From Climate Scepticism

By Mark Hodgson

Unlocking history

It’s almost three weeks now since the Guardian tried to blame Malawi’s weather-related problems on climate change, in an article headed “‘Without water nothing can exist’: the Malawians repeatedly displaced by drought”. I’m a bit late to this party, but it’s a subject I want to explore, since the Guardian approach here is very familiar – its modus operandi, one might say. I have commented on this before, with regard to similar climate scare stories – see, e.g. The Gambia Gambit; Niger Negatives; Volte-Face; and The Cancun Con.

In each of those cases the Guardian tried to put the blame for problems with multifarious causes fairly and squarely on climate change (or, as the Guardian always prefers to put it, the “climate crisis”). In each of those cases, I suggested, this wasn’t an appropriate conclusion. And now we find the same tired old trope being trotted out by the Guardian with regard to Malawi.

Millions of rural Malawians, it tells us, are “struggling with increasingly unpredictable rainfall and droughts made more ferocious by the climate crisis”. It goes on to say that Malawi’s poverty (according to the World Bank, it’s the world’s fourth poorest country), and its reliance on unirrigated agriculture, make it “particularly vulnerable to climate-fuelled disasters”. As well as droughts, the Guardian tells us that cyclones are killing and displacing Malawians, having “increased in intensity and frequency in recent years”. In 2023 Cyclone Freddy killed over a thousand people in Malawi.

We are then told that the World Bank forecasts millions of climate refugees, including in sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, its estimates don’t include forecasts for Malawi, but no matter – the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) says that 400,000 people moved within Malawi during last year’s drought. And according to World Bank data “[a]verage temperatures in Malawi between 2015 and 2024 were 0.63 degrees higher than a century earlier”.

So there it is. The climate crisis is devastating Malawi and its people. Case closed.

Or is it? The World Bank website does indeed show a graph indicating an increase of 0.63C in Malawi as claimed, but questions remain around that. First, is such a modest increase really going to be the cause of dramatic changes in Malawi’s climate? I don’t know, but I doubt it. Secondly, the data underlying the displayed graph is not referenced, so we have no way of checking it. Thus, I turned to the website of Malawi’s Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services to try to track down the sources of the temperature data relied on by the World Bank. An impressive number of weather stations are displayed on the map, from Kameme in the north to Nyachilenda in the south. The problem, however, is that many of these seem to have been established very recently (Kameme in 2020 and Nyachilenda in 2019, for example). Nkhota Kota dates to 1961, as do Thyolo, Bolero, Mzuzu, Nkhata Bay, Dedza and Mangoche. Salima dates to 1953. Karonga was established in 1952. Mzimba dates to 1946. A few more dates to the 1980s, but the vast majority seem to have been established in the 21^st century, most in the last decade. I may have missed one or more, but I can’t find a single weather station pre-dating the Second World War. It strikes me, therefore, that claims regarding precise temperatures dating back to 1901 (as is the case with the World Bank graph) are likely to be based more on “guestimates” than on hard data.

On the other hand, Malawi’s history is known for rather longer than most sub-Saharan countries, due to the activities of David Livingstone and those who followed in his footsteps, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, when the country was known as Nyasaland. In Malawi, representatives of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), Free Church of Scotland, and established Church of Scotland, founded mission stations in 1861 (at Magomero), 1875 (Cape Maclear), and 1876 (Blantyre), respectively. And so, a paper headed “Narratives of 19th century drought in southern Africa in different historical source types” includes rather a lot of information relating to Nyasaland and its earlier droughts. While precise data may be unavailable for these periods, we are not ignorant of the weather and climate of the time:

Sources such as newspapers and weather diaries are rich in qualitative and quantitative observations suitable for the reconstruction of temporal and spatial patterns of weather and climate, as well as climate-related natural disasters. In contrast, letters, reports and personal journals, especially those written by missionaries, provide additional qualitative narratives through which to investigate the vulnerability of past societies and economies to climate variations, and to explore past discourses and social representations of climate.

