Climate change has altered not only our way of life but also our perspective of things around us.
Recent and frequent incidents of floods literally changes the landscape in many parts of the city in a matter of minutes. We see this in many video clips posted in the social media – currents flow on roads and highways, prompting people to wade through them to get home or reach their destinations.
While our leaders used to talk about programs on flood control – a matter which has triggered fiscal scandal of wide proportions in many parts of the country – the masses tackle the issue through a rather reversed perspective: being pushed to a point of no choice but to let floods control their day-to-day existence.
The new normal means classes and work are disrupted, people are stalled by hours in getting home when the weather gets foul. While before, weathermen and women reported about sunrises and sunsets, today’s fare has graphic details of damages and destruction to lives and property.
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Context can shift, too, in the understanding of the dry and wet season. Today, the dry months can expect the occurrence of showers and rain while during the wet season, people may now experience occasional El Niño temperatures, even at night.
Still on the seasons, a friend jested that there seems to be another type on the premise that a season is a period characterized by certain things. “Let’s count the earthquake season.”
Geophysical websites have reported dozens of moderate to strong earthquakes in the country this year, including the two deadly ones that jolted northern Cebu and Davao Oriental as well as their neighboring areas.
Discussions on typhoons and storms today include not only those tropical foul weather disturbances that being heavy rains and strong winds. In the mix of these discussions are frequent thunderstorms, severe snowstorms in the West, and sandstorms.
The latter is of particular interest to environmentalists because dust storms, especially caused by drought, move billions of tons of sand across continents. The result is the carriage of topsoil, leaving behind only a barren or unproductive mix of dust and sand.
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Climate change has also been cited as a cause of many wildfires across continents.
The most-widely reported took place for a little over three weeks early this year in California that spread out to about 89 sq. m., destroying more than 18,000 homes and forcing the dislocation of about 200,000 individuals.
It was a case of a fire that had gone wild and berserk that it spread far and wide and claimed a few hundred lives.
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Early this year, a heat wave – the prolonged period of unusually hot weather – caused the death of about 2,300 in Europe. Even during the rainy season these days, people continue to experience heat-related problems.
While the expression “wave off” refers to the dismissal of things irrelevant, today, we can no longer dismiss rising temperatures as something not worth the worry as they can be debilitating or, worse, fatal.
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“Disaster management”, “resilience” and “mitigation”, too, may need to have expanded context as dictated by the exigencies of the times.
What we used to discuss in the Journalism classroom about an element of news has become truer and more here-and-now than ever: that in the conflict between nature and men, the human being us oft the loser. A sad fact that has become here-and-now more than ever.
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Have mercy on me, my God, have mercy on me, for in you I take refuge. I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed. It is a good idea for me (Psalm 57:1) | NWI
