6 July 2010, Davao City.

For more than three decades, scientists around the worl d have warned of dangerous changes in the atmosphere. Until recently, those warn ings were regarded as uncertain predictions of possible problems in the distant future. Not anymore. For instance, the ferocity of Tropical Storm Ondoy (international cod ename: Ketsana) shocked even seasoned experts in the Philippines where an averag e 20 typhoons hit every year, but they said it continued a recent pattern of unu sually bad weather. Climate change is a global challenge that threatens every nation, no matter how l arge or small, wealthy or poor, said US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton . The threat is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing. It was Dr. James E. Hansen, of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administrat ion (NASA), who first raised the problem of global warming. In 1988, he told an American Senate hearing that the greenhouse effect is changing our climate now. In a Reader s Digest article, author Robert James Bidinotto, explains greenhouse e ffect in these words: When sunlight warms the earth, certain gases in the lower a tmosphere, acting like the glass in a greenhouse, trap some of the heart as it r adiates back into space. These greenhouse gases, primarily water vapor and inclu ding carbon dioxide, methane and man-made chlorofluorocarbons, warm our planet, making life possible. The global warming is very simple, said Dr. Robert Watson, chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the 2007 co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. We are increasing emissions of greenhouse gases and thus t heir concentrations in the atmosphere are going up. As these concentrations incr ease, the temperature of the earth rises.