Climate change: US versus the Rest of the world
At the moment, American government and the nation’s big business are the best of friends. Known for a fact that whatever American Establishment does not like, it bashes until it becomes pulp, the current campaign against
global warming has become its latest victim. The business lobby on government policies as regard global warming is working. As early as 1992 when nations gathered in Brazil’s city of Rio de Janeiro in order to come up with a joint effort to combat the effects of global emissions, America had stood aloof proffering its own nation solutions to a world-wide problem. Pronouncements from the White House ever since make that government the only that has proved unwilling to see the clear and present danger of global warming even when industrialized nations such as UK are falling into line.
Global warming, depletion of ozone layer and the consequent bizarre climatic changes have been a leading item on the list of concerns of environmental campaigners for some time. This has been the case ever since the first series of concrete evidence emerged that
man is the single most dangerous contributor to the ruin of his own environment. Flooding has been identified as a fall out of how man’s activities
damage earth’s natural defenses against disasters that are due to
Climate change. Desertification is another. And there are the great glaciers that defreeze, add to the body of water in the oceans, thereby putting coastal areas around the world such as Lagos at greater risk of going under the sea in a matter of decades. There are the health hazards too. The human skin is increasingly left defenseless against radiation as the ozone layer that natural offers protection from the rays of the sun is depleted. Skin cancer and such like have been mentioned as one of the outcomes. Rain patterns are noted to be affected. The situation is such that even a farmer in the village could vouch that something untoward has happened to the previously-known pattern in rainfall. The thing has simply gone haywire; it’s pattern is not what it used to be. And what of environmental pollution of land water and the air? The overall effect is that as man continues to cause damage to his environment, quickening ecological decline, he puts both the survival of himself and his kind at risk.
It’s no wonder that climate changes took a turn for the worse at a time when man begins to congratulate himself on his scientific and technological advances, at a period he celebrates his prowess. While, for instance, it is estimated that man leapt forward by a century into the future with the making and successful
detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, not many gave much thought to how much damage that single detonation did to the man’s earth. Many in Hiroshima and Nagasaki still suffer the after-effect of that detonation more than fifty years after.
More reviews about the Daily Trust