THE deadly Asian floods are no fluke, insist climate scientists; those are the outcome of a continued rise in global temperature, they tell us. Extremely strong floods and insanely intense storms in South-East Asia, in a way, may have their roots in human failing in keeping intact the sanity and sanctity of the global environment, as we may surmise. And of course, scientists and humanitarian thinkers also have been warning us against such dangerous possibilities, not for now but for the past several decades.

 

That the modern-day human community has refused to learn the right lessons from those warnings, of course, is another part of the sad story of how the global community has caused many a natural disaster on account of its own neglect of the word of caution coming from science. And this has been happening in an age where science is supposed to be the secular religion of the mankind ! We are supposed to be the members of a knowledge society and ardent followers of precepts of science. Yet, when it comes to protecting and preserving the environment, all of us appear to have signed a joint Memorandum of (Mis)Understanding to keep messing up the ecology and environment. The deadly South-East Asian floods are obviously an outcome of the neglect of warnings stemming from science. Even as we all suffer from those deadly floods and intense and punishing storms, we still show no inclination to listen to a word of caution from science.

 

So terrible is this neglect of the wise word the so-called developmentalists even gather the raw courage to describe the scientific warnings are an anti-developmental narrative aimed at messing up the efforts of large human community to attain higher levels of growth. So, the glaciers are melting, the mountain-peaks are registering warmer temperatures, the seas are rising, animal kingdom is disturbed and haunted by fear of extinction, plant kingdom is fast losing its greenness, foods are becoming less and less tastier, milk is losing the cream and the ghee its smooth charm ... ! As all these happen, Asian continent suffers from bigger and deadlier floods -- a gift of declining quality of ecology and environment to the global south because of its geographical peculiarities. “South-East Asia should brace for a likely continuation and potential worsening of extreme weather in 2026 and for many years immediately following that”, warns Ms. Jemilah Mahmood who leads the Kuala Lumpur think-tank ‘Sunway Centre for Planetary Health’. Such warnings are not heeded in general, and the human community continues with its deep mining of land and mountains and seas, and senseless and brazen felling of jungles across the continent, and countries like Sri Lanka, for example, end up having to fend for a 7 billion-dollar loss due to devastation because of floods. These figures have surfaced after an initial assessment of only one country. But then, South-East Asia saw extreme foods in several other countries where the losses could be in the same range as those were in Sri Lanka. When these realities rise from the ground soon after the recent COP30 in Brazil, the fraudulence in human commitment to protecting the ecology and environment comes to the fore menacingly.

 

Most nations -- we must say -- only cheat on one another about their parts of climate goals, and continue to indulge in demonic politics aimed at protecting their own tools ecological devastation and forcing others to give theirs. These universal double-standards are the actual root-causes of the climate disaster the global human community is facing now -- thanks to the new religion of cheating and lie-telling on climate issues by most nations around the globe. When corridors of powers are inhabited by liars on climate commitment, the world has to suffer from the dangerous after-effects -- warning or no warning by anybody. So, We The People of the World cause floods -- which are no fluke !