Is It The Apocryha Yet?
It is only natural that it should rain in the monsoon season and that Malaysia should become more or less in that physical state we humans deem as Wet. It might also be, rather approximately, in the slightly more superflous expansion of Wet, which is Drenched. What is unnatural is for many parts of Malaysia to be in that geologically-disadvantaged (or aquatically-inclined) condition we term as Flooded. What is so unusual about this, you ask. After all, Malaysia is well-known for drainage so radical and cutting-edge in it's planning and construction that the construction of drains and runoffs precipitate floodings when there were none before - we meant it to happen, of course. Why else do you think our country has never had a water shortage before? Oh, wait. We've had water shortages before. Despite being inundated with so much annual rainfall we could probably wash Singapore clean off the map. But those water shortages were probably due to human error - namely, human error in constructing the pipes in such a manner so that the only way for the piped water to reach it's intended destination is for a rip in the space-time continuum and the spontaneous creation of a wormhole from the pipe to the target location. Or even human error as in some construction worker thinking Hey, there seems to be a metallic cylindrical thingamajig here. I wonder what happens when I put this pneumatic drill through it? So, by an odd combination of happy coincidences, the answer is yes, we do get Flooded lot.But the real point I'm trying to get at here is this - some places that are normally just Wet or Drenched during our country's monsoon season are Flooded this year around. And the places that are usually Flooded have been upgraded in status to Submerged And Lost To Humanity this time around. Let's take Kota Tinggi, for instance. It was my dad's hometown and was particularly prone to flooding in the olden days. Back then, the floodwaters were at the most as high as knee-height - the floods would severely inconvenience people by messing up their floors and giving the townfolk a few weeks' worth of gossip but the occurence of floods stopped after the riverbanks in the town centre were shored up, reinforced with concrete and raised in height. However, the floods that hit Kota Tinggi this year had a waterline that reached the first floor of buildings, leaving Kota Tinggi inaccessible except via sampan. Looking at the pictures, it was as if a short-sighted town planner (believe me, we have no shortage of them) had gotten the map coordinates wrong and had decided to build an entire town in a mudflat at lowtide and decided to check on it again at hightide. Kota Tinggi has always struggled to bring in tourism despite the fact that they have absolutely nothing to offer, but with the advent of floods this severe, we just might have another attraction on the itinerary's must-sees of Visit Malaysia 2007 - "A Low Cost Alternative To Venice - Kota Tinggi!".
This current spate of events set me thinking. And no, it wasn't so that I could skive off reading the Physiology textbook that I brought home with me, supposedly Study, For The Purpose Of but actually Gathering Dust, In The Act Of. I've never really thought about the weather except to cuss at it when it's bloody rubbish. Even when cussing it I don't really think about it. It's just an off-the-cuff response. I do it because people often use it as a conversation topic. "Bloody awful weather, isn't it?", they'd say, and I'll just reply out of rote, "Yeah, it's absolutely rubbish." This time around, I'm actually asking myself why? before I open my mouth to cuss at the weather. This time, I'm actually thinking, could this be due to global warming? Why not? Everyone knows about global warming. In a nutshell, we're baking our planet in the very gases we emit and this in turn causes a series of unfortunate events to occur, for instance, floods, forest fires, changes in weather patterns, melting of the Artic ice and an increase in the sea level - and we blame everything on it. Cute seal pups and baby penguins dying because the ice floe they call home is now a rapidly diluting patch of fresh water in the sea, multiple species of oceanic flora and fauna dying out due to changes in the water current patterns and temperature, that humongous blizzard that buried several towns but will make for an extremely White Christmas, etc. Heck, you could even blame the increase in the local crime rate and the clogging of the kitchen sink due to it.
I've always regarded the whole global warming thing as a superbly overhyped marketing tool used by the environmentalists' lobby to sell it's cause to us. It is the perfect foil - everything is blamed on global warming since it is said to affect the whole world and since it's effects are so widespread and diffuse, you can blame just about anything on it and yet no one will be able to prove you wrong. You might not be entirely correct, but you ain't completely wrong either. And so we play the blame game. That avalanche that buried a ski village in the Alps? Blame it on a global warming-caused shift in wind currents causing an abnormally large amount of snowfall - not the drunk idiot who yodeled all night long. The rapidly declining total area of coral in the Great Barrier Reef? Blame it on global warming, which caused a change in the oceans' currents and therefore a change of water temperature - and not the tanker which ran aground right next to it. And since I've never seen seal pups or baby penguins drowning just because their iceberg has melted because they can bloody well swim, I can say that I regarded the whole outcry about global warming with a skeptical eye. That was when I noticed the reason as to why I wasn't taking it seriously. All the disasters attributed to global warming happen somewhere else or cause incidents that I think have better explanations rather than the usage of one blanket term to elucidate everything. However, when things happen in your backyard that you think is a direct effect of global warming, one tends to sit up and take notice.
The recents of the past few days has made me a believer (more or less) of the effects of global warming - but it's not just due to the flooding of several towns and cities in Malaysia that converted me. I've been reading about several extreme weather conditions that occurred in the recent years and I think I'm beginning to understand where the tree-huggers are coming from. However, I'm not encouraging anyone to believe that global warming is the cause of every natural disaster that occurs on Earth and sell your SUV and go for one of those pansy hybrid cars or try to burn down your nearest gas/coal-fired power station (which, may I remind you, is not only a criminal offence but will also be a major source of pollution). Yes, really. What I'm trying to get at is to say that we should be mindful of our actions, which will have profound consequences on th environment that we live in. Whether we like it or not, it is generally agreed that we are stuck on this lump of soil, rock, magma and water that we call Earth for at least a couple more generations to come. So until our great-great-great grandkids are able to purchase that ticket to take them to Lunar New York City or Lunar London and us humans are able to transport a representative population of every species of lifeform on this planet to a Lunar Zoo, let's just try to keep this planet habitable and refrain from killing each other while we're at it. Or else, well, let's just say that we don't really have much of a choice, do we?
Forget the iPhone, the iPod Tiny, the iPod Microscopic, the iPod NotThere or whatever uber cool products are going to be released by a certain fruit company in the coming future. In this millenium, the iApocalypse is back in vogue.
posted by yong chen @ 5:52 PM
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