(Bloomberg) -- For Episode 8 of the Zero podcast, Bloomberg Green’s Akshat Rathi and Laura Millan talk about Timbuktu’s weather station 61223, and what its sudden closure means for climate science across the African continent. Listen to the full episode below, learn more about the podcast here, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google and Stitcher to stay on top of new episodes.

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Akshat Rathi  0:00  

Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshat Rathi. This week: weather data, volcanic skies and conflict in Timbuktu. 

Akshat Rathi  0:21  

Here in the UK, chatting about the weather is basically a national pastime. When is it going to rain? When will we see the sun again? And why have we gone through all four seasons before lunch? And thanks to weather forecasting, we can have those conversations not just with good humour, but also a good level of confidence. We get these forecasts because the UK has a network of more than 400 weather stations spanning the length of the country from the Orkney Islands in the far north to the Scilly Isles in the south. The data the weather stations like these collect are invaluable. It influences the decisions of governments and companies around the world, and can be used to make models that predict energy consumption, harvests, and even when countries might go to war. As my colleague at Bloomberg Green, Laura Millan puts it:

Laura Millan  1:12  

What they do is really important because this data feeds into all these climate models into the research that climate scientists do to try to figure out how the world works today. And this is the data [that is] key to figure out how it will change in the future.

Akshat Rathi  1:28  

When it comes to making climate models, the more data you have and the longer you've been collecting it for, the better those models become. But weather stations are also expensive to set up and maintain, and many countries can't afford them in great numbers. Without these stations, it becomes difficult to provide accurate weather forecasts, and makes it even harder to work out how a country will be affected by climate change. And while the UK benefits from an abundance of weather stations, many countries in Africa are severely lacking the resources to produce reliable weather and climate data. 

This week, Laura tells the story of weather station 61223 in Timbuktu, and what its sudden closure means for the people of Mali and climate science across the African continent. The story starts with the Arab Spring, which sparked revolutions across North Africa, and ends with how the lack of African weather data will affect the discussions at COP 27. 

Akshat Rathi 2:36

Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura Millan  2:37  

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Akshat Rathi  2:38  

Tell me about weather station 61223

Laura Millan  2:42  

Weather station 61223 was one of five weather stations in Mali that had been active for more than 100 years. And these stations that have been operating for more than 100 years, they're really valuable because the data that they provide is very consistent through time. This station in particular was close to the airport in Timbuktu. It was set up by the French colonialists. And it was in a very discreet concrete building near the airport. So no signs, no anything. One could have confused it with a warehouse or something like that.

Akshat Rathi  3:18  

When I think of Timbuktu, the thing that comes to mind is how Bollywood treats it.

Akshat Rathi 3:33

So from India, many Bollywood songs have the word Timbuktu in them and it's treated as this faraway place, which many people don't think is real. 

Laura Millan  3:40  

Right. And I think it's the way it resonates in people's imagination. You talk about Timbuktu in Europe, and it's also this faraway place, this city in the middle of the desert, that no one has been to. It's a bit mythological even. But it's an actual place, it's an actual city. It’s home to around 30,000 people. It's next to the Niger River in northern Mali. And the reason why there are so many stories around it is because it used to be the capital of an ancient empire. And it used to be a center for knowledge and culture, especially religious studies, in the Middle Ages.

Akshat Rathi  4:17  

So this weather station 61223, why did it go silent after 100 and some years?

Laura Millan  4:25  

Well, the reason is that the staff had to abandon it, the people that were maintaining it, that were taking the data, maintaining the equipment, making sure everything was running smoothly, [and] had been doing that for many years. They had to run. They had to flee Timbuktu. And the reason why this happened starts in 2011. With the Arab Spring. 

4:48  

When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire ten years ago, he couldn't have known that his suicide in Tunisia would ignite the entire region.

Laura Millan  4:57  

When the regime of Muammar al Qaddafi collapsed in Libya, many of the desert tribes that Qaddafi had been sponsoring and supporting through the decades had to flee and became rebel fighters.

  5:12  

Over the last few years, Mali has had a problem with militancy. In October 2011, ethnic Tuaregs, mostly from the north of the country, launched a rebellion. 

