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Stephen Mpofu Correspondent
In New York city earlier this week Americans staged their biggest demonstration in years to protest mother Earth’s inexorable heating up, so intense it threatens to unleash recurrent droughts and flooding catastrophic to continued, normal human existence. As the demonstrators surged forward along their chosen path chanting with loud voices to draw the worlds

attention to their concerns, their country’s war planes and those of their allies in Europe and the Arab world were bombing positions of terrorists fighting to turn the Middle East into an Islamic state, decapitating Western journalists, killing countless numbers of other people or destroying their homes in a religious frenzy.

Ironically, however, Americans have long remained conspicuously silent when they ought to have directed their ire at their own government, and the governments of other industrial states in the West, that have together been responsible for a cosmic terrorism whose effects far exceed those of religious terrorism in the Arab world.

For it is America, and to a less extent other countries in the West whose actions are responsible for the terrorism in the cosmos, a phenomenon — that apparently to minimise its disastrous effects — people euphemistically call global warming.

It was America as the largest world economy which allowed its primitive factory chimneys to loose barrage after barrage of carbon gases into the atmosphere as long as the sleepy world mouthed no protest, with the result that the CO2 — laden fumes began slowly but surely to erode the ozone layer, a shield protecting earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays until that protective cover was worn virtually wafer thin.

As the carbon gases grew more concentrated in the atmosphere the suns rays could not bounce back from earth with the result that the globe started to heat up and in the process triggering floods and droughts and diseases across many parts of the globe.

In Zimbabwe this year, for instance, people have complained of uncharacteristically cold spells in August and September which have been attributed to global warming with fears that the southern parts of Zimbabwe might have less rainfall in the second half of the rainy season.

The culprits in the West initially remained unwilling to modify the chimneys to curb large volumes of toxic fumes being spewed into the atmosphere.
They feared that costs incurred in revolutionising the chimneys would be passed on to their products, making these uncompetitive on the world market because of their high prices, hence the lackadaisical approach by the countries in question in modernising their factories.

As the offending developed countries remained cosily perched on the fence they resorted to scape-goating tactics to cover up their own contribution to global warming by wagging accusing fingers at emerging economies, such as China, India, Brazil for instance, for contributing more to global warming with unrestricted emissions of carbon gases.

Of course, other developing countries, including those in Africa, among them Zimbabwe, were also dragged into the equation by the Big Brother original offenders for polluting the air with emissions from refrigerators as well as with smoke from veld fires that Africans in particular use to hunt with as well as to burn grass in pastures so as to scatter the seeds for fluffy new grass to germinate for their livestock.

It is no exaggeration to suggest, therefore, that veld fires are a mere aggravation vis-à-vis global warming although it must also be stated with equanimity that deforestation so rampant in Africa, Zimbabwe included — as people cut trees for firewood for sale particularly in urban areas or clear woodlands for cropping land and new homesteads — seriously alters rainfall patterns, causing droughts in seriously affected areas.

But the genesis of global warming by developed nations causes effects that remain too ghastly to contemplate. Take the calculations of scientists, for instance; CO2 potentially remains in the atmosphere for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Which means that even though the less developed countries contributed less the accumulation of carbon gases originally pumped into the air would still have devastating consequential effects. This pen in no way whatsoever does not say the cumulative effects of carbon emissions by developing countries together are inconsequential in as far as global warming go.
Still, this pen feels that it is incumbent upon industrial nations, as an atonement or reparation for their original environmental sin, to make available human expertise and capital to smaller nations for the latter to mitigate as well as prevent the effects of global warming.

Together, the haves and have nots have a greater chance of survival on the face of this earth, divided they will ultimately stare demise in the eye with no other earth available for humanity to call home.