“It is a question of war and peace,” Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. “We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa.” He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Apr05/0,4670,UNClimateChange,00.html
Parts of the developing world are “particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and least equipped to cope with them” because of instability, current or recent conflicts. It cited the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, parts of the Middle East and parts of Asia and the Pacific.
See for yourself with images from Google Earth - http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=487&ArticleID=5350&l=en
Lake Chad, a great shallow lake in West Africa which was once the sixth largest in the world, shrunk to a wetland one tenth its original size between 1963 and 2001. The user can follow the rivers that feed it to their sources, which no longer provide enough water to maintain the lake. Google Earth shows the countries and cities affected by the lake’s decline and offers the ability to search the internet for additional information about Lake Chad
I am not so blinded by images of shrinking lakes and calving glaciers that I can't see the causes and effects. The lakes in Africa are changing primarily because of natural climate change. See for example: http://www.aaas.org/international/africa/ewmi/livingst.htm:
In more remote times hydrologic changes were much greater. Lake Victoria seems to have been completely dry during a period that did not end before 12,500 years ago (Kendall, 1969; Stager et al, 1986; Johnson et al, 1996). The deepest part of Lake Naivasha in Kenya seems to have been dry during a brief period about 3,000 years ago (Richardson and Richardson, 1972)...