hmes2013: Will there be more Negros and Bohol Killer Quakes?

Source: http://www.hazmapping.com

From over 40 casualties, the death toll has risen to nearly 100 in the Carmen, Bohol Province-Cebu City earthquake. At that figure, the Carmen-Cebu tremor can qualify as a Killer Quake. Cebu and nearby areas has to be declared to be in a state of calamity. There are limited manuevers that aircraft can make at the Cebu airport due to the cracking and opening up of the airport's runways.

The six million dollar question is: how many more incidents like those in Carmen, Bohol and Cebu City and the other ones in Leyte, Samar will we be expecting?

Were the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Philvolcs) prepared adequately enough with equipment to monitor ground movement, tectonic plate disturbance, the nearly 100 deaths could have been avoided. 27 Billion Philippine Pesos is earmarked for pork barrel in the 2014 General Appropriations Act out of a total expenditure program of 2.26 Trillion Philippine Pesos. Would it be difficult to allocate even half of that pork barrel budget for emergency preparedness, disaster risk reduction, equipment upgrade?

Past Warnings of Big Disaster

This site has been warning the public for more than four years since the time of the former President, Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Due to the total torpedoing of the private sector (Corinthian Gardens, Forbes Park, Dasmarinas Village, the owners of high rise condominiums at the left side of EDSA southbound, among others), of the program for predicting highly lethal effects of a major tremor in Metro Manila and the replication of this effort in many urban areas in the country by the same sector in collusion with some corrupt officials in the government, a large disaster and environmental hazards summit was proposed to be supported by the Philippine Government and the United Nations, among other institutions from many other sectors - including the non-profit (minus the Napoles et al NGOs).

Wanting responses

It is reiterated that in the time of Mrs. Arroyo, only the then Administrator of the Maritime Industry Authority (MARINA), Ms. Elaine Bautista, now Mrs. Horn, had the small effort to make an email message to the proponents of the 2010 Disaster and Environmental Hazards Mapping Summit. And that was only because the United Nations Environment Programm (UNEP)  told the former Ms. Bautista to get in touch with HMES 2010 organizing group. At the time, concurrent to her post in MARINA, Ms. Bautista was considered a friend of UNEP and a significant point person for the Philippine Government in relation to selected UNEP concerns - particularly about emergency and assistance.

When Mr. Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino 3rd became President, the organizing group wrote to Ms. Corazon Juliano Soliman of the Department of Social Welfare and Development and Gen. Voltaire Tuvera Gazmin. Ms. Soliman did not respond. It was noticed however that several days later, Gen. Gazmin, the Secretary of the Department of National Defense gave an interview to national media.

In that interview, when Gazmin was asked about what the people should do when a disaster strikes, he replied: "Run for your lives."

Carrying the barest minimum luggage in their bodies, the poor, helpless people in above photos must have taken advice similar to that of Gen. Voltaire Gazmin's to leave and forget belongings elsewhere and to "run for your lives."

It will appear that the kind of response the government has given is exceedingly wanting in substance. It is hoped however that as a grandfather and parent, Gazmin to no fault of his own was merely showing his personal concern for the safety of the life of the average citizen. He was probably very well-meaning and was admonishing the people not to bring their television sets, beds, furniture, cash safety vaults, washing machines, cabinets, sofa, stoves with their fuel gas tanks, desk-stand-ceiling fans, air conditioners, desktop computers and refrigerators outside of their homes and instead to proceed to a more safe location and be saved in time of major catastrophe.

The head of the Philvolcs, Dr. Renato Solidum absolutely cannot be faulted and is blameless. For decades, had been ready to accept the support for equipment upgrade and modernization. Despite the billions of funds allocated to the departments of the government, the great oversight of perpetually forgetting to take care of the Philvolcs modernization programme has consistently been committed by this government.

Despite the billions lost for the personal enrichment of selected persons in our public sector and their intimate partners in very enterprising undertakings in the private sector, no one has shown keen interest in allowing the Philvolcs to finally get hold of the adequate funding for acquisition of hardware and software that will highly increase its forecasting accuracy and its earthquake trending studies and research on the major faults all over the country. Click here for more.

Fighting conventional wisdom

There is much to dread about during the Stockholm Conference running from September 23-26, 2013 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in cooperation with the World Health Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme.

What IPCC warns about are dire. It made the call for a stop to the 'dithering about fossil fuel cuts' saying that the "entire globe is affected," according to Robin McKie, science editor of The Observer's 21 September 2013 issue.