Diaries spanning this period tend to be dominated by weather descriptions. We learn of the terrible 1861-3 drought. The diaries and letters from the Second Zambesi Expedition (1858-1864), led by David Livingstone, for example, provide useful climate information for Malawi at this time. A little further south, and newspaper reports confirm how severe this drought was. The Natal Witness, 19^th September 1862, contained this plea:

Sir, I painfully exclaim, no new grass in the principal grazing districts of Natal, where, in favourable seasons, the best cattle, the best mealies (corn/maize], and the best wheat are produced? For nearly three years we have been sufferers by drought, which friendly visitors from the South-West say goes towards establishing this as a sheep country […] It is neither a good sheep country, cattle country, grain country, or good for anything else; neither will it be unless we assist nature. These never-failing rivers can be diverted easily from their course high up towards their sources, and be made to wind about along the surface of the country, always keeping high levels, to irrigate nearly the whole of the available cultivable land from the Drakensberg to the coast.

Note the plea for irrigation to solve the problem, an issue which the Guardian reminds us still affects Malawi a century and a half later.

Missionary reports confirm the severity of the drought, and of the displacement of local peoples:

[The BaTlhaping people]…formerly of the Kuruman […] have been compelled to vacate those places from the insufficiency of water and are seeking another locality. At present, they are making a temporary stay at Ilosi about 30 miles north of this place and are only waiting till the rains to be able to proceed further into the interior and may eventually settle down in the neighbourhood of the Molopo River.

Or this from 7^th April 1862 in Zululand:

I am afraid we are going to have another year of famine. In some districts the crops are an utter failure and the people have dispersed themselves elsewhere in search of food.

In terms of population displacement, the numbers being displaced by droughts now are probably a reflection of the fact that Malawi’s population has increased massively since then. African Futures tells us that “its population size relative to its geographic size makes it one of the ten most densely populated countries in Africa.” That of itself must be problematic. However, the astonishing rate of population increase must be borne in mind. An appalling drought today will cause far greater hardship that a drought of similar intensity in Malawi in the mid-late nineteenth century. Population density alone will see to that:

The population has significantly increased from 3.6 million people in 1960 to an estimated 21.1 million in 2023. On the Current Path, Malawi’s population will reach 33 million by 2043. By mid-century, it is likely that Malawi will be home to 37 million people, and by 2063, the population is expected to reach 43 million.

Discovering the size of Malawi’s population in the later nineteenth century is problematic, but given a population of 3.6 million in 1960, and given its rate of growth, I would expect the pre-1900 population to be less than one million. The Guardian article does, rather grudgingly, acknowledge that “[t]he rising population is also adding pressure”, noting that the country’s population has doubled in the last 30 years.

There was another severe drought from 1876-1879. Although available diaries for the case study areas mainly focus on day-to-day weather with little reflective commentary on climate impacts/responses, there are exceptions. For example, there are a small number of long-form journals, as illustrated by this diary entry of 9 November 1878 by John Gunn of the Livingstonia mission, Malawi, commenting on drought and tsetse fly:

This afternoon I had a walk round the plain. It occupied me three hours’ hard walking […] Large areas of the plain are being brought under cultivation by the natives, yet much fairly good soil remains available. It seems to me that tsetse are visibly diminishing. This may, however, be more attributable to the parched state of the plain, consequent on the severe drought of last season, than to the fact that we are encroaching on their haunts and driving them away.

Southern Africa also suffered another severe drought from 1895-7, though Malawi appears to have escaped its worst effects. The problematic climate continued into the twentieth century, however, and Malawi was badly affected. The Nyasaland Famine of 1949 is well documented by Wikipedia, and the link is well worth following, for several reasons. As well as offering details of the extent of the southern African drought in 1947-9, it also discusses the ongoing problems, thus:

Malawi suffered widespread food shortages in the 1990s and 2000s, and several of the issues which arose then were the same as those already apparent in 1949. These included the use of land for farming tobacco and other non-food crops, the growth of an underclass of land-poor or landless rural people who were dependent on casual work and the strict governmental controls on growing and marketing of certain crops. In more recent times, as in 1949, it was the lack of food reserves within the country and delays in importing relief supplies that turned shortages into famine. Even the idea, probably incorrect in 1949, that soil fertility was declining and soil erosion was becoming critical had become true by 1992, when cultivation had spread up hillsides and onto steep Rift Valley slopes, where erosion was inevitable and unsustainable.

In other words, Malawi’s problems are complex, and the simplistic narrative that puts the bulk of the blame on climate change is well wide of the mark.

