LAGATAW on GLOBAL WARMING

LIFE is a COIN. On one side is RELIGION; on the other, SCIENCE! The ridge that circumscribes and links the two sides is BUSINESS! And the metal of which the coin is made is PHILOSOPHY!

And GLOBAL WARMING can be explained by life's four facets!

RELIGION would either say:

God will never let the Earth vanish! Despair no more my flock for you are in God's hand! Global warming will never end God's creation!

or

Because of man's wickedness, God shalt once again wash the face of the Earth! The waters will rise and the earth shall devour every unclean creature that creepeth on its face! And the righteous shalt inherit all the good things in Heaven; the wicked shall be forever damned in Hell! Fear not my child for it is the Will of thy Father!

or

(in a Buddhist/Hindu perspective)

If you want to save the Earth, be a vegetarian! The more vegetarians, the higher the demand for vegetables! The more vegetables, the more oxygen breathed out into the atmosphere. Stop raising and butchering the holy cows and pigs and chickens! They breathe out carbon dioxide! But Al Gore will never support this advocacy because he gets a lot of money from Ronald McDonald and the poultry in Kentucky! So I’ll just sit here and do my meditation! Ahhummmmm…..ahhummmmm….ahhummmmm!

In SCIENCE

A Chemist would say:

Life is just a freakish coincidence! It is the bi-product of the harmony of The Trinity—Nitrogen, Oxygen and the Holy Carbon! And these elements will be destroyed neither by the melting of ice caps nor human mortality. One of the nitrogen atoms in your body probably came from the nasal discharge of the extinct Irish elk. And one carbon atom in my brain could have been a part of Plato’s thick eyebrows. These elements don’t actually die with the dying of a protein-based organism. If you want to know how particles are destroyed, talk to the physicist!

A Biologist would say:

Humans are just an interesting freak of nature! There is no LIFE (bios as the Greeks call it)! There is only LIFE AS WE KNOW IT TODAY! Billions of years ago, the earth was too hot to be inhabitable. God bless the cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) which feasted on the heat of the prokaryotic earth. The blue green algae pumped enormous amounts of oxygen (the metabolic bi-product of cyanobacteria) into the air that created the primitive atmosphere. This was the beginning of the aerobic-based life on earth. Organisms that were allergic to oxygen were decimated, if not annihilated from the face of the earth. May they all rest in peace and give way to oxygen-dependent humans! The earth was not originally meant for carbon-based organisms. It’s a cycle! For some billion years, one class of existence ruled the earth and during another billion years another form of organism will flourish. Let global warming take its course! Don’t impede the natural cycle of the earth!

A Geologist would say:

What’s all this fuss on global warming?! It’s just a speck on the blueprint of geological cataclysm! The earth will vanish if it is to vanish! And the effects of global warming (which The Kyoto Protocol labeled as threats) don’t compare to the capacity of the Pacific Ring of Fire to submerge the Philippine archipelago in deep water! The earth is in a constant cycle of cooling down and heating up! The Last Glacial Maximum happened in the time of the modern man but luckily, Al Gore wasn’t there to create fear among earth’s denizens. But life still subsisted after that! During that time, the ocean levels dropped significantly! If there is something wrong with the rising of sea levels there is also something wrong with its dropping. But what really is the ideal ocean level? Is there really?     

A Physicist would say:

Everything is relative! I’m busy colliding electrons with positrons! I want to figure out how to convert 100% of a certain mass into energy. Another war is about to happen and I am to assume a very significant role. This war will change the face of the earth more dramatically than will this global warming hysteria! Check the electrical activity in your brain you might suffer epilepsy just wasting your time thinking about global warming. 

And here’s what BUSINESS has got to say about global warming:

The Cold War has ended, let’s create another enemy! Let’s instill fear among billions of people across the globe and with this fear let’s create global domination. Now that we’ve shut up William Gray, you start Greenpeace and I’ll start the paper empire. Humans, by nature, would do anything to survive. A donation of one million dollars to Greenpeace wouldn’t hurt because mass extinction is on the other side of the scale. That’s what we do best! We create a demand and we sell the merchandise demanded. And fear creates a demand for survival. The whole world will soon be a unified marketplace and the merchandise we’re going to be exclusively selling there is SURVIVAL!

And PHILOSOPHY…Ah Philos Sofia!

She won’t say anything! She just told you this story!

And the poor LAYMAN…Oh! Should I even continue telling the sad lot that befell this creature?!

The LAYMAN will just listen to any of the four. With his eagerness to ACT instead of THINK, he will make the first step! And this single step could either be a virtue or a mistake depending on which of the four dictums he adheres to! Most often the layman is a victim of the ridge (business) where religion meets science. And so the layman will start planting trees! He will work harder so that he can make a donation to Greenpeace! He will switch off his lights for one hour because doing so makes him feel he is righteous and concerned! After all, that’s what ABS-CBN said! Indeed there is no greater motivation for humans than fear garnished with vanity! And this is enough to blind a bright-eyed layman! He will start banning plastic bags in Muntinlupa City and start using paper bags not knowing that paper bags demand for and cut thousands of trees everyday while plastic bags are just innocent suspects of the death of trees! He will sing to the tune of Jack Johnson’s Reduce Reuse Recycle while the paper placards that he is holding up can barely be reused and recycled! And when asked “How does plastic destroy mother nature?”, he will just say “Ask Greenpeace!” and sing again Reduce Reus Recycle when in fact, plastic materials can be reused and recycled seventy and seven times!

And when confronted with the bitter realization of his being conned, the layman would just say Ano naman ang maimumungkahi mong solusyon? Ang hirap kasi sayo salita ka lang nang salita. Wala ka namang ginagawa!

But in fact, who needs a solution when there really is no problem? Why would you address a problem when the problem is fabricated and invented?