    Photo credit: The Guardian

So far, this gloomy forecast is called the darkest of all due to the increasing hazards of global warming. The entire globe has now seen increased, intense warming from land surfaces, oceans and the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

The reasons for more catastrophic weather behavior including the melting of ice sheets at a faster pace has caused sea levels to rise and "oceans are being acidified – a development that could see the planet's coral reefs disappearing before the end of the century."

Climate change expert Lord Stern wrote in The Observer that there is a need to 'start working to create a global low-carbon economy to curtail global warming. Governments, he states, must decide what "kind of world we want to present to our children and grandchildren".' 

Robin Mckie further says:

The fifth assessment report on the physical science of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that humanity is on course over the next few decades to raise global temperatures by more than 2C compared with pre-industrial levels. Such a rise could trigger the release of plumes of the greenhouse gas methane from the thawing Arctic tundra, while the polar ice caps, which reflect solar radiation back into space, could disappear.

Although the report does not say so, Earth would probably then be facing a runaway greenhouse effect.

The scientists' warning – the most comprehensive and convincing yet produced by climate scientists – comes at a time when growing numbers of people are doubting the reality of global warming. Last week, the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) published a survey showing that the proportion of British people who do not think the world's climate is changing has almost quadrupled since 2005.

Asked if they thought Earth's climate was changing, 5% of respondents said "no" in 2005, a figure that rose to 11% last year and reached 19% this year.

But as the IPCC report underlines, scientists are becoming more and more certain that climate change poses a real danger to the planet.

Many believe the disconnection between popular belief and scientific analysis has been engineered by "deniers" explicitly opposed to the lifestyle changes – including restrictions on fossil fuel burning – that might be introduced in the near future.

"There are attempts by some politicians and lobbyists to confuse and mislead the public about the scientific evidence that human activities are driving climate change and creating huge risks," said Stern.

"But the public should be wary of those who claim they know for certain that unmanaged climate change would not be dangerous. For they are not only denying 200 years of strong scientific evidence – the overwhelming view of the world's scientific academies and over 95% of scientific papers on the subject – but they are often harbouring vested interests or rigid ideologies as well."

The report will be discussed this week by political leaders meeting in Stockholm. The study – the work of more than 200 scientists – outlines the physical changes that are likely to affect Earth's climate this century.

Future reports will cover the social impact of these changes and the efforts required to offset the damage caused by global warming. A United Nations meeting in Paris in 2015 will then debate what actions are needed to mitigate climate change.

According to the new report, humanity has emitted about half a trillion tonnes of carbon by burning fossil fuels over the past 250 years, a process that has caused atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to rise by 40%. The world is now on target to release another half trillion tonnes in the next few decades which could trigger a major jump in global temperatures.

Most measures that have been proposed for tackling global warming rely on curtailing the burning of fossil fuels and these will form the focus of the 2015 UN meeting in Paris. Given the poor record of previous summits, many are pessimistic an agreement can be reached.

However, other measures have been suggested to curb global warming. In particular, many scientists have backed geo-engineering projects that would involve either spraying particles into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation back into space or extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in order to bury it in mines or depleted oil fields.

Both suggestions get short shrift in the new report: atmospheric aerosols could have widespread side-effects that could produce major disruptions to weather patterns, while not enough is known about the effectiveness of carbon dioxide extraction or burial. "We have to face up to the prospect of weaning ourselves off our addiction to oil and coal," said one report author. "It is as simple as that."

This site wholly agrees with the scientists' report on the forthcoming grave dangers of the burning of fossil fuel and deforestation.

To compound the situation however, it is predicted by the scientific community as well, that within the entire length of 2013 and 2015, a compensatory powerful occurrence of the solar maxima will take place due to the fact that its anticipated coming in 2012-2013 as well as in the past few years, did not happen.

Such forecast will definitely take place on these two years. 2014 will be a lull period such that in 2015, there is a very much higher likelihood that the solar maxima will actually occur.

Therefore, climate change or not, it could be highly probable that an intense solar storm will strike the globe and wreak as much havoc as possible.

If the solar storm and its pernicious effects will coincide with the burdensome and tiresome climate change, and the conventional wisdom is that neither climate change nor the solar maxima should be believed, the world is headed for the worst.

Who will fight for policy regime change?  For the betterment of the attitude towards individual and collective self-preservation? Who will take up the cudgels against the prevailing conventional wisdom?