Laura Millan  5:22  

One of these groups is the National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad and they’re Touareg fighters. What this group did was surround the city of Timbuktu. And on the first of April 2012, they entered the city and took over the main institutions. Then a few days later, the jihadis of a radical Islamic group called Ansar Dine followed in and they were waving the black flags that were later characteristic of the Islamic State in Syria and in other places. So that meant that radical Islamists had taken over the city of Timbuktu and that made the employees of the state - from top government officials to the people that were maintaining the weather station 61223 - they made them enemies of the invaders, and so they had to flee.

Akshat Rathi  6:15  

What you're describing is the start of the Mali war, which is ongoing. There have been multiple coup d'etats that have happened since. But when this happened in 2012, what was going on in the minds of the people who were working on this weather station?

Laura Millan  6:31  

Well, I didn't talk directly with the people that were working on the station. But I did talk to the person in the meteorological agency in Mali, who was responsible for these people. 

And obviously, there was great concern, you have to imagine seeing all this news from Bamako, from the capital, all this news coming in, it wasn't an immediate conquest. So the forces from the Touareg surrounded the city for a few days, the elders from Timbuktu went out and started to negotiate with them to make sure that they wouldn't destroy some of the city's valuable ancient monuments and so on. This went on for a few days. And obviously, rumours came into the capital. And so this person from Mali’s meteorological agency, his first concern was to get the people out of there

Laura Millan  7:37  

Obviously, it was very important that Mali had a centennial weather station there, but it wasn't more important than the lives of those people. So he made sure he got them out of Timbuktu safely. And luckily, he did that.

Akshat Rathi  7:54  

Now, let's talk about this weather station. Why is it that it's so important to have had that weather station there?

Laura Millan  8:01  

So for any weather station, the most important thing is not just [that[ the data that it gathers is accurate. But that that data at any moment in time can be compared with data that has been recorded previously. The weather stations that have been running for more than 100 years, they're considered the most valuable ones, because they allow scientists to compare what's happening today, with what used to happen decades and more than a century ago. So the loss of weather station 61223 was tragic, not just because of that, but because there are very few of those in Mali, and in Africa. So if a centennial station was lost, let's say in China, where there are many, or in Europe or in Russia, then it's always a tragedy, because a source of information gets lost. But in Africa, where there are very few of them, that's an actual problem, because that means that the set of data that this station has been gathering through time gets discontinued. So scientists don't have a way anymore of knowing what's happening in that place.

Akshat Rathi  9:15  

And it’s a problem even immediately, because this weather station is collecting local data, and helping local people. Immediately after going offline, there were impacts, right?

Laura Millan  9:27  

Yeah, absolutely. It's not just a long-term thing for climate scientists to understand phenomena, weather stations have a very immediate application. In the case of station 61223, it was very important because it helps understand when a very strong gust of wind would come through the desert into Lake Débo, which is Mali’s largest lake. When the people around the lake would receive an alert on the weather station that this extreme weather was coming, they were able to alert local fishermen and people travelling in pinasses, which are long boats that people use to transport goods and transport themselves. In 2011 about 10 people died in wind-related incidents around Lake Débo. But that number increased to 70 in the year after station 61223 went offline. So it went from 10 to 70 just because that station wasn't able to alert the people around the lake.

Akshat Rathi  10:42  

Zooming back, there's the local phenomena, but losing data from weather stations in places like Mali, where there are so few, also has international impacts, right?

Laura Millan  10:55  

Yeah, absolutely. So all these data, all these tiny data points, that weather stations gather every day, I think about them, like little ants, right? They do their work every day, [it’s] always the same, it's not very shiny. But what they do is really important, because this data feeds into all these climate models, into the research that climate scientists do to try to figure out how the world works today, how the climate of the world works today, how it's changing. And this is the data [that is] key to figure out how it will change in the future.

Akshat Rathi  11:30  

Right. So this weather data sort of becomes the anthill and the anthill certainly is a thing of marvel. There was a study earlier this year, where they found that only 5% of the deaths caused by heat happened in tropical countries, where 85% of people live. And that is astonishing, because that shouldn't be statistically right. And when we asked a scientist about it, she said, “that's ridiculous.” And the reason is because we don't have data.

Laura Millan  12:02  

That's right. And there is another study that looked at heat waves around the world. And it found that around the Sahara region, there were no heat waves. No heat waves had happened according to researchers. But that wasn't the case. Obviously in the world's biggest desert  there are heat waves. The problem is that there are no weather stations to record them.

