Climate Communication

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to find the place where all the beauty came from"

-C. S. Lewis

One of my many goals in life, besides being able to spend an evening with John Frusciante talking nothing  but music is to bring back the knowledge of what I have learned back to Malaysia. I am not talking in the sense that if Malaysia wants to achieve its 2020 vision it needs to be highly credited in the field of sciences or what not. I am talking in the sense that Malaysians needs to be more involved in the issue of the environment, climate change, mitigation and sustainability. No i won't be asking you to recycle because you can go shag yourself, but from my personal experience and observation, most Malaysians do not care about issues pertaining the globe in which they live in.

Case in point, recently our great, overly-educated Minister whose name i forgot because i couldn't care less attributed the current freak storm show this year to climate change. Here I am wondering what the heck is he trying to say. Is he saying that of all the real, current and observable climate change impacts like I don't know.....receding glaciers, climate refugees, increasing sea level, shore erosion, increasing global temperature and tralalala, he decided that extreme weather is going to be one issue that is being highlighted. I have no problem with that he said, extreme weather event is an impact of climate change but here's the contradiction in his statement.

Awesome bell curve

Weatherman here stated that both the monsoon and La Nina event are coinciding with one another, hence the increased and heightened stormy weather we are experiencing. The problem is that these are not extreme weather events. Extreme weather events are 'rare' events that does not occur annually. We attribute climate to a bell curve as per showed in this Davinci like drawing on my left. N is normal climate and E is extreme climate, and we attribute its occurrence to probability. On either side of the bell curve the probability of E events are small, hence the word 'rare' extreme events.

But here is where superweatherminister went wrong; it is not extreme weather events due to climate change. Monsoon and La Nina are seasonal and decadal weather phenomenons respectively. To highlight what these are in elementary terms; imagine monsoon as a giant sea breeze and La Nina as a phenomenon where a lot of rain and storms happen. Add both of them together you get a multiplication of awesomeness for storms. My problem is that if said minister wants to communicate about climate change to Malaysians, i hope next time he would consult me at least (<---- LOL) because he is getting his facts wrong. I know my climate science, i've done my research, spewing out rubbish like these is only an embarrassment to the climate science community because he is communicating to the public wrong and incredibly stupid scientific facts, the facts are wrong, the knowledge are wrong and most importantly the public is misinformed as well.

But the sad part is, Malaysians don't care, they read the news and take it as something that happens every year. How many of them even know the difference between weather and climate. How many of you know the difference? To me the reasons why Malaysians don't quite care about climate change because it doesn't have a pronounced and adverse effects to their livelihood. We are so involved with the concurrent notion that "Malaysia is free from natural disaster", and we are naive enough to believe that. Because there is no research on how climate change will affect Malaysia in years to come, because we believe Indonesia will shield us from everything and that is the sad inconvenient truth. How many people know that small villages in PNG were displaced due to the rising in sea level which inundating their villages.

Research, research, research that is what we need. Climate scientist is what we need. We need to know how it will affect us, so that we can take proactive and proper mitigation steps and not just the age old "let's dig the drain deeper" mitigation. We do not need to scare Malaysians into believing climate change would affect us, we just need to highlight issues which which climate change will have a direct impact on.

What I mean is that instead of telling them climate change will cause sea level to rise, we say in this way for example; climate change will cause sea level to rise in Penang, properties will be directly damage and some even destroyed and there will be adverse effect to properties pricing and investment. When you put it this way, if there is a direct impact to their livelihood or even property investment, than people's head would start rolling around. Look, were not lying, it may be true. So here we told you what may happen, so we take steps to prevent it. Sure it's hard, but you can't build a house without bricks, and you can put bricks together without cement.



And for heaven's sake, will you ministers at least go and Wikipedia before you open your mouth, it's disgusting how you guys misguide Malaysians into believing the climate change caused extreme weather and therefore you can blame the weather instead of your lousy development projects that are taking years to finish.