AS we cruise into summer with record-breaking heat index, the global challenge of climate change inevitably comes to mind.
The world is getting warmer every year with 2024 as the hottest year on record, reaching an average of global temperature of 1.55 degrees Celsius.
Climate change as manifested by extreme weather, harsh climate, and water-related calamities has started to wreak havoc on global economies.
The World Economic Forum reported in 2023 that the economic toll of extreme weather has grown substantially with total losses reaching nearly $1.5 billion beginning 2019, up from $184 billion in the 1970s.
In Asia, the economic losses are best exemplified by the $42 billion that China lost in the first nine months of 2023 due to natural disasters. Africa lost $43 billion from extreme weather events from 1970-2021 while Europe shed $562 billion, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
South America’s economic losses amounted to $115.2 billion while North America, Central America, and the Caribbean suffered a combined loss of $2 trillion.
‘If climate change is a global conspiracy cooked up by the world’s tree huggers, why is it that our summers are getting hotter…’
Nations in the former Soviet bloc were also hit with a drastic drop in income due to extreme weather, ranging from 10 to 50 percent.
America was not spared from weather-induced catastrophes, with about $1 billion in losses every three weeks to a yearly average of $150 billion in damage between 2018 and 2022.
Southeast Asia is the most vulnerable to natural disasters like typhoons, storms and floods affecting their agriculture, infrastructure, tourism and transport. It lost some $32 billion from the barrage of typhoons that struck the region from 1987 to 2016.
In the Philippines, losses mainly from agriculture amounted to P10 billion in the first months of 2024.
As wealthy and poor countries grapple with climate change, a shadowy movement that rejects global warming as a crisis has emerged.
No less than US President Donald Trump acts as the de facto spokesman for the movement that threatens to wipe out the gains made by the rest of world to arrest climate change. He caused the US, the world’s biggest polluter, to pull out twice from the Paris Climate Change treaty, calling it a “hoax” and a “green scam.”
The Paris accord seeks to contain “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.”
In the book “The Climate Change Hoax Argument,” it was argued that the “current and continued use of fossil fuels will not lead to the destruction of the earth; neither is it causing increased global warming that will cause this destruction; neither is it causing a rise of sea level that will devastate mankind; neither is it causing an increased number and intensity of tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, floods or droughts.”
“More and more scientists are abandoning the politically correct global warming/climate change movement as they are beginning to see the falsehoods, deceptions, and rigged predictions,” it also said.
If climate change is a global conspiracy cooked up by the world’s tree huggers, why is it that our summers are getting hotter, polar ice caps are melting, and typhoons with floods becoming are more frequent and disruptive every year?
Non-believers of global warming are akin to people who spewed the lie that the Holocaust did not happen.
We are at the 11th hour of our fight to reverse the overheating of Mother Earth. Fake news peddlers attempting to repudiate the climate change agenda should be doused with cold freezing water.
