Project ClimateLearn Blog

By SinmilOluwa Okunade   “What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” —Henry David Thoreau The year is 2021, you have just come out of hiding and now have access to the internet. Amongst the many things the netizens are raving about, climate change seems to be a regular. You see ads mention eco-friendly , and save the planet campaigns are a thing. The colour green is being used to describe gases and energy, things that did not have colours before you went into hiding. Well, Welcome back! Let us start with the international headliner: Climate Change . This phenomenon that nearly everyone seems to be (rightly) agitating about is a long-term change in the average weather patterns that have come to define the Earth's local, regional, and global climates. Simply put, it is a change in the normal weather patterns of a place over a long period. Let’s say your hometown is Wasinmi, in Ogun State Nigeria, and the harmattan season usually starts...

  On some days, I sit back and try to imagine what the Earth was like many years ago- with little or no technology, dense forests, crude tools, minimal carbon emissions, and simple lives. I would not necessarily choose that life over my current one, but if I could take anything from it, it would be the clean, fresh air they breathed then. As someone who has lived most of his life in the Lagos metropolis, I have come to relish the clean air that greets me whenever I visit less populated areas. Familar surroundings of Lagos, Nigeria  SOURCE: techpoint.africa This article does not aim to compare city life to rural life but to highlight the need to take individual action to tackle climate change. If you are reading this, then you are probably using the internet, so it is safe to assume that you have at some point heard about climate change and its effects on life as we know it. While most of the world’s internet-serviced population has heard about climate change, whether or not ...

The time is 10:15 pm. There is no electricity, and my neighbour's generator set is on. I can barely think through the noise, so I try to sleep instead, but even that is proving to be too much to handle. It feels as though the sweltering heat is accentuating the noise of the generator. I can hardly believe that the month is December. The rainy season should be giving way to the cool Harmattan wind, but it's hard to say if there was a rainy season at all. The rains came and went so haphazardly for several months that I wonder how our farmers have coped since most of Nigeria’s agriculture is rain-fed.   I suppose these variations are largely due to global warming. I have read of melting Arctic sea ice, deforestation in the Amazon and the boreal forests of Canada and Russia, and the loss of coral reefs, but I have never quite understood how these events affect me. It was not long ago that they felt so far away, but this present discomfort brings it close to home. It is amazin...