Lesson in 5 parts on TATAKalikasan, Ateneo de Manila University
87.9 FM Radyo Katipunan, every Thursday) 11 to 12 a.m., Nov 21, 2024
Human activities trigger
current Climate Change
Dr Abe V Rotor
Co-Host with Fr JM Manzano SJ, and Prof Emoy Rodolfo, AdMU
Guest: Joseph Quilang Basconcillo, PhD
Climatology and Agrometeorology Division
Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration
Extreme heat is a growing threat due to climate change, and the Philippines has experienced extreme heat in recent years. In April 2024, the Philippines experienced extreme heat, with the heat index reaching 45°C in Manila and 47°C in Dagupan city. The Department of Health (DOH) classified temperatures of 33–41°C as "extreme caution" and 42–51°C as "danger".
Part 1 -Global Warming is accelerating!
Part 2 - Environmental degradation is the most serious global abuse
Part 2 - Environmental degradation is the most serious global abuse
Part 3 - Kiribati: Vanishing Paradise
Part 4 - Some Detrimental Effects of El Niño Drought
Part 1 -Global Warming is accelerating!
Sign of the Times: Smog, acid rain and ozone depletion rolled altogether.
Photo by AVR Fairview, QC 2010
Extreme heat is a growing threat due to climate change, and the Philippines has experienced extreme heat in recent years. In April 2024
the Philippines experienced extreme heat, with the heat index reaching 45°C in Manila and 47°C in Dagupan city. The Department of Health (DOH) classified temperatures of 33–41°C as "extreme caution" and 42–51°C as "danger".
Dr Abe V Rotor
Former Professor, UST, DLSU-D Lesson in Advanced Ecology UST and DLSU(D) Graduate Schools. How can an ordinary citizen help in cushioning global warming?
Acknowledgment: Time Magazine
Here are scientific evidences released by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activity since the mid-20th century.
The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, with most of the warming occurring in the past 35 years with the five warmest years on record taking place since 2010. The warmest year on record was 2016. The IPCC report continues with these alarming developments:
1. The oceans are getting warmer.
2. Ice sheets are shrinking, especially Greenland and Antarctic. The Arctic sea ice is declining.
3. Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa (Mount Kilimanjaro),.
4.The snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere is melting at an earlier rate. .
5. Sea level is rising. Global sea level rose about 8 inches in the last century. The rate in the last two decades, however, is nearly double that of the last century and is accelerating slightly every year.
6. Extreme events such as extreme temperature, intense rainfall, and other force majeure
7. The acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
This global scenario calls for an urgent collective action. It is a plea addressed to governments, organizations, individuals all over the world> It is a plea beyond message of an Internationally famous broadcaster, natural historian and author, David Attenborough. To wit:
"When we look at the rising ocean temperatures, rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so on, we know that they are climbing far more steeply than can be accounted for by the natural oscillation of the weather … What people (must) do is to change their behavior and their attitudes … for our upcoming generation we have to do something, and we have to demand for government support
"Right now we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change. If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon".
- David Attenborough, 2018.~
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Things we, citizens, can do to combat climate change
The single-most important thing that we can do to combat climate change is to drastically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.
1) Don't waste food
2) Eat less processed food
3) Compost farm and kitchen waste into fertilizer
4) Reduce use of commercial fertilizers and farm chemicals
4) Walk, bike or take public transport
5) Consume less water
6) Use LED lighting, smart thermostats, and high-efficiency appliances
7) Save energy at home, specially electricity
8) Change your home's source of energy (Ex, solar)
9) Switch to an electric vehicle
10) Consider your travel - ONLY if important
7) Save energy at home, specially electricity
8) Change your home's source of energy (Ex, solar)
9) Switch to an electric vehicle
10) Consider your travel - ONLY if important
11) Reduce, reuse, repair and recycle
12) Eat more vegetables
13) Plant trees, take care of trees
14) Plant native species of plants, raise native animals and fowls
15) Cleanliness and sanitation of home and surroundings always
16) Make your money count (save, save, save)
17) Speak up, join campaign to help save our planet
18) Invest in environmental health care
19) Build natural resistance and immunity, personally and family
20) Keep environmental care standard high
21) Regenerate spent farms, ponds, woodlands, pasture
22) Green your home, neighborhood, community
23) No bare soil, deprave pavement with grass or garden
24) Revive dead and dying lawn, neglected and abandoned lots, fishponds
25) Revive dead and dying waterways, shorelines, riverbanks, streams
26) Support soil health (erosion and siltation control) restore fertility
27) Support organic and natural farming
28) Rainwater harvesting and impounding
29) Restore water cycle garden pond, palay-isdaan in rice fields
30) Grassland and pasture management the way Nature does it
31) Bring back biodiversity, like in pocket parks, garden, arboretum
32)Tri-commodity farming - plants-animals-fish integration
33) Restore wetland, preserve miniclimate, biodiversity
34) Reforest mangrove, coral reefs, estuaries
35) Participate and support community projects (green initiative)
36) Maintain integrity of food chain, food web, food pyramid
37) Help nature maintain soil fertility, pH, structure, tilth
39) Help preserve indicators of good environment like fireflies, lichens
40) Spread the Word to children, neighbors, friends, organizations
Part 2 - Environmental degradation
is the most serious global abuse
Environmental degradation is the most serious global abuse, not only in pursuit of actual human need, but his unending want of affluence apparently of no end. The earth is slowly choking with deadly gases, its surface defaced and stripped of natural cover, man-made materials dumped on land and water, in fact its geography has changed and continues to be modified directly and indirectly by man.
