As the prospect of a “Godzilla” El Niño event looms like the Four Horsemen over South Africa’s distant summer, leave it to climate research group Zero Carbon Analytics (ZCA) to set the scene.
In suitably dry prose, ZCA describes the approaching event as “a natural climate phenomenon, typically lasting nine to 12 months, that has been linked to crop failures, more frequent wildfires and concurrent droughts, increased flood risk, disruptions to fisheries, elevated civil conflict and increased disease risk in various regions”.
It’s unlikely the Lucky Country will dodge what the “Little Boy” has in store for our weather. Forecasters have raised the likelihood of a catastrophic southern hemisphere summer to 96% — bad news for farmers, dams, livestock, grassland, forests, maize crops and all the humans who put hoe to earth every year and wait for the rains.
In the Western Cape, people are still counting the cost of May’s tempest, which carried away bridges, roads, farms, railway lines, vineyards and mountainsides. But the dams are fuller than they were this time last year, so we’re all right, say the keyboard weather experts as they gather to watch storm surges batter the Kalk Bay harbour, and please don’t say the words “climate change”.
Southern Africa will, if the tropical part of the Pacific Ocean keeps heating the way forecasters believe it is, look like the summer of 2015 all over again. Maize stalks in fields of red dust. Truck convoys of animal feed on the roads. Sheep standing mute on blackened farms. Hunger everywhere.
Africa can expect little, if not zero help from the US, which has turned its back on aid, disease prevention, food relief and all the other trappings of soft power as the evidently self-absorbed administration turns its head inwards, except for that war it started and cannot finish.
The world order is changing fast, and El Niño’s foot is heavy on the accelerator.
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