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Opinion: Climate change may be a political game for the West, but for us it's real

Ever since former US Vice-President Al Gore toured the globe with his scary rendition of what a post apocalyptic climate chaos world would look like, Climate Change has been hijacked by various interest groups for political gain. From this ensued a confusing, debilitating worldwide bickering, entertaining to some extent, but extremely harmful for us in Africa.

Climate Change is real. Regardless of the terminology, the perceptible changes in meteorological base values are well documented by scientists. Whether you call it Climate Change or Climate Modification, it is an empirical fact that all metrics have undergone a significant shift over the past fifty years compared to the 200 years before that. Whether it stems from human activity or the natural cycles of creation, it is there and it is more visible every year.

I know that there are various schools of thought in climatology and that these are not in agreement. Some say climate change is as natural as the tides, only on much longer timeframes, others say it is all bogus and only propagated by a handful of scientists on the payrolls of large corporations. The former deny the facts, while the latter tend to cry wolf over every new iceberg that separates itself from the Larsen C shelf. Still there are a growing number of scientists linking the earth’s cooling and warming phases to conditions on the sun, convincingly indicating that the quanta of energy released by the sun over many years are on the decline.

CIFOR

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