Still think climate change is a hoax? 23 million starving Africans disagree

As a definitive climate-change consequence, a four-year drought in East Africa is depleting 23 million Africans of food and water.

Although drought is common in East Africa, this new heightened frequency is cause for alarm. While the cycle of drought used to revolve in 10-year-intervals, now it is virtually constant. Scientists and government officials are attributing this dramatic shift to radical climate change.

Yes, climate change. Global warming. That nagging “Inconvenient Truth.”

The threat is real and is quickly encroaching on the lives of millions around the world. While we in the States are not directly feeling the impacts just yet, we soon will. As agricultural and water-supply devastation sweeps across the globe, our food and resource supplies will dwindle to nothing. On this small and fragile planet, East Africa is a lot closer than many will admit.

Emergency level threat

The dry lands of East Africa’s northern region are seeing its cattle collapse and die out from exhaustion, famine and thirst. Violence is breaking out over water rations and remaining livestock. Tourists visiting the area report home with images of barren landscapes littered with emaciated livestock.

Among the East Africans facing starvation, almost 4 million live in Kenya, where only one out of every ten people can survive on emergency rations. Kenya’s Rift Valley, typically an agricultural haven for the African nation, has been reduced to a wasteland.  While intermittent rainfall does little to nothing to bring relief, aid agencies are preparing for geological and health disasters like flooding, cholera, malaria and hypothermia.

“For the last four years these farmers have held on to hope, but each year been left with despair as the rains failed,” said Fergus Conmee, Africa humanitarian manager for the Catholic aid agency Cafod. “This humanitarian crisis has pushed them on to a tightrope of survival and many farming families have been left destitute.”

Even still, hope for survival seems to be repressed by greed and corruption – more human catalysts (and symptoms) of the global warming crisis.

The Kenyan government has been accused of not doing enough to strategize and properly ration grain reserve. Dwindling tea and coffee production are each devastating the economy. Earlier this year, thousands of corn sacks went missing, only to magically reappear in Sudan. Grumblings suggest that this was the work of politicians seeking favors – both financial and material – from shady traders.

No room for debate

As stories like this will undoubtedly continue to unfold across the globe in the coming months and years, we as Americans are forced to turn our attention to the hurdles surrounding the climate change crisis. As I wrote in an earlier post, this country seems to be the only one actually debating the global warming crisis; fighting over words and spinning our wheels while the rest of the world continues to take bold action against climate change in spite of its problematic, angry-adolescent neighbor.

Climate change deniers continue to litter the media airwaves with unjustified accounts of “experts” claiming that global warming either a) is not real; b) is not caused, at least in part, by human activities; and/or c) is real, but is natural and a good thing.

A good thing. Try telling that to the millions starving across the globe, watching their livestock wither to nothing and their communities crumble.

We all need to step up and into action. Write Congress, join local action groups – become an environmental steward, even if in the smallest of ways.

For more information on how you can impact the climate change crisis, visit www.theclimateproject.org.