Climate changes; if it didn’t, the world would never have emerged from the last Ice Age. However, even the staunchest eco warrior or merchant of global doom would have to accept that this has happened without any anthropogenic component. Climate trends should not be measured over years, or even decades but multiple decades or even centuries to allow scientists (or their descendants!) to separate natural variation from any man-made component. However, mankind is an impatient lot and we want instant results and (near) immediate action.
In the modern world, politics, public opinion and media hype are inextricably linked. Leaders often don’t “lead” until their advisors can gauge how popular a particular position will be. If anthropogenic climate change is real, then production of electricity by means that do not release carbon dioxide (the widely blamed cuprit, “greenhouse” gas) are imperative. The only permanently available, large scale source of such “clean” energy is nuclear power – why then did Germany abandon its nuclear program in the wake of the Japanese tsunami if anthropogenic climate change poses an existential threat to mankind? Germany is a tectonically stable region and its engineers and scientists are amongst the best in the world. The answer is that politicians feared a voter backlash in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster (in which nobody died due to exposure to radiation, of course).
The next gathering of world leaders to discuss climate change, COP-21, is due to take place in Paris shortly. The head of the World Bank is calling for $16 Billion for Africa to help it adapt to climate change. World Bank research suggests that 43 million people could fall into extreme poverty by 2030, if nothing is done to avert the consequence of climate change. A climate change that may, or may not, be real with consequences that even the scientists supporting the theory are unable to predict. Time was that talk was of “Global Warming”, but this has been supplanted with a “climate change” model which sees increased droughts and rainfall, hotter and colder winters and summers, storms that are more extreme and frequent, depending on where you are in the world.
However, according to the World Bank, in 2010, 414 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa were already living in extreme poverty (income below $1.25 per day), a situation which has continued to worsen. According to the World Food Programme, currently “Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth.” According to the World Health Organisation, the annual estimated
death toll from malaria alone in Sub-Saharan Africa was over half a million people in 2012 – three quarters of the dead were children under the age of five. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the total bilateral aid figure for Sub-Saharan Africa in 2013 was $26.2 billion.
The estimated population for the continent of Africa is 1.1 billion people. The GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa (developing only) was $1.7 trillion in 2014, according to the World Bank.
In the light of these stark facts, perhaps the priority should be to ensure that existing aid is being effectively used to solve problems afflicting millions of Africans today, rather than to canvas for $16 billion to mitigate potential climate problems fifteen years hence.