The New Normal

Thursday, 07 July 2011 06:32

Written by Neric Acosta

This is what Newsweek calls the phenomenon of weather disturbances that follow no real pattern or cycles, but tend to be more freakish or frequent. Everywhere in the world some tornado or cyclone, flooding or drought, typhoon or landslide occurs with greater frequency, displacing millions, damaging property and infrastructure, and derailing economic activity. A writer calls it, not the least facetiously, as “global weirding,” when what we are used to in terms of frames of reference are turned upside down. It is, indeed, a warmer, wilder, wetter, weirder world.

In Filipino this ‘new normal’ will be such that typhoons of the “Ondoy” sort, which inundated eighty percent of Metro Manila in a day of record-breaking rainfall in 2009, will occur with increasing ferocity and frequency – ang mga sakunang lalakas, dadalas, at titindi. This year, the country has had five typhoons, the latest being Falcon, which reminded us yet too rudely how vulnerable we all are to every calamitous climatic occurrence – and for the most part, woefully unprepared. When PAGASA tells us that there will be another 20 or so typhoons before the end of the year that will make their path on Philippine ‘areas of responsibility,’ we cannot but brace ourselves for more meteorological battering.

What used to predictable has become a climate rollercoaster with seasons in the more temperate climes reversed and rainfall or temperature records broken year for year. Heretofore mild weather in places like London, which do not have the kind of blustery cold winters of some parts of Western Europe, has had biting cold weather in the last year and snowstorms that paralyzed major airports, railways and highways.

Last year’s summer in Russia and Eastern Europe scorched over two million square kilometers, igniting forest fires that burned for weeks, covering Moscow in a deadly haze, ruining swaths of cropland and killing 50,000 people with abnormally high temperatures that hit over six degrees Celsius more than usual. Summer this year in Switzerland, France and Germany, among several others, are in for a series of lethal heatwaves. Parallel these images of sweltering cities with footage of streets or highways in parts of Europe this year turned into instant rivers after heavy rainfall or flashfloods.

In the southern hemisphere the same can be said of persistent droughts and endless rain. Australia is still reeling from the effects of January’s floods in Queensland, which is called the country’s “worst natural disaster” that affected an area the size of France and Germany combined. China has alternately been experiencing disastrous dry spells that have depleted reservoirs and watersheds, and massive flooding and mudslides that bury communities wholesale.

Just this week, apart from ‘Falcon,’ the country was witness to unprecedented flooding in Cotabato City and many other parts of central Mindanao, as well as in the congested urban centers of Davao City. The damage in property and the cost to lives and livelihood can only be in the hundreds of millions. Governance – or the sorry lack of it – may be largely to blame in these respects. When illegal logging in the uplands or heavy siltation from upriver or overcrowding of settlements along riverbanks are unaddressed, and the overgrowth of water hyacinths that clog waterways in Cotabato are left without any government action, overall impacts to economy and community are certainly exacerbated. Even so, there is little doubt that excessive rains all over Mindanao, even over what is normally a drier season, are caused by the rather enigmatic weather events El Nino and La Nina, which alternately heat and cool equatorial areas of the Pacific Ocean and bring severe droughts and gargantuan floods.

The intensity and frequency of natural disasters linked to a changing climate have more far-reaching effect in poorer countries like the Philippines. It is the double-whammy of climate impacts and worsening poverty for frontline states. To the farmers in the uplands or the fisherfolk in coastal towns all over the archipelago, climate change is understood not in the abstract data of meteorology or the scientific explanations of accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Quite simply and viscerally, this is understood in terms of loss – in livelihood and opportunity, in food, income and homes – and to a growing sense of insecurity about the future. As the rains continue to fall and rivers overflow – or when dry spells lengthen and the soil gets parched -- the farmer or urban settler is gripped with some gnawing fear of displacement and impending despair.

The “weirding of the weather” in this age of the “new normal” will force us to adapt to changing conditions and find actionable paths for survival. Not only are we made to build climate-resilient homes or structures, or find new crops or ways to farm and impound water or be energy-efficient. We are made to rethink, all told, the way we have understood ourselves in relation to the natural environment. From being dominant and controlling of resources of the earth and their uses, to being more attuned to the complexities of ecology and the rhythms of nature – even reverential.

If anything, the “weirding” of the climate should move us towards a “wisening” of our consciousness – to live in harmony with and smarter adaptation to the cycles and forces of the energies of land, air, and water.

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