Reversed Holocene temperature-moisture relationship in the Horn of Africa.

Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to severely impact the global hydrological cycle, particularly in tropical regions where agriculture-based economies depend on monsoon rainfall. In the Horn of Africa, more frequent drought conditions in recent decades contrast with climate models projecting precipitation to increase with rising temperature. Here we use organic geochemical climate-proxy data from the sediment record of Lake Chala (Kenya and Tanzania) to probe the stability of the link between hydroclimate and temperature over approximately the past 75,000 years, hence encompassing a sufficiently wide range of temperatures to test the 'dry gets drier, wet gets wetter' paradigm of anthropogenic climate change in the time domain.