I don’t believe in climate change. I recently mentioned this to a young adult American woman (23 years old). She said, “Uh, huh”, but clearly thought I was wrong.

I said to her, look, it’s like this: the world always needs an enemy to fight. So we had ‘power lines cause cancer’, ‘bird flu’, ‘swine flu’, Y2k and now climate change (which used to be ‘global warming’, but this was altered to ‘climate change’ when it was found that some places were not warming at all). I said climate change had too many error bars. Michael Mann and three others, in a landmark 1998 paper on climate change, reconstructed global temperatures going back about 500 years, producing an ice-hockey-stick-like graph of global temperatures that showed a sharp upswing beginning in the 1900s.

For temperatures before 1700 AD, much reliance has to be placed on tree-ring data – the colder the year, the closer the growth rings on a tree. In this record, 1500 AD to 1900 AD was 1 °C colder than, say, 300 AD to 800 AD. But, in producing his graph, he didn’t examine trees in greater Africa. No trees in Australia. His paper is titled ‘Northern Hemisphere Temperatures during the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations’. You see that? ‘Northern Hemisphere’. Not ‘The Whole World’. But when you see the hockey-stick graph, you assume it’s worldwide.

But the 23-year-old American doesn’t buy it. She knows what she has been taught. She hadn’t heard of Y2k. But the climate change movement is rich – rich in research grants, rich in trips to conferences at international destinations. And never ending. If somebody says to an engineer that “1500 AD to 1900 AD was 1 °C colder than, for example, 300 AD to 800 AD”, they would be laughed at because any proof of this would be very contrived. So, who cares anyway? Global temperatures will be 1 °C higher in the next 30 years? Does anybody really care? Or do we get told that a 1 °C increase will cause Cape Town to flood over? Really?

There are things we should worry about but, unlike climate change, they are not rich in research grants, among others. Take electricity: less than 10% of sub-Saharan Africa’s rural population has access to electricity. In 2010, the total power generation in sub- Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, was 33 000 MW. South Africa’s alone is 40 000 MW.

With these figures, there is heavy reliance on paraffin. This is fairly expensive and lighting not very good. And yet there are some wonderful solar-powered lamps. These should be distributed in their millions. They are long-lasting and robust (we have experiments to this effect). But nothing happens.

Much of Africa relies on wood for cooking. And there are some wonderful simple wood stoves which burn twigs and bark and can cook a pot of rice as fast as by any other means. These should be distributed in their millions. But nothing happens.

It is well known that the plastic carrier bag is a great source of African pollution. It would be a small matter to design a reusable bag which is ultimately biodegradable. But nothing happens.

There are many other things: malarial repellants, water filtration, compost activation systems, hygiene aids, reading glasses – all of which would improve life in Africa. But they all get ignored, since they don’t fit into the money-making roundabout of renewable energy for countries which are already electrified, conferences to support arcane research and grants to study matters which are of no real help at all. These should come last. You may say, “What is more important than solving global warming?” Well, I say, 1.5 °C in 40 years? Let’s fix Africa now. Greta Thunberg is famous for saying: “How dare you!” I agree with her. Ignore the problems in Africa that we can solve? How dare you!