JUST when you think our country has not done something to alleviate the growing climate change problem, think again.
Both local and international scientists hailed the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 for creating a recess in the ever-hastening global warming process.
After the volcano unleashed its hellish fire and smoke, scientists, including Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology director Renato Solidum Jr., said a drop by 0.2 to 0.4 degree Celsius in global mean temperature.
The favor for the eruption went on as it was said that the sulfur dioxide (SO2) the volcano emitted in its smoke heaved to as much as 23 to 30 megatons, second to the largest after the historic Mount Krakatau eruption in western Indonesia in 1883.
Sulfur dioxide, as it turn into aerosols in the stratosphere, largely help in counteracting the greenhouse effect for it can absorb and radiate sunlight and heat back into space thereby cooling the troposphere, Earth’s first layer of gas.
So come to think of it. If all volcanoes in the Philippines would burst into fiery tantrums in the same fashion as Pinatubo, simultaneously or annually (your choice to pick) and considering that we are located along the Pacific Ring of Fire, everybody would love the Philippine islands because its volcanoes might send dark SO2-bearing smoke hovering and covering half of the world’s hemisphere.
And that would mean a serious break in the global warming process.
But of course, that would be our last concern because while it healed Mother Nature, it had wrecked ethnic disposition along its borders as proven by the diaspora of our Aeta brothers, whose home here in the metropolis we call “sidewalks.”
Add to that the paralysis it had caused in the economy and in the stomach of hungry Pinoys when the rice fields of Central Luzon were wiped out because of the ashflood (lahar). After the eruption, Zambales spelled misery as its barren land pictures a cross between a modern limbo and that “day after tomorrow.”
Even without global warming, the Philippines loses tremendously after disasters strike, both in lives and labor, as can be seen in the Baguio earthquake in 1990, Ormoc landslide in 1991, Cherry Gil Subdivision tragedy in 1999, Guimaras oil spill in 2006, among others. What more with climate change?
Fortunately, this did not leaked out of the mind of Environment secretary Lito Atienza when he spoke on behalf of the country during the Bali Conference December last year, an event that saw the every nations trying to hammer out a new agreement before the Kyoto Protocol expires in two years.
In his speech, as he prided on one hand that the Philippines has not contributed much in global warming and instead shifted to renewable energy like geothermal, on the other, he admitted the country is vulnerable should weather patterns run amok due to climate change.
To wit the always floral-donned official: “If temperature (increases) by three to four degrees centigrade, 340 million people will be displaced… We do not have to go far. The Philippines is one of the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. We suffer increasing and huge losses in lives and properties…despite the fact that we are hardly responsible for global warming.”
Similarly, the United Nations Human Development Report of 2007 to 2008 flatly described the poor nations as “the most vulnerable citizens (to) suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks (of climate change), even though they have contributed least to the problem.”
The report even went at length at scaring people because it warned that the “world is moving toward the point at which irreversible ecological catastrophe becomes unavoidable.”
Humanity has less than 10 years to change its course if it does not want to reach the point where every action is irrevocable.
In the Philippines, while we do our own way in responding to climate change, we can only but hope that the “mega” countries would also be responsive enough to carry its responsibility of cutting greenhouse emission because if they don’t, we are likely to be first in the line of devastation.
And should that happen, we may never see the fish, the factories, and the clouds in the Navotas city seal because the water may rise so high, they may embrace a new slogan, “Welcome to Water World.”
