Year 2, Month 9, Day 20: We Do Not Think About Things We Do Not Think About!

The September 13 Boston Globe runs an AP article on climate change’s impact on Africa:

JOHANNESBURG—International climate change negotiators in Africa later this year will be looking back on the famine now sweeping eastern parts of the continent, and ahead to predictions that climate change will hurt Africa’s future food production, a World Bank expert said Tuesday.

“The challenges are overwhelming,” Andrew Steer, the World Bank’s special envoy on climate change, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“Africa needs to triple food production by 2050,” he said. “At the same time, you’ve got climate change lowering average yields …. So, of course, we need something different.”

We live in the USA. We don’t need to think about these things.

Sent September 16:

US citizens, isolated by geography from many of the most immediately devastating effects of global warming, don’t take the climate crisis as seriously as it deserves. But Africa’s future on a climate-changed planet is deeply troubling to contemplate, and it offers us a glimpse of what the coming decades and centuries hold for all of us.

Increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather will impact American agriculture severely: the combination of unseasonal storms and giant factory farms spells food shortages and spiking prices. Our already crumbling infrastructure will also be subjected to enormously greater stresses; the days of taking our roads, water systems, power lines and other public works for granted are going to end very soon.

While Africa’s agony may seem far away, it offers a disturbing preview of coming attractions in a warming world. We must no longer avert our gaze as the climate crisis assumes profound humanitarian dimensions.

Warren Senders