21 global climate models. There is considerable uncertainty in projected regional impacts across the climate model scenarios, and coherent assessments of impacts across sectors and regions therefore must be based on each model pattern separately; using ensemble means, for example, reduces variability between sectors and indicators. An example narrative assessment is presented in the paper. Under this narrative approximately 1 billion people would be exposed to increased water resources stress, around 450 million people exposed to increased river flooding, and 1.3 million extra people would be flooded in coastal floods each year. Crop productivity would fall in most regions, and residential energy demands would be reduced in most regions because reduced heating demands would offset higher cooling demands. Most of the global impacts on water stress and flooding would be in Asia, but the proportional impacts in the Middle East North Africa region would be larger. By 2050 there are emerging differences in impact between different emissions and socio-economic scenarios even though the changes in temperature and sea level are similar, and these differences are greater in 2080. However, for all the indicators, the range in projected impacts between different climate models is considerably greater than the range between emissions and socio-economic scenarios

Sexual Differences in Chimpanzee Sociality

Scientists usually attribute sexual differences in sociality to sex-specific dispersal patterns and the availability of kin within the social group. In most primates, the dispersing sex, which has fewer kin around, is the less social sex. Chimpanzees fit well into the pattern, with highly social philopatric males and generally solitary dispersing females. However, researchers in West Africa have long suggested that female chimpanzees can be highly social. We investigated whether chimpanzees in the Taï Forest (Côte d’Ivoire) exhibit the expected sexual differences in 3 social parameters: dyadic association, party composition, and grooming interactions. Though we found a significant sexual difference in each of the 3 parameters, with males being more social than females, the actual values do not reveal striking differences between the sexes and do not support the notion of female chimpanzees as asocial: females had dyadic association indices comparable to mixed-sex dyads, spent ca. 82% of their time together with other adult chimpanzees, and had a comparable number of grooming partners. Further, female associations can be among the strongest bonds within the community, indicating that both sexes can have strongly favored association partners. The findings are in contrast to reports on East African chimpanzees, the females of which are mainly solitary and rarely interact with other females. Our results suggest that researchers cannot generally regard chimpanzee females as asocial and need to redefine models deriving patterns of sociality from dispersal patterns to integrate the possibility of high female sociality in male philopatric systems

Implications of improved representations of plant respiration in a changing climate

Land-atmosphere exchanges influence atmospheric CO2. Emphasis has been on describing photosynthetic CO2 uptake, but less on respiration losses. New global datasets describe upper canopy dark respiration (Rd) and temperature dependencies. This allows characterisation of baseline Rd, instantaneous temperature responses and longer-term thermal acclimation effects. Here we show the global implications of these parameterisations with a global gridded land model. This model aggregates Rd to whole-plant respiration Rp, driven with meteorological forcings spanning uncertainty across climate change models. For pre-industrial estimates, new baseline Rd increases Rp and especially in the tropics. Compared to new baseline, revised instantaneous response decreases Rp for mid-latitudes, while acclimation lowers this for the tropics with increases elsewhere. Under global warming, new Rd estimates amplify modelled respiration increases, although partially lowered by acclimation. Future measurements will refine how Rd aggregates to whole-plant respiration. Our analysis suggests Rp could be around 30% higher than existing estimates

Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective

Attribution of extreme events is a challenging science and one that is currently undergoing considerable evolution. In this paper are 19 analyses by 18 different research groups, often using quite different methodologies, of 12 extreme events that occurred in 2012. In addition to investigating the causes of these extreme events, the multiple analyses of four of the events, the high temperatures in the United States, the record low levels of Arctic sea ice, and the heavy rain in northern Europe and eastern Australia, provide an opportunity to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of the various methodologies. The differences also provide insights into the structural uncertainty of event attribution, that is, the uncertainty that arises directly from the differences in analysis methodology. In these cases, there was considerable agreement between the different assessments of the same event. However, different events had very different causes. Approximately half the analyses found some evidence that anthropogenically caused climate change was a contributing factor to the extreme event examined, though the effects of natural fluctuations of weather and climate on the evolution of many of the extreme events played key roles as well.Peer Reviewe