How to improve climate predictions? McGill researchers turn to 19th century letters [Video]

A team led by McGill University researchers came up with a method they hope could improve climate models over Africa by combining them with 19th century missionary records, refashioning dubious documents in a bid to better inform projections of global warming’s impact.

Models are an important way for scientists and decision-makers to understand how human influence is changing the climate.

To come up with those projections, climate models depend on historical baselines – temperature and precipitation, for example – to validate and refine their results. 

However, a lack of historical region-specific data across parts of Africa, plus a major deficit in weather stations compared to North America and Europe, has contributed to model uncertainty.

“Africa’s absence from the underlying data makes deploying these projections uncomfortable, as it partly represents the continent’s marginalization from global scientific discourse during and after colonialism,” says a study published last month in the peer-reviewed journal …