If you’re not worried about what’s been written in today’s THE STAR, then I don’t know what will worry you. Our “couldn’t-care-less” and “it-won’t-happen-in-my-lifetime” attitudes have taken its toll on the global climate. If Malaysians, especially, remain adamant to not recognise the danger of “riches-over-everything-else” then one day we may live long enough to regret it.
Global warming is happening and it is here to stay. When I went to the North Pole back in 1998, it was a desert. As of April last year, the polar ice cap has receded, and the organiser of the North Pole trips e-mailed me saying you can now quench your thirst by collecting water from melting ice. As a matter of fact, you can even find “puddles” on the ice surface. The warmest temperature when I was there was minus 25C; now it’s minus 4C. Some days in Geneva, Switzerland are colder. But even that is in doubt now. Alpine ski resorts closed last season because the trees were green, and so was the ground. You get multiple hurricanes and typhoons hitting the Atlantic and Pacific. It is raining here in KL daily when it is supposed to be dry season.
And believe me, when it is finally dry season, it will be drier and hotter than it was ten years ago. I see a repeat of the 1998 water crisis in KL not too long from now.
I used to tell people what it was like in the early 1970s. I used to don a cardigan over my school uniform every morning and would only take it off after recess as it would be cold. You can see mist and fog in KL on a cold morning. When I first went to Genting Highlands in 1976, we brought food from home and would put the tiffin carriers on the ledge outside the hotel room so the contents would freeze and food wouldn’t get spoilt.
If you drive along the expressway from Bangsar Shopping Center towards Taman Tun Dr Ismail, take a look at the huge monsoon drain as you turn left going downhill from the BSC; that, my dear friends, IS the Damansara River, where families used to picnic on Sundays in a cold and clear stream. Look at what it is now. There also used to be streams and a river flowing through what is now Bandar Kinrara (the phase behind the Kinrara Military Hospital complex).
In the 1970s too, we used to walk along the beach at Port Dickson’s 4th mile, to collect cockles…tons of them. Water was clear at the 9th mile too, that as a kid, I used to snorkle there. I used to be able to see lots of angelfish, anemonefish in abundance there in PD. The reefs were alive, now they’re just dark red, algae-covered, and mostly dead, if not suffocating. Back in the 1970s too I used to hear of fishermen who got their feet bitten by sharks whenever they dangle their feet off their sampan. You’d be lucky to see one now. The last shark I saw in PD was a Tawny Nurse Shark that I caught 2km off PD’s Bayu Beach back in 1999. That one measured less than a meter; the largest was the one we bagged in 1986, at 2 meters in length. I used to see Guitar Shark caught by local fishermen in PD, I see none now.
It now seems as if the East Coast monsoon season has started but the West Coast monsoon hasn’t ended. Believe me when I say that the East Coast monsoon season will not end by middle of March. And as the waters of the South China Sea warms up, it will power up typhoons. Therefore we will have more diving downtimes than uptimes, and shorter dive season.
If you think conservation is a pooh-pooh, think again.
SeaDemon Says 