Warming signs, warning signs January 11, 2007
YOU think that last year produced storms that could never possibly come this way again? Think again. This year could bring worse.
Stronger storms in Asia, floods in Latin America and harsher droughts in Australia and Africa: that is the prediction of scientists as a resurgent El Niño and La Niña combined stalk the length and breadth of the planet this year. 2007 could possibly be the hottest year ever in recorded history.
Raphael Satter of The Associated Press writes: “The warmest year on record is 1998, when the average global temperature was 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average of 57 degrees. Though such a change appears small, incremental differences can, for example, add to the ferocity of storms by evaporating more steam off the ocean.
“There is a 60 percent chance that the average global temperature for 2007 will match or break the record…. The consequences of the high temperatures could be felt worldwide. El Niño, which is now under way in the Pacific Ocean and is expected to last until May, occurs irregularly. But when it does … Pacific storms can be more intense.”
Even as we preoccupy ourselves with the burning events in this country, events that affect us immediately and powerfully, let us spare a thought for the cataclysmic, even if seemingly slow-acting, events in this planet, events that could mean the end of all life as we know it. I don’t know that it’s completely whimsical to think about it as the point where Science and the Bible meet; but unless humankind rouses itself up to the peril, we could be facing an Apocalypse in the not very distant future -- if not in our lifetime, at least in that of our children. The Bible identifies damnation as hellfire, Science identifies damnation as global warming. It’s a tossup which one is hotter.
You can’t have a more life-and-death issue than that. Which is how I’ve become an ardent espouser of the environmental cause lately.
A couple of years ago, I used to tell the environmental groups that came to ask me how to press their cause better before the public to find a way to make it a matter of life and death. My problem with the “green” advocacy, I said -- at least as it has been pitched in this country -- was that it radiated a strong aspect of tree-hugging. It seemed more like a luxury that bejeweled matrons who had little better to do indulged in, encouraged no end by their executive husbands for many reasons, the least being to find tax shelters and the most being to find time for their secretaries.
Saving the trees and clean air, among others, were what we associated the green cause with. Both, of course, had a glimmer of urgency in them, but only a glimmer. The environmental groups could always argue that the disappearance of the country’s forests posed the direst threats to this country, some of which had already turned into a frightening reality, and that tolerating the levels of smog in Metro Manila in particular was committing slow-motion suicide. But given that they paled in comparison with direr threats to life, like hunger -- I remember from my youth that we activists justified our chain-smoking by saying that, before cigarettes, a lot of things were bound to kill us first -- they always stood to be drowned by other seemingly more pressing issues.
A footnote to this is that a lot of things did fell friends before cigarettes could work their poison in their system. But many of them did also die from cancer, which probably came from a combination of cigarettes and a stressful life.
December 2004 changed all that. A couple of things during that month drove home the point about the green cause being a matter of life and death, which truly should shove Greenpeace and the other environmental groups into the limelight in this country today. Those two events were the fierce storm that brought the treeless hills of Infanta town in Quezon province tumbling to the ground, burying hundreds of folk below in a muddy grave; and the tsunami that wiped out an entire village in Aceh and ravaged neighboring islands.
Suddenly, green turned to red, as in blood. I would learn later that that year broke whole new records in ecological disasters, including the inconceivable, which was a hurricane hitting the South Atlantic. The writing on the wall has gotten bigger and more frighteningly gothic fonts since then. Not least for us, with the visitations of the new, improved, supertyphoons that have bleached parts of this country more efficiently than Mr. Clean. Yes, Virginia, there’s a better explanation for the utter devastation of the Bicol region than the not-entirely-unbelievable theory that the storms knocked everything about in the course of its frenzied search for Edcel Lagman and Luis Villafuerte, as per instructions of Divine Retribution. That is, that storms increase in water density and wind velocity from meeting heat, which is what the planet’s increasingly steaming oceans today emit.
Completely literally, the oceans -- not the least of them the Pacific, which is where the Philippines lies -- are whipping up a storm. Suddenly, being the gateway to Asia, which has made this country ideal for US bases, is no longer something to be happy about. It also means being Asia’s welcoming committee for Pacific storms.
I won’t go into what can be done about this. This is a country that won’t move anyway until it’s scared to death, and sometimes not even then. But there is that prediction for this year -- the closest in known history that we will experience hell on earth. There’s only one thing that’s scarier than a scary movie. That is a scary truth.
