What's The Weather Like Today?

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The monsoon season is fast approaching, here in Malaysia. Already, intense rain and powerful thunderstorms are hitting Kuala Lumpur every day, particularly in the evenings with 2-4 hour commutes home. Even so, we consider ourselves lucky when compared to the residents of the US East Coast who have had to face the ‘Frankenstorm’ (Hurricane Sandy), which severely hit New York and New Jersey on 29th October. The region was in lock down, with transport services at a stand-still, schools and offices closed, Wall Street trading disrupted and even with just seven days before Election Day, political campaigns have had to come to a halt.

With all the violent, erratic weather events occurring around the world, the Twitter sphere is buzzing with the growing question - ‘is this wild weather evidence of climate change?’ Quick research on the internet would show you that the community at large is still very much divided on this issue and even scientific experts are not convinced that a human-heated planet is solely responsible for the powerful storms.

Regardless of the cause, it is undeniable that rare and intense weather events are occurring more frequently, at much larger scales and often present multiple threats (storms, snow, winds) at once. Parts of the world which have never before experienced such wild weather have had to increase their preparedness and improve their disaster recovery. For this reason, we have to start to mitigate the impacts of severe weather on our society. Adapting to these conditions requires that our cities should be redesigned to endure this future weather - meaning our infrastructure should be tough enough to survive high winds and thunderstorms, our roads and stormwater systems remodeled to handle heavier downpours, our electricity networks improved to cope with extreme heat and our population given the necessary resources to adapt and improve their own resilience in such events.

In Malaysia, we are just getting of the ground on ‘mitigating climate change’ without any significantly measurable milestones achieved yet. But, there is now another urgency, one of similar importance. The need for our communities to ‘adapt to climate change’, or more specifically ‘adapt to the impacts of our changing climate’. Will we rise to this challenge? Or will we remain in denial?"