Like the Christian missionaries of old, Justin Rowlatt journeys to the benighted ‘Dark’ Continent to bring glad tidings of green salvation to endemic problems of constant warfare and poverty. Climate change is “turbo-charging” problems in Somalia, but there is hope in harnessing the bountiful breezes and sun beams, the BBC’s High Priest of Climate Alarm reports. Somalia is not always an easy place in which to live, but as usual with the neo-missionaries of Gaia worship the state-funded saviour of souls confuses individual weather events with long-term climate changes. His message of a changing climate bringing woe and misfortune might collect more believers if the five-year average temperature in the country in 2022 was not almost the same as that recorded in 1922 – 26.98°C compared to 26.92°C. No change there to worry about – or in the amount of rainfall, since the 1991-2020 period was more or less the same as that recorded 100 years ago.
If rising temperatures are your thing, Somalia is probably the worst country you could pick to peddle an existential climate crisis, as the World Bank graph above shows. Along with static precipitation, a current average 277.8 mm per year compared to 271.1 mm between 1901-1930, the country can hardly be said to have a turbo-charged changing climate – stationary climate might be a better description.
But the ghouls descend of course because the country is frequently affected by drought. In 2022, Rowlatt notes that the country was hit by the worse drought in 40 years, an event that “scientists estimate” was made 100 times more likely by humans-caused climate change. Scientists can estimate what they like but they have no way of proving that claim. Attribution computer models are of little more use than the Augers were to the Emperors of Ancient Rome. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cannot identify human involvement in drought, or in most other natural weather events. In 1992 there was severe famine in Somalia caused by drought and war, while the infamous Abaartil Dabadheer drought between 1973-75 is said to have affected half of the population.
In fact, Somalia is not a complete basket-case, as is sometimes suggested in Western media. The agricultural sector is the backbone of the economy. Its rich southern soils, particularly in the riverine areas, are said to support the year-round production of cereals, pulses, vegetables and fruit. The recent rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, natural and human-caused, has been a great help in boosting plant growth, as the map below shows.
The world is ‘greening’ at an astonishing rate, with particularly vibrant plant growth in Somalia and eastern Africa. In a recent article in Yale Environment 360 it was noted that CO2 was “fast-tracking” photosynthesis in plants, allowing them to use scarce water more efficiently.
Rowlatt reports accurately that Somalia has been torn apart in the last 30 years by overlapping conflicts, including an Islamist insurgency, a civil war and a series of regional and clan confrontations. Climate change is acting as a “chaos multiplier”, making existing conflicts “even more acute”, he claims. “The entwined impacts of climate and conflict have created a huge reservoir of potential recruits for the country’s many conflicts,” he argues. Over at the National Energy Corporation, Rowlatt reports that energy from natural sources like the sun and wind “are much better value than the diesel generators the power stations used to rely on”.
Possibly some Africans would have asked Rowlatt why electricity prices In Europe have rocketed as more wind and solar is added to the grid, with the added prospects of mass blackouts and de-industrialisation. If so, he does not report it. As many Africans are starting to realise, most ‘green’ power technologies are a luxury belief held by rich pampered people who have little idea how perilous human society can be and still is for many around the world. Intermittent power is a lousy solution for societies desperate to increase wealth, not to mention a need to run basic 24-hour facilities such as clean water and sewerage plants.
Rowlatt is not the first BBC activist to promote these useless technologies in Africa. Fresh from his green billionaire-funded re-education sabbatical at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, BBC Verify climate reporter Marco Silva smeared a Kenyan subsistence farmer as a climate change ‘denier’. Jusper Machogu is a rising social media presence and his core argument is: “Do I and a billion and half other Africans deserve the good life? Bet ya!” But can we do that minus access to life saving fossil fuels? he asks. “A big no!” Ben Pile had the full story last June here in the Daily Sceptic. Cartoonist Josh had this take.
One of the great early sceptics of the Net Zero fantasy was the late Lord Lawson, who set up the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Writing in 2015, he noted that hundreds of millions of people suffered in dire poverty in the developing world. Asking these countries to abandon the cheapest available sources of energy is, at the very least, he said, asking them to delay the conquest of malnutrition, to perpetuate the incidence of preventable diseases and to increase the number of premature deaths. “Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational! It is wicked,” he added.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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