Look at the face of Bicol today and see if words like “climate” and “environment” do not spell the difference between life and death. Between a box of chocolates and a coffin.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=42730
Stronger storms in Asia, floods in Latin America and harsher droughts in Australia and Africa: that is the prediction of scientists as a resurgent El Niño and La Niña combined stalk the length and breadth of the planet this year. 2007 could possibly be the hottest year ever in recorded history.
Raphael Satter of The Associated Press writes: “The warmest year on record is 1998, when the average global temperature was 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average of 57 degrees. Though such a change appears small, incremental differences can, for example, add to the ferocity of storms by evaporating more steam off the ocean.
“There is a 60 percent chance that the average global temperature for 2007 will match or break the record…. The consequences of the high temperatures could be felt worldwide. El Niño, which is now under way in the Pacific Ocean and is expected to last until May, occurs irregularly. But when it does … Pacific storms can be more intense.”
Even as we preoccupy ourselves with the burning events in this country, events that affect us immediately and powerfully, let us spare a thought for the cataclysmic, even if seemingly slow-acting, events in this planet, events that could mean the end of all life as we know it. I don’t know that it’s completely whimsical to think about it as the point where Science and the Bible meet; but unless humankind rouses itself up to the peril, we could be facing an Apocalypse in the not very distant future -- if not in our lifetime, at least in that of our children. The Bible identifies damnation as hellfire, Science identifies damnation as global warming. It’s a tossup which one is hotter.
You can’t have a more life-and-death issue than that. Which is how I’ve become an ardent espouser of the environmental cause lately.
A couple of years ago, I used to tell the environmental groups that came to ask me how to press their cause better before the public to find a way to make it a matter of life and death. My problem with the “green” advocacy, I said -- at least as it has been pitched in this country -- was that it radiated a strong aspect of tree-hugging. It seemed more like a luxury that bejeweled matrons who had little better to do indulged in, encouraged no end by their executive husbands for many reasons, the least being to find tax shelters and the most being to find time for their secretaries.
Saving the trees and clean air, among others, were what we associated the green cause with. Both, of course, had a glimmer of urgency in them, but only a glimmer. The environmental groups could always argue that the disappearance of the country’s forests posed the direst threats to this country, some of which had already turned into a frightening reality, and that tolerating the levels of smog in Metro Manila in particular was committing slow-motion suicide. But given that they paled in comparison with direr threats to life, like hunger -- I remember from my youth that we activists justified our chain-smoking by saying that, before cigarettes, a lot of things were bound to kill us first -- they always stood to be drowned by other seemingly more pressing issues.
A footnote to this is that a lot of things did fell friends before cigarettes could work their poison in their system. But many of them did also die from cancer, which probably came from a combination of cigarettes and a stressful life.
December 2004 changed all that. A couple of things during that month drove home the point about the green cause being a matter of life and death, which truly should shove Greenpeace and the other environmental groups into the limelight in this country today. Those two events were the fierce storm that brought the treeless hills of Infanta town in Quezon province tumbling to the ground, burying hundreds of folk below in a muddy grave; and the tsunami that wiped out an entire village in Aceh and ravaged neighboring islands.
Suddenly, green turned to red, as in blood. I would learn later that that year broke whole new records in ecological disasters, including the inconceivable, which was a hurricane hitting the South Atlantic. The writing on the wall has gotten bigger and more frighteningly gothic fonts since then. Not least for us, with the visitations of the new, improved, supertyphoons that have bleached parts of this country more efficiently than Mr. Clean. Yes, Virginia, there’s a better explanation for the utter devastation of the Bicol region than the not-entirely-unbelievable theory that the storms knocked everything about in the course of its frenzied search for Edcel Lagman and Luis Villafuerte, as per instructions of Divine Retribution. That is, that storms increase in water density and wind velocity from meeting heat, which is what the planet’s increasingly steaming oceans today emit.
Completely literally, the oceans -- not the least of them the Pacific, which is where the Philippines lies -- are whipping up a storm. Suddenly, being the gateway to Asia, which has made this country ideal for US bases, is no longer something to be happy about. It also means being Asia’s welcoming committee for Pacific storms.
I won’t go into what can be done about this. This is a country that won’t move anyway until it’s scared to death, and sometimes not even then. But there is that prediction for this year -- the closest in known history that we will experience hell on earth. There’s only one thing that’s scarier than a scary movie. That is a scary truth.
Look at the face of Bicol today and see if words like “climate” and “environment” do not spell the difference between life and death. Between a box of chocolates and a coffin.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=42730
posted by dqfan06 @ 10:02 AM
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