LONDON - Pollution in North America and Europe may have disrupted weather patterns and contributed to severe droughts in poor African countries.
Scientists in Australia and Canada have created a computer model which suggests that industrial pollution from factories and power stations in northern nations affected cloud formation and altered weather patterns in the Sahel region of Africa. During the past 40 years, precipitation in the region that stretches across Africa just south of the Sahara has fallen by between 20 and 50 percent.
"When the researchers included the huge sulphur emissions from the northern hemisphere during the 1980s in the model, the Earth's surface in the north cooled relative to the south, driving the tropical rain belt south and causing droughts in the Sahel," New Scientist magazine said yesterday.
Leon Rotstayn of the CSIRO, Australia's national research agency, and his colleague Ulrike Lohmann of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia who created the computer model said droughts have become less severe during the past few years which could be due to clean air laws in North America and Europe.
"Sulphur emissions increased rapidly until 1975 due to post-war industrialisation, and then started to decline when emission controls were brought in. Maybe that indirectly helped the people in Africa as well," Rotstayn said.
Although climate experts have warned that greenhouse gases are altering the global climate, the magazine said Rotstayn's research is the first to suggest that industry and power generation in the north may have altered regional weather in Africa.:
