Devil to pay December 4, 2006
“REMING” WAS A SUPERSTORM. IT MIGHT not have been so for residents of Metro Manila whom it thankfully spared, but it was a superstorm for other parts of the country, notably Albay. Poor Bicol! Barely had its folk gotten back on their feet from “Milenyo” when “Reming” came round to knock them down all over again.
Science Undersecretary Graciano Yumul gave us a score to appreciate Nature gone berserk in this wise: “You want to know how strong (Reming) is? We have a radar station in Virac (Catanduanes). We had to close it down. That station is made of solid concrete.”
As I write this, more than a couple of hundred bodies have been buried by mudflows from Mayon. Reminds you of the aftermath of Mount Pinatubo. What killed the once fertile plain surrounding it was not the explosion itself, it was the rains that drowned the fields in volcanic debris.
It’s enough to make you think God is punishing Bicolanos for having leaders like their representatives in Congress who like to invoke God to perpetrate iniquity. Indeed it’s enough to make you think God is punishing us generally for having people in Malacañang who love to say God made it a point to put them there. But it’s a strange God that would punish the sacrilegious by sending boils and plagues, or storms and landslides, at others and not at them. A lightning bolt or two aimed in their direction should do the trick.
It’s also enough to make you think supernatural signs like these appear in truly dark times. I recall that shortly before Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, the country experienced a precursor of it in two months of unrelenting rain—in July and August of that year. It turned the outskirts of Greater Manila into a parody of Venice. You had to take a banca to traverse areas where roads used to be. The plains of Central Luzon, the country’s breadbasket, or rice granary, were underwater for weeks, the water in some parts being chest-deep. Imelda led a procession with the Santo Niño at the helm, asking for divine intercession to end the plague. Alas, heaven was deaf to entreaty.
Not so hell. A month or so later, Marcos declared martial law.
But, no, there’s a more scientific explanation for all this, and it’s scarier than hell. Or haven’t you wondered why the storms that have been visiting us lately—and other countries as well, including the developed ones, indeed including the United States—have become more frequent and more vicious? We’ve already had three supertyphoons this year alone, and the last two have produced catastrophic effects. I’ve heard folk complain about Pagasa, saying it misjudged things again with its shrill advisories. Well, thank your lucky stars Reming proved less than Milenyo to Manila. Better to err on the side of caution. I still remember how it was the other Christmas when moans and groans emanated from the pit of Infanta in the season of joy and merrymaking. Infanta was buried in mud and stone when the treeless mountains crumbled from the battering of a superstorm. Or, indeed, when huge piles of logs broke free and tumbled down on the sleeping folk below.
Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” supplies the explanation: The earth’s icecaps are melting, and every year water levels are rising. They’re not just rising, they’re getting warmer. And the warmer they get, the more plentiful and angrier the storms they brew. The United States hasn’t just reaped “Katrina,” it has reaped completely literally the whirlwind in the form of tornadoes. It set the record for the number of tornadoes in 2004, which was 1,117. Japan also set a record for typhoons that year. As did many parts of the world for various calamities, including floods to rival the one in the Bible. For the first time ever, a hurricane hit the South Atlantic, a thing theretofore thought impossible by scientists. It was also at the end of that year that a monster storm hit Infanta, and an even bigger monster tsunami hit Aceh and neighboring parts.
The storms are getting more vicious because of that same warming of the oceans. Before they hit land, they hit the warm water surrounding it. That jacks up their wind velocity and increases their moisture content, scientific ways of saying the storms start blowing like crazy and the heavens weep uncontrollably upon the earth. The results are enough to make you religious. We may bring out all the religious icons we want in processions, but none of them will stop heaven’s fury. Absolutely terrifyingly, we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Nature is bound to go more berserk in years to come. If ever any writing on the wall foretelling doom was plain to see, this is it.
What to do about this? I’m not knocking prayer, but God has been known to help those who help themselves. Those who don’t help themselves He has been known to sigh while stepping on their fingers clutching the Ark, “Sayang, I gave you a brain pa.” Gore himself proposes that the world pressure his country to commit to the Kyoto Protocol, which calls on all countries—the United States foremost, it being the No. 1 culprit—to curb carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Yet another reason to bitterly rue the fact that Bush won and Gore lost the 2000 US elections.
Gore has other proposals on how we may individually give CPR to a drowning planet. But I’ll leave the reader to watch the docu itself. I think it’s still showing in some commercial theaters, but I don’t mind you getting the DVD version from your local neighborhood pirate—get it any which way you can and distribute it. One is tempted to say don’t wait for tomorrow when you see the planet in spasms. But the spasms are happening right now. We are watching a planet at the start of its death throes.
Tomorrow is today. Tomorrow will be “The Day After Tomorrow.”
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=36211
Science Undersecretary Graciano Yumul gave us a score to appreciate Nature gone berserk in this wise: “You want to know how strong (Reming) is? We have a radar station in Virac (Catanduanes). We had to close it down. That station is made of solid concrete.”
As I write this, more than a couple of hundred bodies have been buried by mudflows from Mayon. Reminds you of the aftermath of Mount Pinatubo. What killed the once fertile plain surrounding it was not the explosion itself, it was the rains that drowned the fields in volcanic debris.
It’s enough to make you think God is punishing Bicolanos for having leaders like their representatives in Congress who like to invoke God to perpetrate iniquity. Indeed it’s enough to make you think God is punishing us generally for having people in Malacañang who love to say God made it a point to put them there. But it’s a strange God that would punish the sacrilegious by sending boils and plagues, or storms and landslides, at others and not at them. A lightning bolt or two aimed in their direction should do the trick.
It’s also enough to make you think supernatural signs like these appear in truly dark times. I recall that shortly before Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, the country experienced a precursor of it in two months of unrelenting rain—in July and August of that year. It turned the outskirts of Greater Manila into a parody of Venice. You had to take a banca to traverse areas where roads used to be. The plains of Central Luzon, the country’s breadbasket, or rice granary, were underwater for weeks, the water in some parts being chest-deep. Imelda led a procession with the Santo Niño at the helm, asking for divine intercession to end the plague. Alas, heaven was deaf to entreaty.
Not so hell. A month or so later, Marcos declared martial law.
But, no, there’s a more scientific explanation for all this, and it’s scarier than hell. Or haven’t you wondered why the storms that have been visiting us lately—and other countries as well, including the developed ones, indeed including the United States—have become more frequent and more vicious? We’ve already had three supertyphoons this year alone, and the last two have produced catastrophic effects. I’ve heard folk complain about Pagasa, saying it misjudged things again with its shrill advisories. Well, thank your lucky stars Reming proved less than Milenyo to Manila. Better to err on the side of caution. I still remember how it was the other Christmas when moans and groans emanated from the pit of Infanta in the season of joy and merrymaking. Infanta was buried in mud and stone when the treeless mountains crumbled from the battering of a superstorm. Or, indeed, when huge piles of logs broke free and tumbled down on the sleeping folk below.
Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” supplies the explanation: The earth’s icecaps are melting, and every year water levels are rising. They’re not just rising, they’re getting warmer. And the warmer they get, the more plentiful and angrier the storms they brew. The United States hasn’t just reaped “Katrina,” it has reaped completely literally the whirlwind in the form of tornadoes. It set the record for the number of tornadoes in 2004, which was 1,117. Japan also set a record for typhoons that year. As did many parts of the world for various calamities, including floods to rival the one in the Bible. For the first time ever, a hurricane hit the South Atlantic, a thing theretofore thought impossible by scientists. It was also at the end of that year that a monster storm hit Infanta, and an even bigger monster tsunami hit Aceh and neighboring parts.
The storms are getting more vicious because of that same warming of the oceans. Before they hit land, they hit the warm water surrounding it. That jacks up their wind velocity and increases their moisture content, scientific ways of saying the storms start blowing like crazy and the heavens weep uncontrollably upon the earth. The results are enough to make you religious. We may bring out all the religious icons we want in processions, but none of them will stop heaven’s fury. Absolutely terrifyingly, we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Nature is bound to go more berserk in years to come. If ever any writing on the wall foretelling doom was plain to see, this is it.
What to do about this? I’m not knocking prayer, but God has been known to help those who help themselves. Those who don’t help themselves He has been known to sigh while stepping on their fingers clutching the Ark, “Sayang, I gave you a brain pa.” Gore himself proposes that the world pressure his country to commit to the Kyoto Protocol, which calls on all countries—the United States foremost, it being the No. 1 culprit—to curb carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Yet another reason to bitterly rue the fact that Bush won and Gore lost the 2000 US elections.
Gore has other proposals on how we may individually give CPR to a drowning planet. But I’ll leave the reader to watch the docu itself. I think it’s still showing in some commercial theaters, but I don’t mind you getting the DVD version from your local neighborhood pirate—get it any which way you can and distribute it. One is tempted to say don’t wait for tomorrow when you see the planet in spasms. But the spasms are happening right now. We are watching a planet at the start of its death throes.
Tomorrow is today. Tomorrow will be “The Day After Tomorrow.”
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=36211
posted by dqfan06 @ 2:14 AM
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