BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
HUMAN tragedy, floods, landslides and more intense frequent typhoons are still to come after recent climate change-driven natural disasters. How natural are they? Clearly, science shows they are the result of human activity of non-stop burning fossil fuels causing global warming.
The earth has become warmer since 1890, the start of the industrial age. June 2023 was thought to be the hottest ever in recorded history but then July was even hotter across the globe and is the hottest in about 120,000 years. That triggers the disasters. We have to stop burning coal, oil and gas in power stations and build many more renewable energy sources of electricity.
Try putting your pet gold fish in a bowl of warm water. It will soon die. Millions of fish in the oceans die because of the warming of the oceans due to climate change and human-generated global warming. In March 2016, the highest ever recorded ocean temperature was 20.95C. That was surpassed in July 2023 when sea surface temperature was recorded at 20.96t August 2023 that was surpassed with a temperature of 20.96 degrees Celsius. If this continues, as it will, there are dire consequences for the planet and humans that live and survive on it.
The well-off people are causing it by wasteful lifestyles and primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, coal, gas and oil to sustain how we choose to live. Millions of poor don’t have electricity and cause no damage but they suffer the consequence of our luxurious lifestyles. The greed for more oil profits drives nations to subsidize oil exploration like what the UK announced recently, politicians likely benefiting friends and cronies of course.
This tiny blue dot in the emptiness of a vast universe, our fragile and sensitive planet, is being changed by us humans as never before in its more than four billion years of existence. The warmer oceans threaten the livelihoods of millions of fisher families around the globe and especially in the Philippines. As many as 56 million people depend on fishing worldwide and fish and seafood is the source of half of animal protein and nutrition in poor countries.
The survival of millions of people depends on a day’s catch and fish are very scarce. Warmer water drives the fish deeper for food and cooler temperatures. Besides, minerals that fish feed on are diminishing. In the magazine Science, a study shows that fish populations around China and Japan are diminished by up to 35 percent. The warmer ocean temperatures have caused a four percent reduction in fish netted by legal fishing in recent years.
This is one reason China has aggressively claimed all of the South China Sea and the Western Philippine Sea as its own and is plundering the fish stocks, depriving others by force, especially Filipinos. Recently, Chinese coast guard ships drove away one Philippine boat from delivering men and supplies to a Philippine atoll using powerful water cannons.
The warmer ocean is forcing fish to migrate north to relatively cooler waters. The poor need fish as food. (To be continued)/PN