Akshat Rathi  12:25  

Now for the story, you produced a map, which I remember because it was a stunning map. And it noted the density of weather data stations around the world. And as with many other things, the continent of Africa, not just a few countries, but the continent of Africa was dark.

Laura Millan  12:44  

Yes. And that's a very obvious way of showing that there are very few weather stations in Africa. In particular, Mali used to have five centennial stations. Four after the one that we've mentioned in Timbuktu went dark. But in total, it has 13 active weather stations. Compared to Germany, for example, in Europe, a country that's one third the size of Mali, Germany has almost 200 main weather stations. That's more than 10 times what Mali has. And it's not just a matter of quantity, but also of quality. So the World Meteorological Organisation says that weather infrastructure in Africa is deteriorating very fast. Only 22% of the stations met global reporting standards in 2019. And this represents a very big problem for the scientists trying to study the weather phenomenon and climate phenomenon going on in Africa and in the rest of the world.

Akshat Rathi  13:47  

So how is this lack of data feeding into or not feeding into climate science that looks at global phenomena and looks at many different time periods?

Laura Millan  13:58  

So the data is necessary to produce climate science, and all the scientific papers are gathered once every five years by the IPCC into climate reports. The problem is that if there is no data from Africa, the representation Africa has in very important reports like the IPCC is very small.

Akshat Rathi  14:24  

Now what's being done about the situation?

Laura Millan  14:26  

The good thing about all of this is that there's a lot of very smart people trying to fix this issue. One of the difficulties of this problem is that national meteorological organisations in Africa are often underfunded, and setting up a station that is valid for the WMO that can take reliable weather data is not cheap, it can cost more or less around $20,000 for every station just to set it up. And then comes maintenance and the staff needed to maintain it. Weather stations are not always a priority if you have a government that's struggling with conflict in the case of Mali, or with natural disasters, in the case of many other African nations. Then weather stations figuring out how hot or how cold or how humid it is in certain places doesn't necessarily come top of mind for the people governing. 

Akshat Rathi  15:24  

Right, you would use that money – $20,000 is a lot of money – to do things that are really important on the ground, as needed.

Laura Millan  15:32  

That's it. And that are more urgent or that feel more important. For example, you set up schools or your set up food relief programs or any sort of programme that solves an immediate need. Whereas often the weather and climate are seen as something that's almost a luxury. 

Akshat Rathi  15:50  

But there is technological progress that's happening that's helping.

Laura Millan  15:55  

Yes, that's right. So what's been happening in the past few years is that technology has made some of the instruments used to measure climate or and weather data cheaper. And it's also made it possible for these instruments to actually send the data remotely. So you wouldn't need a person doing the maintenance or being there every day all day recording the set of data. One of the people I found in my reporting is Nick van de Giesen. He's a professor in the Netherlands. And he has set up something called the Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory. And this is a network of weather stations across Africa. They can work remotely, they use modern equipment, and they are much cheaper than the traditional ones. 

Akshat Rathi  16:43  

How much cheaper are we talking here?

Laura Millan  16:45  

So we've said that a traditional weather station costs $20,000. Their goal, TAHMO’s goal is for one station to cost around $200. 

Akshat Rathi

That's a lot. 

Laura Millan 

That's a lot cheaper. And they're not there yet. So they've been able to produce weather stations at a price of around $2,000. And they have installed around 600 of these across Africa.

Akshat Rathi  17:09  

Since you reported this story last year have there been any updates?

Laura Millan  17:13  

Yes and no. The main headline is that station 61223 is still offline. When I talked to the people at Mali Météo 

Laura Millan 

What they told me was that bringing it back online would require a significant investment because this sort of equipment is very delicate. When it goes offline for a while and no one maintains it, then it requires either huge maintenance or completely new equipment. That hasn't happened. The security situation in Mali hasn't improved either. People might have read in the news how French troops and troops from the European Union have left Mali as well. And I wanted to go physically to Mali to report on the story and just a few days before I was thinking about that trip and trying to figure out how the logistics would work, a French journalist was kidnapped by rebel groups. And that meant that the safety of journalists in that part of Mali could not be guaranteed so we could never travel there.

