Covering climate change: Missing the forest for the trees

Climate change? Global warming?

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change defines climate change as “a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and that is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.”

Global warming, says a PAGASA study, is the “increase in the Earth’s mean temperature due to the so-called greenhouse effect (or the process by which the gases in the atmosphere near the surface of the Earth trap the heat that is radiated by the Earth’s surface and remit it downwards).” These gases are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides and halocarbons.

Frequent and intense rains and the bleaching of coral reefs are only some of the manifestations of global warming locally. While the rise in sea level, more frequent incidents of droughts and floods and other changes in weather patterns are only some of the effects of global warming.

Conspicuously missing in the media reports was the information that the Philippines’ Republic Act 9729, or the Climate Change Act of 2009, mainstreams climate change as part of government policy-making. It seeks to form a National Framework Strategy and a Climate Change Commission.

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