IT may not be very far in time and practice when I’d say to a friend, “Come, spend summer with us.

And don’t forget to bring an umbrella.”

Or what if a friend asks me to spend May in Marikina and she says, “I just bought a new rubber boat for trips downtown, we can buy artificial flowers.”

This could sound like man habituating to a new world.

Sun.Star accepts donations for victims of Typhoon Ondoy

Can we adjust? Or how long will it take us to make amends and move, or lose more of things and lives, just before the biggest flood, the most outrageous storm happens?

Summer used to be a time for play under the sun and freedom in the heat. In fiestas, the dance went on until past midnight. In other parts of town, the boys serenaded the giggling girls at the house just off the corner of the churchyard.

This would be how it would sound describing the old summer when the sun sat directly on earth, so to say, and the parents went out to the yard to feel the warm, sweet night air.

Some few years ago, very regular changes of climate within the calendar year were called seasons. Long or short days, nights, hot and dry, or moist---these things normally changed through the months from spring, summer, winter and fall.

Four seasons, full cycle of life.

In our part of the world, it used to be unmistakably dry and distinctly rainy seasons.

But in these days now, it’s dry, and rainy? Or rain-like, but dry?

What will eventually happen to the four seasons where we once saw life, with the days now running too short or staying too long, the weather going wet and hot within a few hours? The old dry, hot summer was seen as adulthood, autumn (or fall) the golden years, the season for harvest. With winter as death, there was resurrection because spring didn’t fail to come along.

But the new generation of the climate change might ask, “What are you talking about?”

And just last July in a “long-range forecast for the season,” weather experts in New Jersey said summer now was a pattern of “wet weather”.

The temperature of 67.7 degrees was lower than the summer usual in June and the month’s then predictable 6.6 inches of rain was higher than one would have expected of the old dry season.

In our part of the world, rain in the wrong month flooded Luzon, past the days of the old rain-and-shine pattern in the natural periods of the equinoxes and solstices.

So we go back to thoughts on the environment, over-use and mis-use of the world, its body, its vastness, its soul.

Scientific observers conclude that on climate change, “human activity is very likely the cause for the rapid increase in global average temperatures over the past several decades.”

And we know what these activities are---emissions from fossil fuel combustion, aerosols, deforestation, land use, ozone depletion, animal agriculture, and what else. If there are no ways to stop the changes or slow them down, then let’s know of ways to reduce the impact of these changes in our life. In fact, soon enough, say the environmentalists, man can adapt to the changes.

No wonder global warming is referred to as “modern climate,” as though it’s normal.

But it’s still human-induced climate change which could be avoided. And we must fight to improve our life to reform in the way we live, the despite the modern climate.

I’ll never forget the picture I got in my head when I learned that with the Arctic glaciers and ice quietly melting, the polar bear is wondering why its ice water home is becoming deadly warm.

The new atmosphere could send it out of the area in search of the old home in strange seas, or it will continue to have lower survival rate, now not so far from sheer decline.

(ecuizon@gmail.com)