Last December, Utusan Malaysia had global warming as the subject of its front page. Today, it is The Star:
More:
BANGI: The warming of the Indian Ocean in the past 20 to 30 years — brought about by global warming — could have played a part in the unusual weather which caused flooding in Johor and other parts of Malaysia.
Climate expert Associate Prof Dr Fredolin Tangang said the rising temperature of the Indian Ocean, brought about by a series of events starting with the melting of ice in Greenland, could have caused the unusual and adverse weather conditions in South-East Asia.
An oceanographer based at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s School of Environmental and Natural Resource Sciences, Dr Fredolin said the Indian Ocean was cooled by a natural phenomenon which oceanographers labelled the “Great Ocean Conveyor Belt.”
The conveyor belt or thermohaline circulation is featured in The Day After Tomorrow and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The Day After Tomorrow is fiction of course. A great fiction, that is.
While we talk about flood, El Niño might have finally shown its head:
SHAH ALAM: There may be dry months ahead for Selangor.
Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Dr Mohd Khir Toyo said weather reports indicated that the state might face a drought caused by the El Nino phenomenon from February to August.
El Niño was declared official as early as September last year. Despite the massive flood-causing torrential rain, El Niño is supposed to bring in drier season to Southeast Asia. I am not a climatologist but I do try to keep up with any event that has the slightest link to global warming and climate change at large. It is because of the contradiction — heavy rain in spite of the effect of El Niño — that I posed this question: is the record rainfall in Johor part of a larger trend?
I hope the question will be answered by a report commissioned a few weeks ago by the government.
And then of course, on February 2, the publication of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which will discuss global warming from a global perspective.
One reply on “[1059] Of global warming on the front page of The Star”
year7-12
January 22 2007
Last week two items on TV stuck with me: a program on BBC with the telling title: “Time bomb in Siberia,†how the melting of the tundra will push climate heat higher; and on CBC where the Doomsday clock was advanced to 5 minutes before that fateful hour.
Tell me, is there anybody in the world who can help us avoid Doomsday?
I am a reader of history. Some 800 years ago the Netherlands was fashioned by the people that lived there. There is some truth in the saying that “God created the world, but the ditch-digging Dutch shaped the Netherlands.†In the 12th century these clog-shod peasants were fortunate in being ruled by Count William I, a direct ancestor of the current house of Orange. His domain was the most Westerly part of the Netherlands, correctly called Holland, with major sections already protected by the dunes against the North Sea. He alone was instrumental in completely enclosing his fiefdom by means of a system of dykes. Before Count William’s time this land mass was subjected to constant flooding. The people there mostly managed to keep their heads above water, but it needed the central leadership and the organizational talent of this nobleman to rally these stubborn Dutchmen to make that permanent by building and maintaining lasting defenses against the treacherous seas. Indeed, eight centuries ago one man could make a difference.
Fast forward to Century 21.
Can one person help us to prevent Doomsday? When the Netherlanders walled in their own country the world was a much simpler place. One man could make a difference. Now life is complicated, the world is complex and our planet abounding in people and problems. Can Bush solve them? Or Blair? Or Ms Merkel of Germany? Or Putin in Russia? Perhaps Bill Gates with his billions? No. None of these important people can stop what we are doing to our fragile world.
Tony Blair, in a blurb on the book, “The Weather Makers,†may write that “Climate Change is perhaps the most challenging action problem the world has faced,†but will his half-hearted endorsement make a difference to society? The environment is on every politician’s lips. And there’s where it mostly stays: lip service.
I will point you to a sure way to make even lip service effective: stop eating meat. Stop eating meat? What nonsense is that? Read on: A recent United Nations report claims that the comprehensive process of meat production from land to lip generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. If you quit meat consumption and become a vegetarian, you not only help the planet but also enjoy better health and a longer life. Yes, vegetarians live longer and better. You can push back the Doomsday Hour even more by buying locally grown produce. Why not take another step: dig up your pesticide-laden lawn – by hand of course, you need the exercise anyway – and start planting and eating homegrown stuff. Nothing taste better! Saving yourself and our world is in your hands.
Doing more at home – dishes by hand, making meals from scratch – also helps fighting Climate Change. Might as well go all the way now to ensure a better life by using pedal power: tune up that bike that has been rusting away in the garage for those trips to the store.
Oh, yes, that BBC program on Siberia. Old hat, of course. We know, everybody knows, that the permafrost is melting, that the Siberian and Canadian Arctic tundra is chockfull of methane, now bubbling up into the air, stuff that is 70 times more potent than the Carbon Dioxide that comes out our beloved cars. It will heat up the air we suck in even more than the coal-fired generating plants do in China, where a new one is commissioned each and every week.
During 1940-45 in war-time Europe, austerity was forced upon us. We had no choice. Now we as global citizens are faced with an immensely more difficult task: to voluntarily embrace simplicity, keep air and car travel to a minimum, and, as much as possible, go back to basics.
Yes there are people who can save this world. The only ones who can keep the Doomsday clock from advancing and even make it turn back, are your and me. We are responsible, because – and here emerges my Calvinistic streak again -I believe that some day God will ask us what you and I have done to minimize the damage to his world: yes driving a car or even turning on a light is a (polluting) sin.
The entire matter of Doomsday is a religious concept. Only when we keep this in mind, can we deal with the matter of Climate Change.
This and previous columns can be seen at ‘hielema.ca’. He can be contacted at ‘hielema@allstream.net