Awal-awalnya saya merasa gak begitu berminat mengikuti berita-2
mengenai Pilkada di Indonesia, yang proses pemilihannya
selama ini banyak diwarnai kericuhan dan intrik politik.
tapi kalau dipikir-2, se"buruk" apapun mutu Pilkada yang
telah diselenggarakan selama ini, sebetulnya itu memang
bagian yang penting dari proses pendidikan politik dan
pencerdasan bangsa. Ini akan banyak makan waktu, makan
beaya dan makan energi.
Pilkada Aceh contohnya, mempunyai peranan sangat penting
sebagai kelanjutan proses 'reintegrasi' Aceh ke dalam RI.
Pilkada Jakarta juga akan menjadi perhatian, karena
mungkin akan menjadi 'model' yang akan dijadikan acuan
bagi propinsi-2 lainnya. Sayangnya dari berita di surat
kabar saya merasa belum menjumpai informai yang memadai
mengenai issue yang menjadi tema/program setiap pasangan
kandidat.
Untuk Jakarta yang masyarakatnya relatif sudah cukup
terdidik dan kritis, seharusnya salah satu bentuk kampanye
para kandidat ini juga mencakup debat publik/televisi
di mana setiap kandidat diminta membeberkan visinya
mengenai strategi pembangunan DKI di masa depan, utamanya
di dalam memecahkan isu-isu sentral yang dihadapi DKI:
(1) Rencana Tata-Ruang / Regional Planning DKI
(2) Konsep sistem transportasi
(3) Konsep sistem pengendalian banjir
(4) Konsep pengelolaan dana parkir ( and how to deal
with 'premanisme' parkir :) }
***
khusus mengenai butir (3) sistem pengendalian banjir,
setelah membaca berita banjir bandang yang baru saja
terjadi di Inggris - yang saya cantumkan di bawah ini -
saya khawatir ini dijadikan "excuse" oleh Gubernur DKI
masa depan:
"aduh bang, wong negare-nye Mpok Ratu Elisabet aje,
nyang dulu pernah menguasai tujuh samodere, ampe katenye
berani bilang: "British, rule the waves!", sekarang
lagi kalang kabut kebanjiran", apalagi kite
bang, nyang baru 62 tahun merdeka, ... "
ato mereka make isu Global Warming, El-Nino, La Nina, dll
sebagai cadangan excuse, ... :-)
---( IM )----------------------
catatan:
--------
gue baru tumon juge, bahwa "Reading" itu
nama sebuah kote di Inggris sane. Jadi
"University of Reading" itu artinye
bukan "Universitas yang kerjaannya
tiap hari membaca".... :-)
<http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2795635.ece
---------------------------
A 21st century catastrophe
----------------------------
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 24 July 2007
Flood-ravaged Britain is suffering from a wholly new
type of civil emergency, it is clear today: a disaster
caused by 21st-century weather.
This weather is different from anything that has gone before.
The floods it has caused, which have left more than a third
of a million people without drinking water, nearly 50,000
people without power, thousands more people homeless and
caused more than £2bn worth of damage - and are still not
over - have no precedent in modern British history.
Nothing in the past hundred years, in terms of flooding
caused by rainfall, has been as bad. According to the
Environment Agency, even the previous worst case, the
extensive floods of spring 1947, which were aggravated
by the vast snow melt that followed an exceptionally hard
winter, has been surpassed.
"We have not seen flooding of this magnitude before," said
the agency yesterday. "The benchmark was 1947, and this
has already exceeded it." And the 1947 floods were said
to have been the worst for 200 years.
Most remarkable of all is the fact that the astonishing
picture the nation is now witnessing - whole towns cut off,
gigantic areas underwater, mass evacuations, infrastructure
paralysed and grotesquely swollen rivers, from the Severn
and the Thames downwards not even at their peaks yet - has
all been caused by a single day's rainfall. A month's worth
and more in an hour. It is obvious that the Government and
the civil powers, from Gordon Brown down to the emergency
services, are struggling to cope, not only with the sheer
physical scale of the disaster itself, but with the very
concept of it. It is entirely unfamiliar. It is new. Yet
it is exactly what has been forecast for the past decade
and more.