One last citation regarding droughts should, I hope, make the point. The Environment and Society Portal website has a fascinating article about the problems encountered by early white colonists and businesses keen to use Malawi’s rivers for transport. It suggests that shortage of rain was a regular occurrence:

The African Lakes Company (ALC) was formed in 1878 to navigate “the rivers and lakes of Central Africa, and especially of those rivers and lakes which communicate with the Indian Ocean by the River Zambezi and the River Zambezi itself, with a view to develop the trade and resources of the country, and to encourage legitimate traffic amongst the natives.”

The expansion of European empires into Africa was aided by navigable river networks that made efficient and cheap water transport possible. Rivers, however, are not constant and predictable, as the ALC would discover in colonial Nyasaland (now Malawi)…

…Livingstone and his successors nevertheless believed a Zembezi-Tchiri river route could become a key artery for international trade from the Shire Highlands to the coast, perhaps because they had visited the region when river levels were particularly high. From the late nineteenth century, however, lake levels were in decline across eastern Africa due to climatic changes. Lake Nyasa’s levels dropped and would not rise to similar levels until the 1930s, by which time significant river transport had come to an end altogether.

As water levels dropped, by the 1890s Katunga (Chikwawa) was abandoned as a port. The function of its successor at Chiromo was also threatened, and in 1903 steamers from Chinde had to unload their cargoes at a Portuguese station, over 60 kilometers to the south of the Mozambique-Nyasaland border. The river in the dry seasons was now transformed into a series of shallow pools and sandbanks….

Althought the Guardian article focuses on drought (which, as we have seen, is nothing new in Malawi), it also talks briefly about floods:

Gladys Khumbidzi first moved 22 years ago, because of repeated floods.

Well, floods aren’t a new phenomenon in Malawi either. Wikipedia again:

A shortage of manpower and disastrous floods in the lower Shire valley caused a drop in [cotton] production to 365 tons in 1918.

Surely climate change must be causing some problems in Malawi? The Guardian suggests that cyclones are getting worse there. Malawi, it says, is:

…vulnerable to climate-fuelled disasters, including cyclones that have increased in intensity and frequency in recent years. In 2023, Cyclone Freddy killed more than 1,000 Malawians.

Since 2019, about 950,000 people have been displaced by cyclones, most temporarily, some multiple times…

The seriousness of Cyclone Freddy cannot be denied, but a century earlier there was another terrible cyclone. They didn’t give them names in those days, and in the absence of 24/7 television and the internet, news wasn’t reported so avidly or in such detail. However, the Christchurch Star of 8^th March 1922 managed a short piece reporting on the damage caused to the port of Chinde. Admittedly Chinde is not in Malawi, but it is very close to it, in what is now Mozambique, being at the point where cyclones from the Indian Ocean make landfall, close to where the Zambezi reaches the ocean on its way just south of Malawi. The reporting in 1922 was somewhat understated. Today, I have little doubt, it would have made banner headlines alongside claims that this is climate change in action. Back then the report simply said:

Further details of the Chinde cyclone show that ten steamers were sunk or driven ashore and eight Europeans and sixty natives drowned. The town is practically blotted out.

At least one key issue was omitted from the Guardian article – deforestation. Its scale is mind-boggling (according to the African Institute for Development Policy, though there are plenty of other sources saying essentially the same thing):

Between 1972 and 1990, Malawi lost over 40% of forest coverage and lost 15% of its forest and woodland habitat from 1990 to 2005. Such high rates of deforestation can be attributed, in large part, to unsustainable land management and agricultural practices….arable lands are often over-cultivated, overgrazed, and degraded by lack of crop variety. As lands are overused, the yields diminish and farmers are forced to expand to new plots, often requiring cutting down more trees, repeating a vicious cycle….In addition to cutting down trees to meet food needs of Malawi’s growing population, trees are also used as biomass which currently fuels 89% of Malawi’s energy supply.

What can we conclude? My conclusion differs in one material respect from that reached by the Guardian. It states that “Unpredictable weather fueled by the climate crisis is forcing millions from their homes, with many struggling to access water. Save for the “climate crisis” reference, I wouldn’t argue with the claim. But I do argue with the invocation of a “climate crisis”, because the article presents no evidence that Malawi’s weather is significantly different from its weather 100 or 150 years ago. Malawi’s problems are significant and should not be lightly dismissed. On the contrary, blaming them on a “climate crisis” risks failing to address the country’s many underlying problems, and lets its politicians off the hook.