Strategies of Communication on Climate Change

Sunday, November 10, 2013

The normal changes into the monstrous





The normal changes into the monstrous
the fortunate into the unfortunate
and our bewilderment 
goes on and on

(the Tao Te Ching according to Ursula Le Guin)
Image: the recent hurricane in the Philippines

2 comments:

  1. A good Filipino friend of mine just sent me this and I am cutting and pasting it below just as I received it:

    "As for the recent super typhoon that hit the Philippines, called "Yolanda" within the Pinoy jurisdiction, take a look at the trajectory as attached. (I could not attach his diagram here) This is very unusual as I probably witnessed NO typhoon going nearly an east west trajectory and if indeed there ever had been one such anomaly, normally it would skip the whole Visay as a region because of the protective mountains of Samar and Leyte.

    On another front, I thought that the large number of casualties (a reported 10,000 dead) (thus far) was the fact that there were poor warnings. Apparently that is not the case, people did not follow the directives - Imagine if I had lived in Tacloban City, I would never have believed that a mega typhoon would wreak havoc by passing directly through my city!!! That is something that rarely happened before. That we have these new trajectories of typhoons and megatyphoons is certainly an indicator that something is awry in climate patterns in the world. Most of the people who died in Tacloban accdg to news video resulted from storm surges where people trapped inside their homes (not heeding the advisories and warnings to evacuate) could not escape from.

    In the attached article the President walked out of a meeting when he realized that the Philippine govt agencies did in fact carry out their work of warning people about the mega typhoon but were not heeded and yet still receive flak from the public. So what do you do?
    Can you blame the president for feeling frustrated?

    http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/11/10/13/pnoy-walks-out-disaster-meeting-out-frustration

    ReplyDelete
  2. And now I suppose the bloody lesson will be learned.
    Dismiss the weather alert to your own peril.

    I really feel sick for the orphans that the typhoon leaved behind

    ReplyDelete