No one can yet attribute the flood events of the past week,
or indeed, those of June, when Yorkshire suffered what
Gloucestershire and Worcestershire are suffering now - again
from one single day's rainfall - directly to global warming.
All climates have a natural variability which includes exceptional
occurrences.
But the catastrophic "extreme rainfall events" of the summer
of 2007, on 24 June and 20 July, are entirely consistent with
It is nearly 10 years since the scientists of the UK Climate
Impacts Programme first gave their detailed forecast of what
global warming had in store for Britain in the 21st century -
and high up on the list was rainfall, increasing both in
frequency and intensity.
This was thought most likely to happen in winter, with summers
predicted to be hotter and dryer. But yesterday Peter Stott of
the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research,
an author of a new scientific paper linking increases in rainfall
to climate change, commented: "It is possible under climate change
that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under
general drying."
The paper by Dr Stott and other authors, reported in The
Independent yesterday, detects for the first time a "human
fingerprint" in rainfall increases in recent decades in the
mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere - that is, it finds
they were partly caused by global warming, itself caused by
emissions of greenhouse gases.
The public as a whole appears not to have taken the extreme
rainfall predictions on board, thinking of climate change in
terms of hotter weather. But the science community has been
fully aware of it, and has steadily reinforced the warnings.
One of the most important came from a group of experts commissioned
to look at the risks by the Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King,
under the Government's Foresight Programme, in 2004. Their report,
Future Flooding, said that unless precautions were taken, more severe
floods brought about by climate change could massively increase the
number of people and the amount of property at risk. Yet once again,
this hardly penetrated the public consciousness.
Amidst all the news of communities being overwhelmed by water
yesterday, one very significant announcement, from Gordon Brown and
the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hilary Benn, was that the
Government is setting up an independent inquiry to look at the flood
events of June and July.
Its report will be immensely important and may prove a milestone in
terms of the British public's appreciation of the reality of climate
change. It will doubtless focus on the key problem in terms of flood
response - there is no one minister, or other person, in overall
charge - but it may also take a view of the disaster in terms of
global warming, and may well come to the conclusion that we are
already witnessing the future. The floods of 2007 may eventually
be regarded as a wake-up call to the warming climate's rapidly
approaching effects.
Nobody saw them coming. But that appears to be the way of a changing
climate. In April 1989 Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, gave
her Cabinet a seminar on global warming at No 10 and one of the
speakers was the scientist and green guru James Lovelock. A reporter
asked him afterwards what would be the first signs of global warming.
He replied: "Surprises." Asked to explain, he said: "The hurricane of
October 1987 was a surprise, wasn't it? There'll be more."
The floods of 2007 were a surprise as well, and if Dr Lovelock is
right, there'll be more of them too. Welcome to the weather of the
21st century.
The flood of 1947
------------------
The Great Flood of 1947, the previous worst inundation caused by
rainfall in Britain, swamped almost all of the rivers in the South,
Midlands and the North-east, submerged 700,000 acres of land and
caused an estimated £4bn worth of damage (in today's money).
The deluge was predominantly caused by the rapid thaw of snow
and ice that had covered much of England after a particularly
long and cold winter. The weather patterns that caused the thaw
also caused a number of torrential downpours, exacerbating the flooding.
The timing could not have been worse; Britain was still recovering
from the war. Rationing was harsh, deprivation widespread and the
economy was teetering. What made the catastrophe even more
unfortunate was that it occurred before the era of flood
insurance.
The flooding started across the South, from Somerset to Kent,
as many rivers broke their banks. By 14 March, parts of west
and north-east London had been submerged. The next day, the
river Thames overflowed its banks at Caversham, near Reading,
and around the Lea Valley to the east of London.
By the end of the month, an estimated 100 000 homes had been
flooded, hundreds of thousands of people displaced and the
year's crops largely wiped out.
