Somalia is suffering its worst drought in 60 years.

It’s always difficult to tell what might be driving extreme weather events like the Horn of Africa drought. Climate change is often fingered as the culprit, but the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change actually predicted that East Africa would receive more rainfall as temperatures warmed, not less.

Most immediately, the current drought seems connected to severe drying conditions resulting from the La Nina phenomenon that lasted from June of last year to this May in the Pacific Ocean, and which be connected to record-breaking drought in Texas as well. But according to a new study published today in Science, La Nina—and the its warm counterpart El Nino—has affected the climate of faraway East Africa for at least 20,000 years. A group of scientists from Germany, Switzerland, the U.S., the Netherlands and Belgium examined sediments that have built up over thousands of years in Lake Challa, at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya, drilling into the ground—much as climate researchers use ice cores in Greenland or Antarctica to reveals details about the state of the climate in the Earth’s past.

http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/