Dr Abe V Rotor
Bad air over New Delhi, typical in other big cities like Beijing, New York and Metro Manila
industrial boom and millions of cars as affluence rose to the point of ostentatious and frivolous living. But each car’s exhaust is a miniature volcano, erupting daily, worse than a Mt Pinatubo (Philippines) and Mount St Helens (US) combined.
2. The air accumulates gaseous materials and particulates, building acid rain that turns soil acidic and unproductive, defacing valuable works of art (historical relics and artefacts), causing illnesses heretofore unrecorded in medical books, and triggering other diseases as well, including the resurgence of ancient diseases like tuberculosis.
Thinning of the ozone layer over Antarctica. Ozone hole has been detected over the Arctic.
3. The ozone layer, a protective blanket against radiation from space is being thinned by CFC and other gases. A hole at the southern hemisphere as big as continental USA, exposes millions, particularly children, in Australia and New Zealand to ultraviolet rays, a major cause of skin cancer. A smaller ozone hole is building up over the Arctic region.
4. Gases in the atmosphere trap heat from escaping, thus solar heat together with heat generated by the earth and man’s activities collectively contribute to global warming at an alarming rate. Climate change has been the cause of climatic adversities (typhoons, tornadoes, drought, blizzards), erratic weather, and other unexplained atmospheric phenomena.
5. In Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” the world is getting warmer and warmer at a geometric rate, far exceeding any period of the history of the earth except in its early formation. Warming is traced to increasing amount of CO2 in the air, the principal gas of combustion mainly of fossil fuel that runs agriculture, industry, transportation, and illuminate whole cities around the world.
6, The failure of timely shift to alternative fuel even as fossil fuel sources are dwindling, even as alternative energy is available, even as population demand tremendously increased in the past one hundred years, has grave consequences which we are feeling today, and this is just the beginning - fuel shortage, high cost of living, increasing inequity leading to mass poverty.
7. Environmental degradation is the most serious effect, not only in meeting actual need, but unending want of affluence apparently of no end. The earth is slowly choking with deadly gases, its surface defaced and stripped of natural cover, man-made materials dumped on land and water, in fact its geography has changed and continues to be modified directly and indirectly by man.
8. Reminiscent of the Dust Bowl of the Dakotas in the US in the early 20th century are similar desertification cases, farmlands becoming wastelands due to excessive farming and poor management, such cases include the Sahel region (Africa) struck in the 60s by extreme drought, farmlands around the shrinking Aral Sea (Russia), the source of irrigation now only a measly fraction of its original size. A comparison of Aral Sea in 1989 (left) and 2014 (right)
9. We don’t have to go far. Our own Laguna Bay, bigger than the Sea of Galilee, is dying, its once pristine blue water as I saw it in the sixties as a UPLB trainee in a lakeshore barangay, Gatid, Sta Cruz, is now shallow and muddy as siltation and pollution from homes, farms and industries from four surrounding provinces worsen by encroaching settlements and fishpens clogging the lake – indeed a desecration of the lake’s beauty as described in Rizal’s celebrated novel, Noli Me Tangere.
10. All over the world lakes and rivers are dying: Lake Chad of Africa, Aral Sea of Russia, tributaries of Mississippi in the US, Nile in Egypt, Yangtze in China, Mekong in Vietnam. Who would believe that odor of methane and hydrogen sulphide from the polluted harbour of Hongkong is the first to greet passengers even before landing on the sprawling modern airport? So with tourists on reaching the deck of the 100-storey Sears Tower on Lake Michigan in the US.
Part 3 - Kiribati: Vanishing Paradise
Rising sea level is forcing inhabitants to leave permanently their home islands, a classical example of modern day exodus - ecomigration.