Akshat Rathi  18:27  

After the break, are Timbuktu's historical records the answer to Mali’s lack of weather data? And what does the lack of accurate climate models across the continent of Africa mean for discussions of loss and damage?

Akshat Rathi  18:49  

Weather stations aren't the only way in which we can gather data. Of course, current data is gathered from weather stations. But there are other approaches to try and understand what's happening to the continent. Right?

Laura Millan  19:03  

Absolutely. And one way to do that –  and it's not just in Africa, it's being done everywhere –  are historical documents. So if you go back in time, people have been recording what the weather has been like for hundreds and even thousands of years. And there are clues in historic documents. In the case of Mali, and Timbuktu specifically, Timbuktu was a cultural centre and one of the main cities in North Africa. So people would go there to study many things and they would leave a written record of what was going on.

Akshat Rathi  19:36  

There are some stunning architectural buildings that still stand in Timbuktu.

Laura Millan  19:42  

Yeah, absolutely. And they're actually protected by UNESCO. They're ancient shrines and churches that could be visited, and they have a characteristic architecture made with mud. Very typical of Timbuktu. So what used to happen in the 16th century [is] that people would travel for weeks and months through the desert, to learn from the wise men in the city. They would learn everything from Islamic theology, history, philosophy, anything. And the city was also a crossroads for tribes that lived in the desert. So there used to be lots of camel caravans that would carry salt and gold, even slaves across the desert, and they would be traded in Timbuktu.  That left a very big paper trail in the form of manuscripts that describe what life was like at the time. And that tried to register things from agricultural techniques, and obviously, the weather.

Akshat Rathi  20:45  

So we have these historical documents from centuries ago that have detailed weather conditions in them. Have we ended up using them in some form?

Laura Millan  20:54  

Not yet. And that's another fascinating part of the story, and something I find fascinating about Timbuktu. And it's what we call the Timbuktu manuscripts that people might have heard or read about, is a huge collection of documents, not just from Timbuktu, but from the whole region, that have been preserved within families for centuries. So families will be guardians or custodians of a certain set of documents that gets passed through generations. And academics have only started to scratch the surface of the wisdom and the contents of these manuscripts. I talked to some researchers in the US that are digitizing these documents, basically scanning them and making sure they don't get lost, burned, or stolen or anything like that. And then analyzing the contents. They have made it possible for people to search online, certain keywords on these documents. So if you search for “rain,” for example, you'll be able to find that there are a bunch of documents that mention rain and rain changes and so on. But no one, as far as I know, has gone as far as to put that into scientific research. But that has been done with ancient documents in European nations like Germany and the UK. People have gone to monasteries, and looked at the annotations of what the weather was centuries ago and produced scientific research out of [it].

Akshat Rathi  22:26  

So it's certainly possible to find better models once this data has been translated into a usable form.

Laura Millan  22:32  

Yes, absolutely. It won't be as thorough as if you had had someone recording the temperatures every day for the past 500 years, or water levels for the past 500 years, which there are places in the world that have been recording for many centuries, but at least you can have an idea on whether rivers were bigger or smaller, where the rain was more frequent, the winds, et cetera. And then that could help scientific research definitely.

Akshat Rathi  22:59  

There's the story which I find fascinating, which is in 1815, Mount Tambora, a huge volcano went off and put all the sulphur related compounds into the atmosphere and caused what is now known as the year that had no summer  across the world. There were famines, deaths, et cetera. But it also changed art, because researchers have now analysed paintings from that era and compared them to the pre-1815 era. And essentially, the skies turned more orange, because there was more sulphur and that's what the painters were reflecting in their paintings. So there's all these downstream impacts that happen from weather and they are recorded in these weird forms, which may not be data, but it's still data if you want to interpret it that way.

Laura Millan  23:47  

Yeah, and maybe we're going a bit off topic, I don't know. But there's also research on the legends that Aboriginal Australians tell each other and have been telling each other for millennia, because the Aboriginal Australians are the longest running people or civilization on earth. And researchers have analysed what they thought were legends and found that they actually tell the story of the land. And that these stories correspond with changes on rivers and mountains and on the sea, that actually happened ages and ages ago. It's not just weather stations recording the changes and the data. These changes can be found everywhere.

