Climate change and PH storms, rains
THE people of the Philippines are not particularly concerned when typhoons and other storms approach us from the Pacific Ocean. About 20 of them come every year, sometimes with strong winds of 200 kph and above, sometimes with strong rains that last several days. The people of our islands are used to them and generally know what to do.
Super-tyhoon Yolanda in 2013 brought a new kind of danger – a storm surge. The sea, pushed by strong winds, surged inland, submerging homes and buildings where people thought they were safe. The waters swept inland for several kilometers. Then they rushed back to the sea, bringing along the bodies of many of the victims. Some 6,000 died in Leyte and Samar in 2013, including many whose bodies were never recovered.
This week, Urduja swept through central Visayas and Palawan. It was only a tropical depression, not a typhoon, but it dumped so much rain that it caused landslides that buried many homes in the island province of Biliran, north of Leyte. As of Wednesday, 46 were reported dead in the region, with 45 others missing, believed buried under tons of soil loosened by Urduja’s rains.
Many of the storms and typhoons that have hit the Philippines in recent years have had unusually strong winds or heavy rains lasting days, so that the usual precautions now seem inadequate. There have been similar instances of unusually bad weather in many other parts of the world – a heat wave that hit Europe last August, the most powerful hurricane to hit Texas in the United States in 50 years named Harvey, followed by another – Irma – that devastated Puerto Rico, and now, extremely hot weather that has caused forest fires in southern California.
The world’s scientists are agreed that all this extreme weather is related to rising temperatures on the planet. These are, in turn, caused by the excessive carbon emissions from industries in many countries. The heat is causing the polar glaciers to melt and it is feared that this will cause ocean levels to rise, inundating low-lying islands around the world. The Philippines, with many islands, would be among the first to suffer.
We thus hope that the world’s nations that pledged at the Paris Conference on Climate Change in 2015 to limit the carbon emissions of their industries will succeed in their goals so that the totality of their efforts will achieve the desired goal of keeping world temperatures down. In the meantime, w will have to cope as best as we can with the powerful typhoons like Yolanda in 2013 and the rainy storms like Urduja that just hit Biliran, Leyte, and Samar.