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EDUCATION KEY TO FIGHTING GLOBAL WARMING - ALVAREZ
by Winston A. Marbella
Manila Bulletin
July 19, 2007
Believing that "the most important tool against global warming is public information and total awareness of the issue of climate change," environmentalist Sec. Heherson Alvarez is seeking permission to translate to Filipino Al Gore's Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
Alvarez plans to translate Gore's documentary into ten major dialects "to allow the urgent call for global warming mitigation to reach more Filipinos.
"By bringing the issues into movie-houses frequented by the general public, by taking the matter into everybody's living room, we hope to (inject) mitigation and adaptation efforts into the consciousness of every citizen, making it part of the Filipino pysche," Alvarez says.
Gore's film shocked the world about the dangers of global warming. It painted a bleak scenario of a global climate gone wild.
Picture, if you will, this scenario in the windmills of your mind:
The North Pole has lost most of its ice in the summer, and the polar bears have all but died.
The Mediterranean shores of southern Europe and North Africa are basking in the summer sun. People go up to the Alps to ski, but there is no snow. The temparature is like Baguio's.
Droughts are ravaging the semi-arid lands of Africa, while killer typhoons batter the Philippines and the Gulf states of the United States.
The sea level has risen from melted snow and thermal expansion and has submerged half of the coastal communities in 80 percent of the provinces in the Philippines.
Bangladesh is flooded as well as the Nile River delta in Egypt and the Red River delta of Vietnam.
Melting glaciers in the Himalayas have cut a swath of destruction across India and China as rampaging floodwaters displaced almost a billion before emptying into the oceans already swollen by melted polar ice caps.
Millions of "climate refugees" are on the move, elbowing out millions of others in a life-and-death competition for scarce water and food. Disease follows in their wake. It is as if the four horsemen of the biblical Apocalypse - war, pestilence, famine, disease - have descended upon us.
Hollywood blockbuster movie? Think again. The scenario is 90 percent probable, according to a United Nations scientific study - and it could happen in our lifetime.
Gore's documentary will become a devastating reality unless we all do something about global warming - and do it fast, says Alvarez.
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