Nature fights back

All the garbage we spew out of our smokestacks and the exhaust pipes of our cars into the air we breathe are killing us. We get sick letting all that bad air into our lungs. For example, my childhood asthma is back… in my second childhood. My pulmonologist blames it on air pollution.

Worse, all that carbon dioxide and other pollutants end up messing up our weather system. Climate change happens and we suffer its consequences.

According to the Environment Defense Fund (EDF), climate change is why we are getting more killer typhoons, tornadoes and floods. Mother Nature is merely reacting to how badly we treat it.

Extreme weather is our future is a result of climate change. The irony of it is that countries like ours suffer the brunt of extreme weather even if our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is rather small.

In Pakistan, a third of the country has been flooded by unusually torrential rains. It is the poor who end up suffering the consequences of actions that made many developed countries extremely rich.

Matthew Bossons, a journalist living in Shanghai since 2014, wrote in The New York Times about his experience trying to have a vacation in the mountains of China’s Sichuan province. Instead of that refreshing dip in a mountain pool, he saw how bad China’s heat wave was.

“In the torrid summer of 2022,” Bossons wrote, “half of China turned into a giant oven… The heat wave that baked China for weeks was startling in its scale, duration, and intensity.

“Through July and August, it shattered temperature records, dried up rivers, withered crops, sparked wildfires and caused deaths from heatstroke. It may have been the most severe heat wave ever recorded…

“... rivers that are important arteries for shipping and transportation became unnavigable. Water levels in the Yangtze, the world’s third-longest river, hit record lows, dropping as much as 20 feet below recent average.

“Chickens died or struggled to lay eggs, pigs were hosed down by fire trucks to keep them cool and Sichuan’s famed pandas lay on blocks of ice. People hoisted food to their apartments using buckets and ropes because the power blackouts had left elevators idled…”

What happened in China is our future, unfortunately for the world.

It isn’t just China. Many locations around the world are experiencing heatwaves lately. My daughter was complaining about the worst summer temperatures they have experienced in California last week.

According to CNN, Californians are enduring what could be the worst heat wave in state history. On top of everything, there is a threat from Hurricane Kay that Californians must deal with.

And once Hurricane Kay weakens to become a tropical storm, the heat will end “abruptly and unusually,” the National Weather Service in Los Angeles said. Sweltering temperatures are expected to give way to excessive rainfall, which can cause quick rises in creeks and rivers, and could lead to flash flooding in Southern California and southwest Arizona.

“It’s never a good thing to get too much rain all at once, a trait all too common among slow-moving tropical storms,” the prediction center wrote Wednesday morning. “Thus, the flash flood potential is also rapidly increasing.”

CNN quotes Jan Null, a California meteorologist and owner of Golden Gate Weather Services: “In some ways, this is the new normal.”

Californians were warned to prepare for the possibility of power blackouts if energy supply falls short as the heatwave drives up demand for power and strain California’s energy grid. They were asked to avoid using major appliances and turn off all unnecessary lights between 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. Californians were asked not to charge their EVs at certain hours to avoid a power blackout.

The long and short of it is, in this era of extreme weather changes, typhoons are expected to become more intense and droughts will be more frequent and severe. All have a devastating impact on our food resources and personal safety.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) notes that with climate change, warmer oceans increase the amount of water that evaporates into the air. That affects the frequency and intensity of typhoons and hurricanes.

Warmer air can hold more water vapor. For each degree of warming, the air’s capacity for water vapor goes up by about seven percent. An atmosphere with more moisture can produce more intense rains.

“When more moisture-laden air moves over land or converges into a storm system, it can produce more intense precipitation—for example, heavier rain and snow storms.”

In recent years, a larger percentage of precipitation has come in the form of intense single-day events. We remember Typhoon Undoy, which caused heavy flooding in Metro Manila.

It really seems that nature is fighting back after decades of abuse. Forests have been decimated in many parts of the world, changing the ecosystem that impacts on worldwide climate.

The negative impact of climate change is real. We can now see and feel it in our lives. Unfortunately for us living in the Third World, there is little we can do except to mitigate adverse effects on our people.

This means that our government must invest in technology… in new types of crops that can survive hotter climates. We must also always be ready with enough stocks of food to make sure our people will not go hungry when crops fail due to too much rain or too little.

Perhaps, urban dwellers should start raising some of their own food. The technology is there to make urban farms thrive.

Let us make use of the scientific data gathered by Project NOAH of the UP Resilience Institute, a proactive hub to empower Philippine communities, with benchmark information vital for effective climate change. LGUs can use the resources of UP’s Resilience Institute. They can also learn from Joey Salceda whose efforts to make Albay resilient to natural disasters have been internationally recognized.

The new DENR Secretary is a veteran scientist on climate change. She should lead the charge for greater resilience.

Mother Nature is fighting back. The new normal in our world today can be unpredictable and brutal. Being prepared is our only option.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco