African Wildlife & Environment Issue 84 2023

EDITORIAL

EDITORIAL

weather observations were captured from 1652 through to 1791, with remarkable consistency. Results show extreme weather and climate variability in Cape Town during the mid- to late 1780s including 1787 when it rained a lot. The year saw 121 rain days, and at one point it rained for 16 solid days. That June, VOC scribes wrote of ‘continual, copious rains’, and in July they wrote that ‘accumulated rainfall has exceeded that noted during all previous winter seasons’. Later in the month hail covered all of Table Mountain. ‘It cannot be recalled in human memory, at least not since a long time in years, of such excessive rains that have almost flooded the countryside, and of such cold northwest winds’ one scribe wrote. The extreme weather and climate variation in the mid to late 1780s seen in the Cape Town records may be linked to a volcanic eruption in Iceland, and that raises important research questions that require further investigation, such as whether volcanic explosions in the north could have impacted midlatitude climates. (Grab & Williams, 2022). And lest we forget, this place was initially called the Cape of Storms, Cabo Tormentoso by Bartolomeu Dias who first reached it in 1488. Also known as the ‘Graveyard of ships’ the Cape’s treacherous and violent storms have accounted for nearly 3,000 sunken ships. So what’s new about the Cape weather in 2023? Thankfully, this issue of your magazine is full of interesting and informative news about the wonderful world we live in. Enjoy the read! The media (as usual) are full of bad news around the hardy headline-grabbing mainstays of war and weather. The conflict in Ukraine saw our President visit there to seek some kind of solution; nothing of the sort seems to be on the table. The Russians are certainly not going to appreciate their soldiers being killed by Ukrainians driving Abrahams tanks made in the USA. But what are they doing in Ukraine anyway? I had long thought that Ukrainians were also ‘Russians’. But it’s all a real tragedy of human suffering, loss of life and terrible destruction of buildings and infrastructure.

Dr John Ledger

We have been bombarded with reports of high temperatures and fires in the Middle East and Europe. A devastating earthquake in Morocco left many dead, injured and displaced people in its wake. In Libya, the coastal city of Derna was partly washed into the sea, along with thousands of people who had been asleep when two dams (poorly designed and maintained, by all accounts) collapsed after heavy rains. Closer to home, the southern parts of the country were lashed by vicious storms and torrential rains that caused loss of life, damage to property and general devastation and despair. Thanks to modern communications and the millions of mobile phones all around the globe, the sounds and sights of an unhappy world stream into our homes as we reluctantly share the misfortunes of those impacted by war and weather. The media seldom provide any kind of historical perspective on extreme weather events and mislead us into thinking we are experiencing something unprecedented . We have only a short historical record of past weather events. We did not have thermometers until the German physicist Fahrenheit invented the alcohol thermometer in 1709 and the mercury thermometer in 1714. In 1724, he introduced the temperature scale that bears his name. Later scientists called Celsius and Kelvin introduced other scales that perpetuate their names. Meanwhile, down at the southern tip of Africa, scribes working for the Dutch East India Company ( Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC ) were carefully filling in their ‘day registers’ ( daghregisters ) which comprise one of the world’s longest-known chronicles containing near-continuous, systematic, non-instrumental daily weather information, providing insights into the late-eighteenth-century weather and climate of Cape Town (Grab & Williams 2022, https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/ bams/103/8/BAMS-D-21-0127.1.xml. ) It seems Jan van Riebeeck took a personal interest in understanding the Cape climate and its implications for local shipping, and required weather data to be included in the registers. As a result,

Dr John Ledger Consulting Editor john.ledger@wol.co.za 083 650 1768

1 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 84 (2023)