A retrospect on global warming
I remember reading about global warming (I guess know it more as climate change nowadays?) in an encyclopedia that my grandparents bought for me when I was little. Although I don’t know the implications at the time because 1. english isn’t my first language and 2. it was done with cartoon drawings. I’ve heard over the years of people chalking it up to something that we won’t see in our lifetimes (I guess acknowledging it’s a problem in the first place is something) but thinking about it now, I observed that there is a shift in tone with climate and heatwaves that aren’t circled back to global warming.
So a bit of context here, I live near the equator, so we have a somewhat uniform time for sunrise and nightfall, and two seasons, which are summer and summer with heavy rain. Well, there is a climate change, but the discourse on heatwaves is more prominent in my memory.
Back in 2016, I remember reading about the 2016 El Nino on one of the columns in the magazine I was reading, and the discussion at the time was to turn on the fan. Yeah you read that right, fan. So apparently the context for that is that the elderly lived without a comfort of a fan in their generation, and it’s seen as more like a weakness to resort to using it. The column also talked about the dangers of heat strokes and reminders on hydration which at the time was standard stuff.
Cue a decade later, and the attitude to heatwaves are different. No, unfortunately I haven’t read a magazine column to also compare, it’s mostly a personal observation and news. Okay, so you know how the talk was to use a fan? Yeah now it’s about getting air conditioners. I mean, yeah it’s the equator, what can be expected. But worriyingly, I can feel it’s hotter than previous years. I was born post 2000, so I don’t even have a lot of years to compare it with. The further I compare with my memory, the more it seems that it’s colder then. Body clock’s also been off for the past few years, where I would mistake the heat in February with the heat of the monsoon transition in June, a 4 month difference.
I know, I know, we’ve all been lectured on global warming since forever, but I genuinely am thinking whether I can stay where I am over the coming decades because of this. I mean, I know the dream is to have a high paying job somewhere in Europe/Australia and immigrate there, but that’s not suited for everyone.
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tags: blog