The heat is on

It’s here – summer in all its blazing glory. As soon as the weather bureau announced the official start of summer temperatures zoomed, quickly registering in the high 30s (degrees Celcius) – with the promise of more to come and the probability of having days hitting 40 degrees and beyond.

Our weather follows the global trend of extreme temperatures. Australia baked in record high heat waves as Europe endured monster storms that brought flooding like they hadn’t seen before and the US suffered crazy snowstorms and blizzards as “polar vortex” entered the vocabulary. What’s that they said about the “new normal?”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the second report of its Fifth Assessment last Monday, saying “the effects of climate change are already occurring on all continents and across the oceans” – “from the tropics to the poles, from small islands to large continents, and from the wealthiest countries to the poorest” – but the world is “ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate.”

Aside from heat waves, severe storms that result in mega disasters, climate change is posing serious threats to food stocks, from agriculture (declining global crop yields even as populations continue to grow) to fishery (fish catches in some areas in the tropics are projected to fall by around 50 percent). “Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, warned.

Such an assessment unfortunately hits very close to home. We don’t need a 2,600-page report to tell us that weather patterns have changed (and changed for the worse), since we live such change, and the dangers that the report talks about is a reality for us – Super Typhoon Yolanda last November, and the numerous other typhoons before that (Milenyo, Ondoy, Pablo, Sendong) have wreaked havoc of unimaginable proportions for our people. And the bad news is that we can expect more monster typhoons to come our way. We can map high-risk areas, but being an archipelago, the whole country is at risk.

The IPCC says that the world will probably get four degrees warmer; PAGASA reports that the number of hot days have been increasing and the number of cool days decreasing. Rainfall has likewise been increasing, and though there may not be as many typhoons, they are certainly getting stronger, and hitting areas that used to be relatively storm-free, like Mindanao.

The IPCC report points out that while the risks of climate change are great, there are opportunities to respond to such risks. “Investments in better preparation can pay dividends both for the present and for the future,” said Vicente Barros, co-chair of the IPCC group that prepared the report.

Before the rains come and the floods rise, let us all – national and local government, scientists and legislators, you and me – invest in better preparation now.