The climate
she’s a-changing

Published by the Visayan Daily Star Publications, Inc.

NINFA R. LEONARDIA Editor-in-Chief & President

CARLA P. GOMEZ Editor GUILLERMO TEJIDA III Desk Editor PATRICK PANGILINAN Busines Editor NIDA A. BUENAFE Sports Editor RENE GENOVE Bureau Chief, Dumaguete MAJA P. DELY Advertising Coordinator

CARLOS ANTONIO L. LEONARDIA Administrative Officer

If we ever had any doubts about the claims and warnings of environmentalists that the world is going to undergo a drastic change in climate, the time has come for us to realize that there was absolute truth in what they were saying.

In recent years, we had seen how floods and landslides had devastated some parts of our country, causing the loss of thousands of lives and properties, destroying crops and livestock, dislocating people, and traumatizing them.

We have also seen or heard of too many earthquakes in the most unlikely places, tornadoes, tsunamis, eruptions of volcanoes, and the discovery of so many strange diseases and ailments and epidemics never known or even heard about before.

The same people who had been warning us about these phenomena have also focused on humanity’s own misdeeds as the cause of these strange happenings. On a small scale, we have noted how the clogging of passageways with our own trash could cause floodwaters, both from rain and from the natural movement of the sea known as tides.

Lately, we heard about and saw on TV and in the newspapers, scenes of destruction caused by floodwaters in such unlikely places as Australia, where one of its biggest cities, Queensland, was inundated by deep floodwaters. And yesterday we also had reports about similar floods in another big Australian city, Brisbane.

And note that even in the United States, people are experiencing one of the weirdest winters that has brought tons of snow and blizzards that have forced the cancellation of flights as well as of trips of land and sea transport vehicles.

Yesterday, our own province saw one of the worst floods with several towns and cities at a standstill. Public transport to such northern areas as Talisay, Silay, Victorias and E.B. Magalona was halted, with some vehicles lined several kilometers unable to move for several hours because of the flooding on the highways.

This is Mother Nature showing her response to our own insensibility, and while we move to mitigate the effects, it is time to admit that we are now in the midst of a global problem and that everybody must cooperate in the measures being proposed to divert, if not restore the regularity of the climate in old days.*