Capturing convection essential for projections of climate change in African dust emission

The summertime Sahara and Sahel are the world’s largest source of airborne mineral dust. Cold-pool outflows from moist convection (‘haboobs’) are a dominant source of summertime uplift but are essentially missing in global models, raising major questions on the reliability of climate projections of dust and dust impacts. Here we use convection-permitting simulations of pan-African climate change, which explicitly capture haboobs, to investigate whether this key limitation of global models affects projections. We show that explicit convection is key to capturing the observed summertime maximum of dust-generating winds, which is missed with parameterised convection. Despite this, future climate changes in dust-generating winds are more sensitive to the effects of explicit convection on the wider meteorology than they are to the haboobs themselves, with model differences in the change in dust-generating winds reaching 60% of current values. The results therefore show the importance of improving convection in climate models for dust projections.

Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans

In this study, we synthesize terrestrial and marine proxy records, spanning the past 620 ky, to decipher pan-African climate variability and its drivers and potential linkages to hominin evolution. We find a tight correlation between moisture availability across Africa to El Niño Southern Ocean oscillation (ENSO) variability, a manifestation of the Walker Circulation, that was most likely driven by changes in Earth’s eccentricity. Our results demonstrate that low-latitude insolation was a prominent driver of pan-African climate change during the Middle to Late Pleistocene. We argue that these low-latitude climate processes governed the dispersion and evolution of vegetation as well as mammals in eastern and western Africa by increasing resource-rich and stable ecotonal settings thought to have been important to early modern humans.

Towards an eco-literate tertiary music education: Notes from a South African context

On 20 September 2019 in Cape Town, as part of the global protests on inaction on climate change, the African Climate Alliance submitted a memorandum of demands to South African government representatives, one of which was ‘the creation of a mandatory climate-education curriculum for South Africa’. This raises the question of how this imperative would be met within a tertiary music education context. Does the justified insistence on decolonised curricula in the period following the national #FeesMustFall protests of 2015–2016 allow space for inclusion of climate education? Given the links between social justice and environmental justice, there is certainly an argument for a focus on eco-literate education. What, then, would this include at South African tertiary music level? There are several (mostly United States based) course syllabi available online which focus mainly on themes and case studies in the field of ecomusicology. Daniel J. Shevock’s work on eco-literate music pedagogy strongly advocates for a place-based approach, but Greg Garrard’s critique would indicate otherwise. This article examines eco-critical and eco-literate theories and their application to music and uses the author’s own teaching context to outline ideas for integrating a more climate-related educational approach.