WILL the collective efforts of all countries save us from harsh climatic disasters such as floods, typhoons, tsunamis, tornados and heat waves that have already killed thousands of people worldwide? From a distance, it’s as if our country has the solutions to the problem, what with Republic Act 9729 that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has signed into law as “Climate Change Act of 2009,” aimed at formulating a national strategy against global warming and erratic climate change. It authorizes the President to organize the Climate Change Commission, which would represent the country in international and local fora on climate change.

The best that could be said of the law so far is that it is timely. Next week now – on December 6-18, 2009 – the President and the Philippine delegation will attend the United Nations’ international climate change conference at Copenhagen, Denmark. Some 8,000 delegates from 170 countries are expected to grace the Copenhagen Protocol that would draft a new treaty to reduce carbon emissions. In effect, it would serve as extension of the Kyoto Protocol, which would expire in 2012.

The President, as chairman of the Climate Change Commission, is empowered to appoint three commissioners and to create an advisory board made up of selected Cabinet members and representatives from the academe, business, non-government organizations and the presidents of the League of Provinces, League of Cities, League of Municipalities, and Liga ng mga Barangay.

Senator Legarda sees in her Climate Change Act an effective guide for government to take the right steps in curbing or at least minimizing the hazards of extreme weather change. The lessons learned from typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng that flooded many Luzon cities and provinces last September and from typhoon Frank that devastated Iloilo in June 2008 would be discussed in the six-month timetable of the Climate Change Commission to finalize the “National Framework Strategy and Program on Climate Change.”

Did I see you raising an eyebrow? You must be wondering whether the new law is not just another “batas na may butas.” What have we gained from the preceding environmental laws, specifically the “Clean Air Act” and “Renewable Energy Act”?

The “Clean Air Act” has no teeth. It has only succeeded in one thing: outlawing the use of incinerators in burning garbage without substituting a viable alternative. Incidentally, a Filipino worker calling a Manila radio station from Tokyo, Japan recently belittled the banning of the incinerator. High-tech incinerators that don’t belch poisonous gasses, he said, are now trendy in Japan.

The “Renewable Energy Act” is as useless. To this day, its principal author, Senator Miguel “Migs” Zubiri, could not pinpoint a location for a viable all-season source of renewable energy in the Philippines.

The worsening power lack in Iloilo City, fortunately, has discouraged residents from going along with pseudo-environmentalists in condemning as health hazard the clean-coal technology that Global Business Power Corporation is adopting for the first coal-fired power plant now under construction as barangay Ingore, La Paz.

Modern technology has reversed the image of coal as a health hazard. In fact, it has become the most viable alternative to costly oil.

The “concern” over “350 C02 PPM” – that is, 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – as direct cause of global warming is a rather sweeping and unsubstantiated claim, short of asking us to stop breathing. As everybody knows, man and other animals exhale carbon dioxide, an essential component of ecology, without which plants could not “breathe” for their own survival. And without plants, we would die due to absence of oxygen.

There are proofs that global warning is not necessarily man-made and attributable to modern times. There are scientists who look back to the past for clues that it is a direct manifestation of erratic solar energy. When the sun radiates beyond-usual amount of cosmic rays, according to this theory, it clears away clouds, resulting in hotter heat waves. The intensity of today’s global warming is reminiscent of the 1930s when the Arctic cover also melted.

Joseph Bast, an American environmental journalist, remembered that “winter” in Chicago, Illinois on a New Year’s Day (January 1, 2007) when temperature there rose to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. He initially thought it had never been like that until he researched and found out that the same phenomenon has occurred in Chicago in the long-ago winter days of the years 1876, 1890, 1891, 1892 kag 1897.

But, of course, I am not asking you to sit down, relax and sing, “Que sera, sera.” While there are realities beyond our control, there are also responsibilities we can do to cope and survive. We can dispose of our garbage properly, keep the waterways open and stop smoking.

God save us from natural phenomena!

One Response to “On with ‘war’ to halt global warming”

• 1
  nangtud
  December 12th, 2009 21:45

  350ppm has been breached, latest count is that the atmosphere now has 389ppm CO2. The earth has not experienced this much concentration of CO2 in the last million years. Unabated, this will cause unimaginable havoc to the environment.

  Global warming skeptics are not unlike ‘flat-earth’ believers. Despite scientific evidence they continue to deny the impact of sources and impacts of climate change.

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