Samuel Ogundipe: Gov. Fashola and the global warming hoax

Posted By TheScoop on March 6, 2013

by Samuel Ogundipe

The average Nigerian, especially one who’s apolitical, would most likely harbour the assumption that Lagos Governor Fashola is among the most brilliant state executives in Nigeria.

The average Nigerian is more likely to harbour this assumption if he or she has never seen the governor dabble into the matter of basic science.

Understandably, Lagos is surrounded entirely by archipelago and the Atlantic, which minimally justifies the governor’s attention to the issue of heavy rainfall. But a thorough vetting of the governor’s pronouncements on the weather exposes him as being merely emotional.

During an appearance at the Fourth Climate Change Summit paid for by the state ministry of environment, Governor Fashola lamented the perils of climate change and called for the human race to swiftly do something to alter it.

“Many of us are living witnesses to the 16 hours of rainfall that occurred in Lagos on July 10, 2011, and the deaths and destruction left behind,” said the governor. “On August 26, last year, an unusually heavy rainstorm ravaged some parts of Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, resulting in floods that destroyed many lives and property.”

Then the governor put it down to climate change.

In as much as we can agree that the claim on the heavy rainfall made by the governor is true, the idea that climate change is the reason behind these rainfalls is parenthetically preposterous.

And the governor did not tell us if the rainfalls he alluded to were so unusual as to be unprecedented.

But there’s more.

“This is not limited to Nigeria”, continues Mr. Fashola. ” All over the world, we are waking up almost daily to news of devastation by floods that experts seem neither able to predict nor explain.”

No, they can neither “predict”, nor “explain” because the issue of climate change is as natural and as old as the earth itself. And I believe this is the more reason the governor should have taken more of his time doing something better than wasting it in trying to change the complicated system of Mother Nature.

But I digress:

“We have been told to expect about 236 days of rainfall this year and the intensity of recent rainstorms are pointers to the fact that the rain may fall with even greater fury this year.”

Really? The same scientist that couldn’t “predict” nor “explain” the climate underpinning can be relied upon to pontificate about the amount of rain we should expect and devastation it could wrought? Is Governor Fashola channelling his inner Fox Butterfield? That’s a rhetorical question, I know.

But let’s, for the sake of argument, agree with the governor on the last statement that scientist can accurately predict our climatic conditions. So how accurate are they? The history hold sway.

An article that appeared in Newsweek in 1975 titled “The Cooling World” was even more alarming than Governor Fashola’s cry about the armageddon that humans will witness if no immediate action is taken to curb our excessive use of the planet’s resources: “Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend… But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

We all know how that turned out, after all we’re a decade and 3 years into another century.

A New York Times article, under the header: “Another Ice Age?”, from 1974 also raised the same overwrought alarm.

“When meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe, they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.”

Again, that alarm turned out to be a mere theory that holds no bearing to reality, as most theories usually end up.

Scientist predicted that there could be another Ice Age and agricultural famine by year 2000. But this is 2013 and, au contraire to what alarmists would have you believe, the weather has continued to change as it always have been, winter and summer. In fact, there has been no significant change in average earth temperature for the past 15 years, according to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.

There’s only one questions the ‘warmists’ have either surreptitiously avoided or outrightly ignored: if the earth is getting too hot, or too cold, as a result of human activities, especially post industrial revolution, what caused the Ice Age to cease to exist? Since the Ice Age disappeared long before human ever walked on the planet.

Nigeria is a signatory to the failed 1991 Kyoto Protocol that was designed to force a significant reduction of carbondioxide output by all nations of the earth. The United States was not a signatory to that edict, but countries like China, India, South Africa and Brazil all signed up to it without noticeable enforcement of the said protocol. While these errant countries have seen significant growth in their manufacturing output, Nigeria, a strong adherent of it, has continue to wallow in the abyss of moribund economy.

Former American Vice President Albert Gore, the bastion of global warming propaganda, not only cruises around the world on a private jet but also have two large condos on the seaside, each equipped with central heating facilities.

The climate has always been warming and it will still continue to warm. The idea that human beings somehow have the ability to influence the activities of the ozone layer is a plain delusion.

Climategate was a 2009 scandal that reverberated across the world when it was revealed that scientists at East Anglia University resorted to cooking the books when they couldn’t find any evidence that climate is always changing. And to imagine that someone of Governor Fashola’s calibre would not only believe the global warming hoax but lends his voice in parroting the meme shows how hopelessly gullible he really is.

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One Comment

Mansur

March 6, 2013 at 6:12 pm

What really is the author of this article trying to say? That the earth is not warming or that Governor Fashola is somehow unworthy of his office because he believes it is?

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