“Last week the weather was five degrees Celsius above the normal average temperature, which is a very extreme temperature for this time of year,” he explains. Click to Graph 2. “From 1950 to 2015 average temperature in Senegal has gone up two degrees Celsius,” says Ndiaye, adding that the whole Paris U.N. climate conference was about how to avoid a two-degree rise in the global average temperature since the Industrial Revolution … and Senegal is already there.

Click. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “in 2010 gave four scenarios for Senegal, and the worst was unbelievable — and now,” he says, “the observation says we’re following that path even faster than we imagined, and it leads to four degrees Celsius rise in average temperature by 2100. People are still doubting climate change, and we are living it.” Click.

Matador’s most famous rap song is called “Tukki,” which means “trip.” It’s a migrant’s lament — the story of life as a tumbleweed. Africans have a long history of migration, but mostly within Africa and their own countries.

But the land and the climate cannot sustain enough of them anymore. And they don’t want a benefit concert in Central Park or Hyde Park. They want what they see on their cellphones — Europe, which involves a trek across the desert and a boat across the sea. But who can blame them?

Matador is torn between understanding his generation’s need to find work and money to send home and his gut instinct that it is better to be poor in one’s home than a stranger in a strange land — so stay and build Senegal. Some of the “Tukki” verses are:

Go to France to Belgium to Italy

To Spain to Switzerland to go to Denmark to the Netherlands

One must go to Germany

Norway Sweden China Japan Portugal go to Brazil

Mexico and Great Britain

All these places are great to earn a living

All work is noble all means are good to survive

Master the system and assert yourself

Play hide-and-seek with the police

In the blistering cold, one fights how one can …

Eating the leftovers from restaurants

You cannot return and you don’t know when you’ll get back

Illegal and undocumented who makes you think you’ll go back to your country

Everyone for himself and God for us all

Headphones screwed on your head ears blocked

A stare that reminds you that no one wants you here …

Ready to leave for better tomorrows and without hope

One ends up discouraged

A lot of money for a distant tomb

You won’t even end up in a cemetery

Setting sail or passing through the desert

Our scarce savings for a visa

Face the borders …

Calls from the home country multiply

Everyone has a request not a moment’s rest

When will you sign up for your return? When will you send the money?

The weatherman can’t rap as well, but he sure can annotate the lyrics. “The only hope is that humankind will see we are one body,” says Ndiaye, “because if it goes the other way and everyone is for themselves — and just builds a wall — this will be really, really crazy. People will just get out of here.”

When human beings are under stress, he adds, “they will do anything to survive. You live here and you see on TV people having a good life, and democracy [in Europe], and here you are in a poor life, people have to do something — people now are taking any kind of boat to get to Europe. And even if they see people dying, they are still going. They don’t have the tools to survive here. The human being is just a more intelligent animal, and if [he or she] is pushed to the extreme, the animal instinct will come out to survive. Everyone wants a better life.”

Click.