Let us look at it this way. Somewhere in Akatsi, a woman is cooking akpele and fetridetsi on a commercial scale. She cooks in an open space and jealous neighbours are constantly complaining that the lovely aroma of the fetridetsi is perfuming the atmosphere, to produce a terrible combination of gas and smoke for their tearful eyes. She bribes the daughter of the chief complainant with a hot served fetridetsi and the whole community is quiet.
She hires an accident prone Benz 207, to cart the food to the biggest market town in the region. The Benz is powered by a 1955 third-hand engine which pumps several tons of exhaust fumes into the atmosphere, to the discomfiture of angry passengers.
In Accra, a presidential motorcade made up of 12 posh saloon cars, a six-door luxury Mercedes X9Million seating JAK and Madame Theresa, and 4 giant terrorist-sensitive police BMW motorcycles has held the capital to a standstill. The presidential jet is waiting to whisk JAK to China for a follow-up negotiation on the Bui Dam. The vehicles and the aeroplane are spewing millions of tons of VIP carbon fumes into the sky, like there is no heaven.
Incensed by this, we cross over to Tweapease where a corn grinding machine (Nikanika), is billowing into the heavens thunderous degrees of smoke, as neighbours queue to deposit their unwanted mercies into the community KVIP. The KVIP itself is releasing dangerous canons of vapour to poison the eyes of the moon. Greedy forest guards have also connived with timber merchants to saw down all the wood in the area, leaving the land as bare as the Tamale Kaladan Park.
Now climate experts are saying that we are going to pay a punitive price for going about our poor lives the same old way in a poor country. They say there is a big uncle who is holding the sky uptight in the heavens. As we pump smoke and pollute him with CO2 carbon emissions, he will angrily loose his grip, whereupon the sky will pull out from the sockets, like the yolk from the albumen, and with a very big bang, fall down to destroy everything we have laboured to build over the years.
So far, it is not clear whether that incident will herald the second coming of Christ or it will mark its aftermath. But it is an issue that is dividing scientists around the globe. Generally, scientists do not disagree that carbon dioxide contributes to global warming. They have made remarkable advances in reconstructing the history of the Earth’s atmosphere as far back as 500Million years. They have also analysed the composition of presently unidentifiable gases by teasing clues from fossilised soils, plants, sea creatures and from computer models of geological activity.
Where scientists have failed to reach a consensus is the extent to which carbon dioxide alone, independent of other factors, would cause a cataclysmic end of the world. One camp believes that temperature increases will only cause a nuisance but not a catastrophe, while the other insists that a global crisis is rapidly unfolding as a result of planetary heating.
The area of contention: Is global warming the same as climate change? Most discussions on global warming have concentrated on evidence of climate change gathered from the last few hundred years. The danger is that, experts say it is much like determining where a big path leads by narrowing your gauge to study the orientation of a single paving slab. It will lead you nowhere or only to a truncated end.
In the past, the Earth’s atmosphere has recorded carbon dioxide levels that were 18 times higher than the levels we are complaining about today. So why is it that the big uncle in the sky has not given up already and pushed the clouds down on us? Is today’s technology-dictated lifestyle producing a different CO2?
But the debate rages on. 186billion tonnes of CO2 are released into the Earth’s atmosphere every year from innumerable sources. Of this figure, only 6billion tonnes are from human activity. Some 90billion tonnes come from biologic activity in the oceans on the Earth and the remaining 90billion tonnes from sources such as volcanoes, decaying plants and other raw materials.
If human pollution contributes just 6billion tonnes of CO2 to climate change, why are geologists from Yale University insisting that global warming is due to CO2? Scientific sources at University of Pennsylvania, however, hold that factors such as geological and solar activity appear likely causative agents than CO2 levels.
Even so, global warming poses a terrifying threat to our generation and Africa will be the biggest loser. The 2003 World Health Organisation report says 150,000 human lives have perished as a result of global warming. Experts also warn that the increased warming of the Pacific Ocean (El Nino) and the North Atlantic effect will soon render farm lands in Africa too poor for our crops. Even the African savannahs could disappear, with all its ecologically unique broad grasslands. Biodiversity combined with climate change will erode our plant species, including our medicinal plants.
We cannot control the second coming of Christ but the economic possibilities of our time present enormous opportunities for global action against global warming. Of course, we haven’t gotten to the time where a customer would want to know whether a chop bar operator observed global warming measures in cooking the spicy abenkatekonto before he makes a purchase, but already there are green campaigns all over the world.
In 2012, the Kyoto Protocol-the UN’s major weapon for fighting climate change will expire. Secretary General Kofi Annan has called for a vigorous leadership of the campaign against the phenomenon. It appears climate change must now be pursued with the same seriousness as war, poverty and weapons of mass destruction.
Former Vice President, Al Gore, is pursuing the call with momentum levels greater than what he used to campaign for the US presidency, which he lost to Bush. In his An Inconvenient Truth, he reports that the US contributes 30.3% to global warming while Africa produces only 2.5%. The aggregate greenhouse gas pollution by Africa, South America, the Middle East, Australia, Japan and Asia is lower than that of the US.
Yet, the Sir Nicholas Stern report on the economics of climate change, published on October 30 indicate that, the total world output could be five times lower due to climate change, and Africa will be the greatest loser, not the US. With more than half of the world’s 854Million poorest people living in Africa, what would you expect? .
The Stern data states that “…in terms of GDP, India and Africa together are expected to loose 10 times more from climate change than the US and 20 times more than China…” May be very soon, global warming will wipe Africa from the maps of the world, whereupon its poor people will be distributed to the other continents. Then with a united global front, we will wait for the big bang that will finally kill the world.
Remember the Asian Tsunami? If we don’t change our lifestyles, it will be a daily drama in many parts of the world. Drought will lead to failing crops and the resulting hunger will smoke global hunger to end the world for sure.
Before that happens, we can take green measures to reduce the effects of global warming. We can determine each other’s carbon footprint by reducing the number of cars we drive, converting our cars into bio-diesel, as Prince Charles of the UK is doing, and do lot more recycling. Replacing just one incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent lamp would save the world 500 pounds of coal and more than a ton of carbon dioxide emissions.
If Ghana’s 50th anniversary celebration is bad for everything else, we are going to plant 5 Million trees, to offset the effects of climate change. Get involved. Go green.
See you next week.
The author is a newspaper columnist and a Business Lawyer in London
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.