Nigeria is hereby under review ecologically. Before going further , the animals whose pictures appear above namely:- the cheetah, the pygmy hippo, the giant eland, the black rhino and the giraffe, have all disappeared from Nigerian landscape in recent times. Infact a policeman shot the last giraffe in former Gongola state of Nigeria.

An estimated 484 plant species in 112 families, including many medical and fruit trees, are also threatened with extinction because of habitat destruction and deforestation.

Climate threat is therefore no longer open to debate.

Even the Lake Chad which supports millions of people has shrunken from 30,000sq km in 1960 to a mere 2,500sq km. Boko Haram nightmare, may be a fallout of this phenomenon. Local notion must have concluded that the West caused the evaporation of the life sustaining Lake Chad. Idleness breeds aggression.

The nomad Fulani, who now meander through human and vehicular traffic in West African cities seeking arms, have lost their value system irretrievably to the ever encroaching Sahara .

The cattle egrets which have since trailed the disappearing nomad to the cities have adapted to the city refuse dumps and squalid abattoirs. Their color has since changed from sparkling white to something else.

Its indeed unfortunate that the vicious circle linking population, poverty and ecological degradation has eventually caught up with both the urban and rural poor as they struggle to eke a living with scanty resources. With corruption blocking every available source of development, the existing vices have elevated to kidnapping and terrorism. Emma.Chigbo Nwogbo

Washington -- The verdict is in: Global warming is real and greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity are the main cause.

This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, a MacArthur fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of other climatologists around the world came to such conclusions years ago, but the difference now is the source: Muller is a long-standing, colorful critic of prevailing climate science, and the Berkeley project was heavily funded by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along with its libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder Charles G. Koch, has a considerable history of backing groups that deny climate change.

In an opinion piece in Saturday's New York Times titled "The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic," Muller writes:

"Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

The Berkeley project's research has shown, Muller says, "that the average temperature of the earth's land has risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1 degree over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases."

He calls his current stance "a total turnaround."

Tonya Mullins, a spokeswoman for the Koch Foundation, said the support her foundation provided, along with others, has no bearing on results of the research.

"Our grants are designed to promote independent research; as such, recipients hold full control over their findings," Mullins said in an email. "In this support, we strive to benefit society by promoting discovery and informing public policy."

Some leading climate scientists said Muller's comments show that the science is so strong that even those inclined to reject it cannot once they examine it carefully.

Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said Muller's conversion might help shape the thinking of the "reasonable middle" of the population "who are genuinely confused and have been honestly taken in" by attacks on climate science.

On his Facebook page, Mann wrote: "There is a certain ironic satisfaction in seeing a study funded by the Koch Brothers -- the greatest funders of climate change denial and disinformation on the planet -- demonstrate what scientists have known with some degree of confidence for nearly two decades: that the globe is indeed warming, and that this warming can only be explained by human-caused increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. I applaud Muller and his colleagues for acting as any good scientists would, following where their analyses led them, without regard for the possible political repercussions."

Muller's conclusions, however, did not sway the most ardent climate contrarians, like Marc Morano, a former producer for Rush Limbaugh and former communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

"Muller will be remembered as a befuddled professor who has yet to figure out how to separate climate science from his media antics. His latest claims provide no new insight into the climate science debate," Morano said in an email.

Muller's New York Times commentary follows research he did last year that confirmed the work of scientists who found that the Earth's temperature was rising. In the past, Muller had criticized which global temperatures had been used in such research, contending that some monitoring stations provided inaccurate data. Now, Berkeley's research has weighed in on the causes of the temperature rise, testing arguments that climate contrarians have used.

"What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of 2 degrees?" Muller writes. "We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice."

Muller asserted that his findings were "stronger" than those of the UN's intergovernmental panel. But neither Berkeley's research from last year nor the new findings on causality have been published in peer-reviewed journals, which has raised criticism and concerns among climatologists and contrarians alike.

Benjamin D. Santer, a climate researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a lead author of the 1995 UN climate report, said he welcomed the involvement of another research group into "detection and attribution" of climate change and its causes. But he said he found it troubling that Muller claimed such definitive results without his work undergoing peer-review.

"If you go into the public arena and claim to have generated evidence that is stronger than the IPCC, where is the detailed, scientific evidence? Has he used fundamental new data sets?" Santer said. "Publish the science and report on it after it's done."

He added: "I think you can do great harm to the broader debate. Imagine this scenario: that he makes these great claims and the papers aren't published? This is in the spirit of publicity, not the spirit of science."

Elizabeth Muller, co-founder and executive director of the Berkeley project and Richard Muller's daughter, said the papers had been peer-reviewed, but not yet published. But because of the long lead-up to publication, she said, the Berkeley team decided to place its papers online, in part to solicit comment from other scientists. The papers were posted on the BerkeleyEarth.org website on Sunday.

"I believe the findings in our papers are too important to wait for the year or longer that it could take to complete the journal review process," Elizabeth Muller wrote in an email. "We believe in traditional peer review; we welcome feedback from the public and any scientists who are interested in taking the time to make thoughtful comments. Our papers have received scrutiny by dozens of top scientists, not just the two or three that typically are called upon by journalists."

Once on the brink of extinction, these birds have made a triumphant comeback in the wild and are close to being taken off the list of threatened species.

Here is what made the eagle population decline in the first place. When humans began moving into their territory in the 1800's, humans hunted and fished causing less food for the eagles. People began cutting down forests to build houses and farms. Because of that some eagles began dying off due to lack of food and a shrinking habitat. Around the 1940's there was a sharp decline in the eagle population due to farmers using pesticides like DDT. This harmful pesticide was passed to animals like mice and other small animals when they would eat the plants that were treated and when the mice were hunted and eaten by the eagles they would ingest the poison. DDT caused sterility and death in eagles.

Another cause for the decline in the population of eagles were that power lines were placed too close together on high tension wire poles and when the eagles would land or try to take off, their wings would touch both wires at the same time and electrocute the birds. This became a big problem. When, in the 1960's, eagles had been placed on the endangered species list, things were done to preserve the eagles.

Over the years the power lines were replaced and spaced further apart to protect the eagles. DDT and other harmful pesticides were also banned from use. Laws were passed to preserve what eagles were left in the wild. US Fish & Wildlife Service put programs in place to reintroduce eagles to regions where the population had declined. Eagles were hatched in captivity and then reintroduced to the wild. By 1988 the program had been so successful that they no longer needed to breed them in captivity. The eagles were beginning to flourish again on their own. Their condition was then upgraded from endangered to threatened.

The American bald eagle continues to thrive because of the intervention of the US Fish & Wildlife Service, and because people decided to do their part to save these magnificent birds.