Getting Wet In The Philippines
|
Image Courtesy: Martyn Willes
|
Getting wet seems to be the easiest thing to do in the World at the moment, with floods (or snow fall that will turn to flood) in: United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Mozambique, the United States et al
Why does there appear to be so much precipitation?
Is it, as a friend of mine said recently, "a factor of the ability to deliver immediate news and especially when there is no real news flooding is a good headline"?
Take Davao City, Mindanao, for example. Here, the weather forecast this week was for more than 50mm of rain every three hours, almost every day. Awesome some would say; the US based FNMOC meteorological website indicated that they could not indicate so much rain and so the weather system appeared as an open space on their forecast charts – because it exceeded their three-hour maximum of 30mm . . . schools and businesses were closed in preparation. Fortunately, the actual precipitation was less than 30mm per three-hour period and the flooding moderate only.
Davao’s weather is "unseasonal" insomuch as at this time of year they would normally expect clear skies in the morning with afternoon thunderstorms, instead they are receiving non-stop rain. Anecdotal evidence states that this has been the case for the past couple of years. A temporary change in the weather only?
The erstwhile promoter of Mindanao goodness – Mr. Jess Dureza – was prompted to issue an editorial in the Mindanao Times titled "I know why the floods", in which he waffled in hs explanation of why, and actually failed to disclose anything at all that was worthy of note. He did site Al Gore’s inconvenient truth and other prophets of impending doom but he failed to explain how his support for construction of yet another Aboitiz funded coal-fired power station, for Mindanao, could in any way be part of the problem – burning fossil fuels is determined to be a major cause of the increased precipitation that he so voluminously writes about.
Here is the simple equation: heat up water and it evaporates into the air as water vapor; cool the water vapor (e.g. as it rises over land), and it precipitates (turns to water again and falls to Earth). Explaining this to a six year old is easy but to a sixty+ year old appears to be a challenge.
So what is heating the World’s oceans? The sun, obviously. For many millions of years the sun’s heat that has been absorbed by the oceans has been dissipated into the air and eventually dissipated into cold "space", at a steady rate that is balanced, and has been understood to create relatively predictable weather systems, for centuries.
What has changed? During this last century, since Man devised ingenious ways of extracting fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) from beneath the ground and then burning them in even more ingenious "combustion engines" and furnaces, We (yes: you, me and virtually everyone) have been adding Carbon Dioxide (CO2) to the air at increasing rates.
Why is this important? The "air" is a mixture of gases. A balanced mixture that allows the heat to dissipate into space at relatively predictable rates, creating predictable weather systems and (most important) predictable precipitation. Some of the gases that make up our air accelerate heat dissipation others restrict heat dissipation – CO2 is one of the gases that restricts heat dissipation. By increasing the proportion of CO2 in the air the air is changing its heat dissipation properties and is, in fact, not allowing so much heat to dissipate into space. The result: the oceans are warming.
Warming oceans result in two related, observable phenomena: when heated, water expands (causing rising sea levels); and, when heated, water evaporates more rapidly causing more severe weather systems to develop and to deposit their load (rain/snow) over land.
Mr. Dureza, in his editorial, is keen to point out the former result: he states that sea water levels have increased by as much as “twelve inches” over a twenty year period at his point of reference, on the sea shores of Mindanao, near Davao City. Unfortunately, Mr. Dureza fails to note that the corollary to rising sea levels is the increased evaporation. He also conveniently fails to note that adding CO2 to the air is a major part of the cause that has created the effect he has observed, despite his siting of Al Gore’s dissertation on the subject.
The bottom line is this: if We continue to upset the balance of gases in the air by adding more CO2 then We are decreasing dissipation of heat into space; as the oceans warm then evaporation will increase and the water in the oceans will expand; and, as the level of evaporation increases so too will precipitation as the water vapor rises over land and cools.
If we are to curtail what we currently refer to as "extreme" weather events (which will actually, soon become the norm) then we need to stop producing CO2 in the current quantities. That means less coal fired/diesel/gas powered electricity generation and more alternative-energy wave/tidal/solar/wind/geothermal powered electricity generation. It is being accomplished in other countries and it can be accomplished here in the Philippines. All it needs is the political will, the removal of the blinkers and the eradication of greed . . . if we have two out of three then everything is possible.
So, please remove your support for Aboitiz coal-fired power stations in the Philippines and instead support wave/tidal/solar/wind/geothermal power generation alternatives . . . Aboitiz executives I have spoken to, when they divorce themselves from the need for corporate greed, know that this is the true path forward for the Philippines, and the World.