Snow Ball from Hell

Snow Ball from Hell

snowballMy nine weeks in Africa convinces me the most pressing issue of our time is climate change.

I’ve returned from a series of safaris with some of the most memorable moments of game viewing in my career. I met some incredibly wonderful new people and reacquainted myself with a number of dear clients.

From South Africa through Botswana into Tanzania, new political and conservation initiatives gave me optimism, but unfortunately the common theme dominating every single day was how destructive climate change has become:

To the animals, to the veld and most of all, to the people.

Of course negligence, corruption, bad politics and dysfunctional science also provide plenty of negative influences as well, but there is nothing – nothing more threatening to Africa’s future than our unprecedented global warming.

Cape Town normally has a mean high temperature in March of 77̊F. On March 3, while I was in Johannesburg, the temperature reached 108̊F, a whopping ten degrees higher than ever seen there before.

An alarming two percent of the precious Cape Flora Zone, the most unique and smallest of the six such zones in the world, was lost to fires.

We toured the wine country on highways with fires on both sides.

In Botswana a quarter of the unique Okavango Delta was lost this year to drought and fire. This is unheard of.

I arrived in Tanzania at the end of a six week drought. That drought came after record rainfalls in December, amounts that exceeded half the entire season’s normal precipitation in places like Ndutu.

The drought ended with devastating downpours. The Serengeti Super Storm that we experienced just a few days ago may be unprecedented.

The flip-flopping of extreme climate: droughts to floods to droughts, decimates animal populations as we discovered this year with the wildebeest. It endangers and enrages animals, as we discovered with several elephant events.

But most significantly, it’s destroying people’s lives.

Though my second safari saw a Tanzania as pretty and green and lush as I have ever seen, the withered and stunted crops that had survived a traditional schedule of planting at the beginning of the rainy season had already succumbed to the drought.

Not just agriculture is disrupted. In my own industry, tourism, extreme weather and unpredictable flip-flopping of season terribly disrupts property management that has until now depended so much on predictable seasons.

Building and renovations – particularly on the exteriors of lodges and camps – have traditionally been done at the end of the rainy season, which coincides with a lingering low tourist season: May and early June.

Landscaping, tempering of murramed walkways and gravel paths, sealing of tarred thatching … these depend on a wetter environment that have traditionally occurred at the beginning of the rainy season.

But now it’s anyone’s guess as to when it will rain or not. And when it does, it’s so severe that traditional construction methods are jeopardized.

You can’t understand global warming by any one moment. Senator Inhofe’s foolery on the Senate floor challenging the veracity of global warming by heaving a snowball is the basest of stupidity.

The main result and symptom of global warming is radical changes in climate. Yes, the world is slowly warming and that has many long term effects.

But short term devastation is not the result of warming, but of extremes: more violent weather, more cold then more hot, more drought then more floods, following on the heals of one another quicker and quicker.

That’s the horror I witnessed this season in Africa, and I felt ashamed and embarrassed at how my society at home seems so insensitive to this and therefore terribly inhumane to the less fortunate of the world.

We’re much more capable of protecting Brooklyn from the violence and rising of the sea than islanders can protect Honiara. We can react more immediately to changes in our fishing seas, to threats to our agriculture and even just to the disruptions of our commute to work than any place in Africa can.

So we kick the can down the road with greater confidence that the road spans a long enough period of time that something can be figured out: that new technologies, or new political alliances or who knows what will ultimately come to our rescue.

Africa can’t wait. The wilderness, the animals, the people … they don’t have the luxuries of our development.

Climate change is killing them far more effectively than ebola or ISIS.

10 thoughts on “Snow Ball from Hell

  1. We just had a guest last weekend who did not believe in climate change- very scary because otherwise he had good sense. I will forward your blog to my list.

    Thanks Les and Joyce.

  2. I am afraid that climate change denial in the USA is a combination of our divisive politics, economic fear and just sheer ignorance.

  3. I agree with you wholeheartedly, Jim. Climate change, global warming, more big ‘swings’ from drought to flood, hot and cold, devastation from fire, flooding & extremes. The results are affecting all aspects of the world from people to animals.

  4. Gives me hope to see you call climate change the most important issue of our time! Keep spreading the word. If we all keep saying it, it will become the norm. We also need to do something about it – and that can start with each one of us. I just read that in the Midwest we have a 20% higher carbon footprint than the rest of the US… We’re addressing climate change at this year’s Earth day fest at Turner Hall: Wed., April 29th, 9am to 8pm. Potluck at 5pm followed by speaker on climate change, be there!

  5. Fareed Zakaria interviewed Jeffrey Sachs yesterday (CNN) on why he claims that we MUST act on global warming in 2015. Pretty fascinating.

  6. Jim, story has to be particularly frustrating if you can’t get it told. Bud Davis

  7. Brisbane in QLD Australia now has mosquito borne Ross River fever to the extent of which we’ve never known before. Weather patterns have changed. Because of climate change people have put in rain-water tanks. The mosquitos are breeding in the many new tanks. Thanks, Jim.
    Bet.

  8. The world suffers as greenhouse gases increase. In the US Senate, the majority leader sends letters to our nation’s governors token on using coal in power plants which are the largest sources of carbon and mercury in the atmosphere. Short term self interest trumps our future.
    The carbon now being released by burning fossil fuels was once in the atmosphere and was removed by plant life millions of years ago. At that time, the earth was a very inhospitable place. Knowing that elements are not created but only recombined, it is rather simple to understand how the removal fossil fuels burried in the earth and their release into the atmosphere moves the world’s envirnonment in a direction that was present millions of years ago. Climate change deniers just do not understand the planet’s equilibrium or the laws of thermodynamics. How many years will it take to make those in positions of political power to understand their responsibility?

  9. I couldn’t agree with u more, Jim. The USA spends their time arguing about whether or not there is climate change at all. I am in FL for the winter and the governor (Scott) has banned his staff from ever using the term climate change! Can u believe this goes on in America??

  10. Jim, Very distressing, but also very important to counter the “where’s the warming” crowd who just suffered a cold Chicago winter.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.