What is the appropriate balance between our responsibilities towards future generations, and our obligations towards those suffering today?  To Africans, this is the central dilemma of global warming, one on which  the rich and the poor have different perspectives. The wealthy emphasize imminent environmental disasters, and “adaptation and mitigation” policies.  From an African perspective, this approach sends our children, most of whom live in abject poverty, the unfortunate message that their inheritance will be environmental disasters, and advice on how to cope.  We owe our children, not messages of gloom and doom, but promises of a better and brighter future.  Africans are therefore obliged to regard global warming, not as a threat, but as an opportunity to address a host of urgent problems.  We can learn how to cope  with potential floods and droughts  by dealing with those occurring right now.  We can create jobs and new business opportunities by exploring alternate energy sources. Above all global warming is an excellent vehicle for the promotion of education, the key to the alleviation of poverty,  by far the most urgent priority in Africa.

Education is most effective if it involves everyone  (school children, their parents, laymen in general, and scholars at universities) and  if it deals with issues and phenomena all of us care about dearly. Since we all love and cherish nature, and wish to be responsible custodians of this remarkable planet, the Earth is  an ideal focus for an educational program.

Africa, an ideal place to understand climate change and cop with it

We wish to be wise stewards of our planet but, unfortunately, are handicapped because we have to take, on faith, the alarms that scientists sound without comprehending the scientific reasons. Our response to the threat of global warming  will be far more effective if it were motivated by a rudimentary understanding of why the Earth is  habitable.  Furthermore, learning about planet Earth  is a vehicle for teaching  mathematics, chemistry and physics while discovering that  the familiar, natural  world around us is full of mysteries and wonders.  This is an opportune time for such a program because the earth sciences are entering an exciting new phase. What used to be separate disciplines are now being integrated in order to understand why ours is a habitable planet, and how human activities are affecting it. Those disciplines may have daunting names — meteorology, oceanography, biology, geology etc. — but they deal with phenomena familiar to everyone, the winds and clouds, hills and valleys, plants and animals, oceanic waves and currents.

The ideal place to study these topics is  Africa whose astonishing biodiversity depends on a variety of climatic zones that in turn depend on the three strikingly different surrounding oceans. Whereas the western coast of southern Africa is cold and highly productive, the eastern coast is warm and has entirely different species, while the under-explored Southern Ocean absorbs much of the carbon dioxide humans inject into the atmosphere. An African climate center for studies of the continent, the surrounding oceans, and the interactions between them, will have its own niche in the competitive world of science, and can be an internationally recognized  center of excellence,  a beacon that attracts students to science. Many of the gifted young scientists who should populate such a center are, at present, unaware that science can be a career. They need to be identified and nurtured.

Gilbert Walker and famine in India, an example from History and climate science

For Africans to deal effectively with global warming they should be, not merely the recipients of advice, but participants in discussions of how we can best cope with this problem.  Africans suffer from an excess of advice, a paucity of opportunities, especially in education. What we need are their own centers of excellence, beacons that attract students and boost their self-esteem, that help Africans articulate their own voice on environmental issues for example.

To appreciate why  Africans should have their own voice, consider how India learnt to deal with the horrendous famines that plagued that country in the 19th and early part of the 20th century.
The famines, that led to the  deaths of millions of people, were associated with   reduced crop production, a consequence of sporadic failures of the  monsoons. The British, while they were in charge of India, saw accurate predictions of the monsoons as an important step towards a solution. To that end, the  young Cambridge  mathematician Gilbert  Walker was sent to India after the famine of 1899. He made important discoveries concerning  the Southern Oscillation, but was unable to develop methods for the prediction of the monsoons. A century later the monsoons still defy accurate predictions, and still fail occasionally, but for several decades now there have been no massive famines. The solution to the problem of Indian famines depended critically on India becoming an independent democracy, responsible on its own for evaluating scientific information concerning possible failure of the monsoons, and for developing policies to cope with such potential problems. Indians are now able to cope even in the absence of precise predictions. Accurate scientific information is of course invaluable, but the use of any scientific information can not be divorced from the social, cultural, economic and historical factors that are unique to each country. This is the compelling reason why Africa needs its own voice on issues related to global warming.