Akshat Rathi  24:28  

Now we are about to head into another COP meeting, which is this annual climate conference that the UN organizes. This time it's in Egypt in November. It's called COP27 because it's the 27th time it's happening. And it's the fifth time it's been hosted by a country in Africa. How does the lack of good weather data fit into the international climate discussions and negotiations?

Laura Millan  24:53  

It's at the heart of it, because if you don't have the data, then there is no discussion possible. We tend to say that Africa is the continent suffering the most from climate change, but the one that has contributed less to it. So the second part that we know for a fact, that it's the one that has contributed less to it. The first part of the sentence: it's suffering the most, is the hard one to prove, because we have this intuition but actually, there isn't that much hard data on it. And the reason is, again, weather stations. So if you don't know whether a heat wave is happening, or why people are dying in a certain place, or why crops are failing, then it's really hard to attribute these effects to climate change. And so a lot of what will be discussed in COP this year will hopefully be around the need to have better data coming from Africa in order to know more the effects of climate change and what's happening there. And the other effect that the lack of data [has] is that in the IPCC reports, there is lots of research reflected on America and Europe and developed nations, but then developing nations have less of an importance because of that lack of data.

Akshat Rathi  26:15  

Something that's happened over the last few years that's really changed the way we talk about climate change is this phenomena of attribution studies, where climate scientists can look at an extreme weather event, maybe that's a heat wave, maybe it's a flood, and tell you just how much worse they were made by climate change.

Laura Millan  26:35  

Yes, and it's so important to have these sorts of studies about things that happened in Africa, about extreme weather events in Africa, and we're not seeing them. And we're not seeing them because we don't have the data to produce these studies. And the implications of that are huge. It's not just a matter of scientific knowledge, but African nations, and this is going to be a really important issue at COP27 in Egypt in November. African nations, one of the things that they want is something called loss and damage, which is the developing nations suffering from the effects of climate change should be compensated by developed nations that caused climate change in the first place, that are the main contributors to climate change. But if you cannot prove that something has been caused by climate change, then how can you get compensated, right? So this is why data is so important. So you can produce studies, including attribution studies that would then later allow a country to go to the developed nations say, this extreme event, say a heat wave or a typhoon or a storm or flood or anything, caused this amount of damage to my GDP, to my crop production, X amount of deaths, that number of people lost their homes, like all these very tangible, very real effects. And I have this scientific paper which has been peer reviewed and authored by reputable scientists saying this event was made much worse by climate change. So how are you planning to compensate me? So if a country cannot do that, then the injustice in the system remains.

Akshat Rathi  28:30  

What's a climate story that you found meaningful?

Laura Millan  28:33  

I think the story that changed the way I see climate and the way I see climate journalism was the first story that I read about how climate had impacted and contributed to the Arab Spring. So that's when I started to think that climate and climate change had a huge impact [on] everything that happens in our lives in a small way, but also in a big way.

Akshat Rathi  28:58  

And there's a more personal connection there, because the Arab Spring is what drew you into journalism.

Laura Millan  29:04  

Well I was a journalist before, but I happened to be in Cairo when the Arab Spring broke. I wrote about it for two years. And I’m slightly ashamed to say that I never made the climate connection. It was later when the reports started to come out about how — if I remember — 2008 had been a really dry year and that drought had continued and had impacted wheat prices and how bread had become more expensive. That's when I made the connection. But yeah, absolutely there's a personal side to it that this event that I lived in such an intense way was so affected by climate change, and I just lived through it without realizing it.

Akshat Rathi  30:00  

A lack of good climate data might sound like a wonky subject. But as Laura’s reporting shows, it has huge consequences for those without it. Access to good weather data should be as much a part of climate justice discussions as say, ensuring coal miners are not left behind, or developing countries have enough funding to move to clean energy. For more, you can read Laura's Story on bloomberg.com/green. It's also linked in the show notes. 

Thanks so much for listening to Zero. If you like the show, please rate review and subscribe. Tell a friend or write it in a diary that may be found in 500 years. If you've got a suggestion for a guest or topic, or something you just want us to look into get in touch at zeropod@bloomberg.net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly.

Many people helped make the show a success. This week, thanks to my colleague at Bloomberg Green, Eric Roston who has everything in his brain that I wish I had. I'm Akshat Rathi, back next week.

--With assistance from Oscar Boyd and Laura Millan Lombrana.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.