In this remote town in Mali, climate change takes on a sinister reality | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | The Guardian
For years now, the elders explain, they have been worried by climate change. Disrupted rain patterns, shifts in winds have no parallel in collective memory; they notice how it is prompting changes in the behaviour of animals and birds. But all of these anxieties are dwarfed by the sand dune now looming above their town – the result of those drier, fierce winds and erratic, intense rainfall.
... Back in Bamako, a government spokesperson wanted compensation put on the agenda in Cancún. It's only a matter of time before the demand for compensation becomes the rallying cry for a new generation of activists – not just in Africa, but across the globe.
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Unable to sleep one night, I tuned into BBC World Service and heard a very articulate spokesman for the Kenya pastoralists' association (more or less ranchers) claiming the same thing.
Usually they could forecast the weather and move their stock accordingly, using "ancestral wisdom". Now the ancestral wisdom did not work, so it was the fault of the carbon in the sky and they would like their compensation please, preferably now because it was urgent.
There have been long, unforeseen "extreme weather events" throughout African history at least from the time of Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dream of seven lean years.. ("ancestral wisdom", perhaps?.
It is only guilt-ridden Western civilisation with its present cultural death wish which would pay the slightest heed to these aggressive mendicants in these terms. Humanitarian aid is another matter but not to be extracted by moral blackmail.
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