by Ram Maxey
THE sudden downpour in Davao City last Thursday evening resulted in the usual flooding of certain streets, including Quirino Avenue where the center island disappeared under floodwaters. The good thing about a bad thing (flooding) where our city is concerned, is that floodwaters recede in just a matter of a few hours or less and life is back to normal.
None of that stuff that’s been happening in typhoon-lashed areas of the country where hapless people have had to contend with floodwaters deep enough to force people to abandon homes or seek safety on their rooftops—not for just a number of hours but for days, a situation that Dabawenyos can hardly imagine happening to them ever.
Did I say “ever”? Or “never”? Don’t count on it. Results of studies made by our weather experts from 1960 to 2003 tell us that things will get worse before they become better. They point to this modern day phenomenon called Climate Change where warm days are longer and cold nights shorter. Perhaps people haven’t gotten around to noticing this phenomenon in the midst of their daily problems of making both ends meet and all that sort of aggravation. But we have to trust our weather experts whose job it is to study weather patterns and make heads and tails of what they mean to us ordinary laymen.
The problem called Climate Change is here to stay, whether we like it or not. Nor is it a problem that we should leave to weathermen alone to solve. When they say that global warming is causing the ice caps in the polar regions to melt, which in turn causes the seas and oceans to rise inexorably, who are we to question their findings and pronouncements? We who are marooned on planet Earth, for better or for worse, are in this predicament together, and together we must collectively do something to reverse the situation if we want future generations to survive. That happens to be the inconvenient truth scientists have been talking about.
After all, global warming has been blamed on man’s folly of tampering with the ozone layer some 30 to 48 miles up in the lower atmosphere with carbon emissions emanating from his factories in the United States, China and India, to name just the world’s three biggest culprits, all the way down to the lowly charcoal maker.
Climate Change is everybody’s concern and it behooves policy makers in the world’s governments to address it realistically and forcefully. That goes for our own members of Congress whose myopic view of this grave global situation is reflected in their pre-occupation with that other kind of change—Charter Change. When will they wake up and get serious?
