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posted by martyb on Thursday January 30 2020, @09:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the come-find-out-what-the-buzz-is-all-about dept.

Climate change behind Africa's worst locust invasion in decades

Locusts by the millions are nibbling their way across a large part of Africa in the worst outbreak some places have seen in 70 years. Is this another effect of a changing climate? Yes, researchers say. An unprecedented food security crisis may be the result.

The locusts "reproduce rapidly and, if left unchecked, their current numbers could grow 500 times by June," the United Nations says.

[...] "A typical desert locust swarm can contain up to 150 million locusts per square kilometer," the East African regional body, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, has said. "Swarms migrate with the wind and can cover 62 to 93 miles in a day. An average swarm can destroy as much food crops in a day as is sufficient to feed 2,500 people."

[...] Heavy rains in East Africa made 2019 one of the region's wettest years on record, said Nairobi-based climate scientist Abubakr Salih Babiker. He blamed rapidly warming waters in the Indian Ocean off Africa's eastern coast, which also spawned an unusual number of strong tropical cyclones off Africa last year.

Heavy rainfall and warmer temperatures are favorable conditions for locust breeding and in this case the conditions have become "exceptional," he said.

Even now rainfall continues in some parts of the vast region. The greenery that springs up keeps the locusts fuelled.

So already in the 2020s we have a massive viral pandemic with millions of people facing quarantine, gravity waves hurtling towards earth from the black hole at the center of the galaxy, massive forest fires so large they start their own thunderstorms and thereby "self-reproduce", Betelgeuse about to go supernova, Sol going quieter than it has been in 200 years (which is a harbinger of a little ice age) and now giant locust plagues that threaten to consume all the crops on an entire continent!

Can't wait to see what the rest of this century has up its sleeve!


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @07:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @07:14PM (#951343)

    uhm ah ... one could argue that locust swarms are a way of this planet to "shed" energy.
    the locust eat sunshine energy, that is plants.
    they are born .. errr ... created, mass wise, as tiny speks.
    if they survive, the process of liberating themselfs from the soil (height = 0) and flying into the air, liberates energy in form of not just heat but work: they obviously rise above the original height, doing work against gravity, then feast on more solar ..uhm ..err ... vegetable energy and vigorously move air molecules around (generate heat?).
    once they are too old to chomp their mandibles, they starve and fall back to the ground (height = 0) to become fertilizer.

    now the question is, since we cannot kill all locusts, how to go about this, cooling effect?
    i propose to NOT plant mono-cultures, so they have to flap their wings vigorously to fly far and far distances helping the planet to radiate more energy then it received?
    there's a program in locusts, for sure ... let's use it to cool the planet. ofc the human tummy takes precedence. so there: a extra difficulty for you all scientists to figure out.