Sudden temperature flips manifesting in the form of extreme cold to warm and vice versa have increased four to six times higher than the global average
On climate change, man has three options: one, mitigation, that is reduce greenhouse gas emissions, two, adaptation, meaning learn how to live on a hotter, more hostile planet with less potable water and more flooded coastlines, or, three, suffering, which is basically to die, starve, drown and otherwise shed a lake of tears.
These are the options famously outlined at the 2007 UN climate conference by John Holdren, Barrack Obama’s science advisor, and quoted in the editorial of the MIT Technology Review of June 2019.
The human race will likely lose the mitigation war. Clean energies will not replace fossil fuels, not in sufficient quantities to make any appreciable impact on warming, and not fast enough before the heating reaches a point of no return.
The Review is skeptical that fancy new technologies — such as systems to reflect light back in space — will make a significant dent. Besides, the growth in energy demand by fast growing developing countries will eat up whatever gains will have been made.
In 2019, India had 75 gigawatts of renewable energy installed, and another 45 gigawatts planned.
Some 55 per cent of its energy then came from coal and even with its massive solar parks, it was squaring up to challenge the US to become the world’s biggest emitter.
Between 2019 and 2040, India’s GDP was expected to increase four-fold, doubling its energy demand. Carbon emissions by India’s power sector, in some estimates, are expected to increase by 80 per cent by 2040, according to the Review.
I am citing these examples to make the point that not enough has been done to slow down emissions and cool the planet; perhaps not enough can be done. The Review devoted an issue to climate, titled Welcome to Climate Change.
I subscribe to The New York Times as a political statement, I no longer read it. Good, quality journalism needs to be supported to survive and I’m happy to pay for that.
I subscribe to The Review too and I read every edition, perhaps not always with perfect understanding, but with wonder and interest: it leaves me feeling little bit better informed about things I consider important. It’s archive of past issues is a treasure.
Which brings us to the other options — adaptation and suffering — which speak to me. I’m interested in farming in a relatively marginal area and getting a front row seat as those two dramas play out.
For us, climate change is not just a question of the rains failing, that is a simple problem we can address with water harvesting and irrigation.
It is the rains coming too early, ruining the harvest, and since we have (at most) a 90-day wet season, making the season even shorter.
Or the rains being too heavy, washing away valuable soils and destroying legumes. It’s hotter and the rains are not the friend they used to be.
Adaptation for us is breeding sturdy crop varieties which can weather those perilous conditions. Yams can, so can cow peas (kunde) and my favourite, pigeon peas (mbaazi) which seem to thrive when the sun is at its hottest and the soil is sandy and nothing else can grow.
Arrow roots, certain varieties of sweet potato and cassava varieties are not only hardy, but they are also nutrient dense.
Food is not our biggest problem; with a bit of encouragement, we can produce, and hopefully eat, enough traditional foods, those whose seed has not been buggered by multinationals.
The most important cash crop for us today is coffee — good, productive, andas-filled arabica, black as the devil and with a kick like a mule.
Andas, in street Kimeru, is the hallucinatory magic in miraa, which turns mice into lions. If the quality is good and the bolus on the cheek large enough, it can make a man soar to the heavens and visit distant galaxies.
I have always assumed, without solid evidence, that all these soft robustas produced in Vietnamese wetlands and suited to delicate Asian constitutions are lacking in andas.
The need for hardy coffee varieties is almost desperate, demand is growing, the Chinese are spitting out the green tea and reaching for a latte, but the lands suitable for coffee are expected to decline by 50 per cent by 2050.
The Review reports a breakthrough from Costa Rica where researchers have produced a hybrid coffee variety called Centroamericano which yields 20 per cent more per acre than traditional varieties, resists coffee leaf rust disease and tolerates frost very well.
I read about a start-up in Singapore which is making coffee, or something that tastes like coffee, by fermenting food waste.
The way that start-up has read the tea leaves, soaring temperatures, new diseases and other environmental troubles, make coffee an endangered crop, just when the palates of the world are getting used to it.
Apparently, climate change presents an existential crisis to coffee growing. For us, that is what our option, adaptation, boils down to.
If we can figure out a way to continue growing coffee, it doesn’t matter how much oil they burn, we’ll suffer happy.
