It’s now a stark given that natural calamities are getting more frequent, more unpredictable, a lot more ferocious and violent, and many times ever more tragic in lives and properties.
No better examples than the onslaught of tropical storm “Ondoy” and super typhoon “Pepeng” in magnitude of devastation. In Filipino lives, there have been more than 800 taxed by Mother Nature in both calamities, and multi-billions of varied material damage.
It’s also a given that along the “tornado alley” of the Atlantic or eastern seaboard into inland states of the USA, even starting from Hurricane “Katrina”, the succeeding hurricanes and tornadoes have become more often and much more destructive in strength and intensity.
For quite sometime now since the Kyoto Protocol as a start of mankind’s concern over climate change, a series of summits among the world leading environmentalists have been held, but so far, no meeting of the minds how carbon emissions could be contained and to what graduated extent.
It’s a bad commentary on USA as the world’s leading greenhouses gas emitter – though lately overtaken by China due to the latter’s slew of coal-fed factories – to have refused signing the Kyoto Protocol. Uncle Sam’s continuing excuse is that doing so is calamitous to its industries and its complex of road users using gasoline and diesel fuel.
America’s argument is for all including the poor underdeveloped countries with negligible greenhouse gas emission have to commit to regulate just like the industrialized and developed countries. Well, fair being fair, USA has a point; but, it doesn’t lessen the bad taste in the mouth from a superpower and exponentially towering over others in fossil fuel spewing.
It has become a customary standoff for three or four mid-summits this year, and earlier, that leading G20 nations, also comprising greenhouse waste spewers – including China and India of the latter category – have arrived at no middle-ground, or even a compromise.
Such mega topics of “cap and trade” measures, or what maximum volume target of gas emissions for, say, year 2030 or year 2050, must be set, or what anti-global warming contributions should the poor and under-developed countries must chip in, or how to address the still in use coal-powered plants of, say, the BRIC bloc, i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
The next venue for the United Nation’s advocacy against global warming is set in December in Copenhagen. This is supposedly the pinnacle summit to collate and refine whatever proposed and agreed in the past mid-summits. But then, as earlier cited, practically nothing has been accomplished, or even agreed upon in principle.
It appears that the UN Copenhagen summit isn’t bright with hopes for a final takeover of the precursor Kyoto Protocol. While global advocates strongly express positive action now, only few countries have made new pledges in their domestic spheres, like, China for curbing emissions by year 2020. Even Pres. Barack Obama seems equivocating on what USA plans to pursue to avoid the “irreversible catastrophe” of climate change.
One thing though, the international consensus now that needs no overemphasis is that Copenhagen is a “decision point” to have international concerted action.
Meantime, both the Antarctic and Arctic polar mountains of ice sheets are shrinking much faster than what scientists predict, since the melting ice sheets are in “runaway melt mode”. In some parts of Antarctica, the ice sheets have shrunk some 30 feet a year since 2003, and in the Arctic, it is feared that by 2020 to 2030, the icebergs and ice sheets may become all melted into an open ocean. When so, goodbye the coastal cities and towns worldwide when the sea water level rise inexorably above the 2-meter height and farther beyond.
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Email:lparadiangjr@yahoo.com