It’s hot, really hot.

It feels like being inside an oven. Now, at least, we know how our favorite breakfast fare – the pandesal – feels like before it gets to our morning tables. What is ironic, however, is how people in other places have to deal with blizzards and heavy rains. While we who live on these islands are now threatened with dying from thirst, starvation, or disease, our Southeast Asian neighbors are battling incessant rains, flooding, and landslides.

People in North America, meanwhile, are trying their best to cope with heavy snows and other uncharacteristically heavy precipitations. These abnormal weather patterns are also observed in Europe, Australia, and all of the other continents.

All those hacked emails from environmental scientists notwithstanding, there are indeed something wrong with our climate. Global warming or not, there is just no denying that the global climate has gone loco. And this is true whether you are a tree-hugging liberal or an evolution-denying redneck.
There is something wrong with our planet.

eWaste Coming

And things are about to get worse; not that they have been well for quite sometime now.

The United Nations has issued a warning over the imminent boom in sales of consumer electrical devices and gadgets in the developing world in the coming decade. Developing world refers to those countries that are too poor or whose governments are too corrupt (or both) to provide their citizens with basic social services, such as medical care and education.

And based on that definition, that includes us.

When countries are too dirt poor to take care of their people, how could they be expected to manage the giant heaps of discarded TVs, mobile phones, and computers? There is simply no way that these countries, wallowing in abject misery and poverty, can properly dispose of their electronics refuse. In the first place, these poor countries are already serving as dumping grounds for the rich countries’ high-technology garbage and refuse.

Based on some industry data, the volume of the world’s electronic waste is growing at exponential rates that are horribly faster than the Moore’s law for the microprocessor’s processing prowess. Between the IT-related wastes produced by the United States and China, we humans might soon be swimming in digital “basura.”

Some UN officials are now telling us (as if we need being told about it) that the “world is not prepared” for this rapidly expanding, technology-driven environmental catastrophe.

Well, the world might not be prepared for it. But it does not mean we should idly stand by and watch it happen. There are things we can do.