Dr Abe V Rotor
Kiribati main island is formerly Atoll Christmas, named by Captain Cook when he arrived on Christmas Eve in 1777. The island, like most islands in the region, faces irreversible submergence and sea water intrusion as a result of rising sea level brought about by global warming. The island was used as nuclear testing ground by the United States in the fifties and sixties.
Aerial view of the Kiribati group of islands. Rising sea level is forcing inhabitants to leave permanently their home islands, a classical example of modern day exodus - ecomigration. Displaced inhabitants are being settled mainly in Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.
The sea has practically swallowed up a whole atoll*, with narrow
fringes the only remaining habitable portion, at least up to now.
Kiribati Parliament House is threatened by receding shoreline
(background) and rising lagoon (foreground).
Kiribati (pronounced /ˈkɪrɨbæs or KIRR-i-bas; Gilbertese: [ˈkiɾibas]), is composed of 32 atolls and one raised coral island, dispersed over 3.5 million square kilometres, (1,351,000 square miles) straddling the equator, and bordering the International Date Line at its easternmost point. Kiribati is the only country in the world located on both hemispheres and lying on both sides of the 180th meridian.
The groups of islands are:
* Banaba: an isolated island between Nauru and the Gilbert Islands
* Gilbert Islands: 16 atolls located some 930 miles (1,500 km) north of Fiji
* Phoenix Islands: 8 atolls and coral islands located some 1,100 miles (1,800 km) southeast of the Gilberts
* Line Islands: 8 atolls and one reef, located about 2,050 miles (3,300 km) east of the Gilberts.
Caroline Atoll channel between west side of Long Island and Nake Island.
Used for nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s, the island is now valued for its marine and wildlife resources. It is particularly important as a seabird nesting site—with an estimated 6 million birds using or breeding on the island, including several million Sooty Terns.
According to the South Pacific Regional Environment Program, two small uninhabited Kiribati islets, Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea, disappeared underwater in 1999. The islet of Tepuka Savilivili no longer has any coconut trees due to salination. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels will rise by about half a metre (20 in) by 2100 due to global warming and a further rise would be inevitable. It is thus likely that within a century the nation's arable land will become subject to increased soil salination and will be largely submerged.
Rising level level is also being felt in many countries, particularly island-countries like the Philippines. ~
Images of Kiribati from the Internet
Official name: Republic of Kiribati.Capital city: Tarawa.Population: 135,389.Area: 811 sq km.Major languages: I-Kiribati, English.Time zone: UTC+12/+13/+14 (Gilbert Island Time/Phoenix Island
Time/Line Islands Time)
- Economy- Until 1979, when Banaba’s deposit of phosphate rock was exhausted, Kiribati’s economy depended heavily on the export of phosphate mineral. Before the cessation of mining, a large reserve fund was accumulated; the interest now contributes to government revenue. Other revenue earners are copra, mostly produced in the village economy, and license fees from foreign fishing fleets, including a special tuna-fishing agreement with the European Union. Commercial seaweed farming has become an important economic activity. Internet
Part 4 - Some Detrimental Effects of El Niño Drought
Seedlings of Ilang-ilang (Cananga odorata) and Sweet Tamarind (Tamarindus indica) wilt under the punishing sun, exacerbated by the heat evolved by the concrete pavement. Daily watering is needed in the morning and afternoon.
Malunggay trees (Moringa oleifera) appear to withstand the current drought and excessive picking of their leaves by passersby. Their trunks have been cut into stumps to give way to street lighting and cable installation.
Kamote (Ipomea batatas) is predisposed to Sweet Potato weevil (Cylas formicarius)under extreme heat. The pest renders the tubers totally unfit to human and animal consumption.
Anahaw (Livistona rotundifolia) becomes an alternate host of Rhinocerus Beetle (Oryctes rhinocerus) in the absence of its regular host - coconut. The pest has been emboldened by continuous and heavy spraying of vegetables and other crops in the area.
Used plastic sacks left in the farm to "decay" under direct sunlight and continuous irrigation disintegrate into microplastic which is deleterious to health and the environment.
Brooding hen finds refuge to hatch her eggs inside a broken jar (burnay Ilk) while outside temperature is unbearable.
Talisay (Terminalia catappa) barely retains its leaves, while a Camachile tree (Pitecolobium dulce) succumbs to the El Niño phenomenon, the worst in many years this current year 2024.
Acacia trees (Samanea saman} now skeletons in the sky, and a new beginning and resolve with the young generation led by co-ed Angie Tobias. ~- Part 4 -
