The ominous realities of El Niño today, La Niña tomorrow
DAILY forecasts from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) in the past were largely ignored by Pangasinan and Dagupan City, until March 2024.
Even news of the arrival of the El Niño phenomenon was a non-event for many because experiencing high temperature is nothing new to us. Of course, There was a brief recollection of PAGASA warning last year of temperatures between 33 and 41 degrees Celsius classified as “extreme caution”. But that was a brief event.
Suddenly, Pangasinenses fear PAGASA’s next day’s weather forecast that forebodes of sizzling heat, with temperature from 42 to 51 degrees Celsius categorized as “dangerous,” posing a significantly higher risks of a deadly heatstroke.
All too sudden, the reality of a climate change as life-threatening situation has dawned on the country with the onset of this year’s El Niño. News of global temperatures and extreme events affecting health, shortage of water, food security, and economic productivity across the world in the coming months are staring down at us.
We now realize that climate change’s impact on everyone’s health can no longer be ignored.
Before us is a situation that requires everyone to be adaptive to the real threats to our health, from heatstroke to loss of crops to drought to livelihood.
That’s just for starters. Having learned the lessons from what harm El Niño can do, our citizens and local governments must brace for the worse from hereon. There is the La Niña phenomenon waiting in the wings to unleash its wrath, too.
Unlike the El Niño that we’ve come to know that local governments can do very little except to help provide mitigating measures to help our farmers, La Niña will require our local governments to plan and prepare for the impact of unprecedented levels of flooding that will affect safety of communities and livelihood directly.
We no longer have the cyclical summer fun and cool rainy season for us from hereon.
Let’s face the reality that rough months and years are ahead of us that will be determined by nature that man has no control over.
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