By Alan Rogers
A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2019 to all readers but let us not forget the weather events of 2018!
In the last six weeks of 2018, the Borneo Post daily published some fascinating articles on wild weather worldwide. I quote but a fraction of such events: Global warming outpaces efforts to slow it. Thousands evacuated as Australian bushfires rage. Northwest China hit by sandstorm as Beijing is smothered by smog. 2018 temperatures set to be among the hottest on record. Dangers fear for survival on India’s disappearing island. Climate change could cost U�� hundreds of billions a year. 79 Chinese cities triggered air pollution reports. Alarm sounded, nations urged to act at UN climate talks. Campaigners target coal at UN climate summit.
More doom and gloom, you may well mutter and in your next breath, question: “How does it affect me in ��abah and ��arawak?”
Read each daily paper carefully for you will find that the Malaysian Federal and ��tate governments are putting plans in place to help mitigate the effects of climate change.
Rising Earth and ocean temperatures, sea levels, intensities of rainfall, persistent drought, crop failures, famine, landslides and cliff collapses are not “Acts of God” but mankind’s failure,in that he/she has triggered such catastrophes.
In early to mid-Dec 2018, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) met appropriately in Katowice, Poland, at COP 24 (Conference for the Parties of the Paris Agreement 2015) to discuss commitments to combat climate change.
Katowice, in ��ilesia, grew as a city from its coal and lignite (brown coal) deposits, used in thermal power stations worldwide with their toxic emissions of greenhouse gases, to generate electricity.
In the opening speech at that conference Vice President ��efcovic stated: “We will not forget the most vulnerable parts of the world, because our climate action is not inward-looking and because climate change has no borders.”
In the conference’s closing speech, Antonia Guterres, the UN ��ecretary General, in referring to our failure to tackle climate change, aptly concluded: “It’s not only immoral but suicidal!”
Perhaps it was a 15-year-old girl, Greta Thunberg, in her speech to the conference members on behalf of the world’s youth, who forcefully said: “We will have to live with the mess that older generations have made. We will have to clean it up for them. That is not fair!”
Her cri de coeur made politicians take the problem of climate change more seriously. The answer is blowin’ in the wind Few of us may remember the U�� artiste Bob Dylan’s famous song