Nature's Cleaning

This morning here, far from our little lovely homeland, I was able to experience what Singaporean went through several weeks ago during the haze attack, at least only visually, fortunately for me.

The air smelt perfect as usual so I knew it wasn't quite the same thing. Besides, Indonesia would not have the audacity to start their fires during the period of a south-east wind. They also know very well how much noise Australia will make and render no "financial aid" that our Singapore government has been doing. Call that a conspiracy theory if you want but I wouldn't do that if I were you. Don't give me a the bullshit about farmers performing slash-and-burn at a specific season that happens to be the north-west wind cycle. When things "happen to be" for more than a decade, you don't call that a coincidence.

What I had here was probably thick fog. It seemingly engulfed the whole 30km range I drove. We are all familiar about haze by now which is essentially dust, smoke and other dry and light particles from the Indonesia fires in the air which obscure the clarity of the sky and of course, affect the quality of consumable air. Fog would have the same hazy appearance but is actually made up of dense water droplets. Think of it as a cloud at ground level for simplicity. We know that cloud is form by condensation. It must be quite cold last night with little or no wind at all for such thick fog to form over the entire metropolitan region. It is an unusual phenomenon because air here is seldom wet.

You wouldn't believe me if you are young enough not to experience regular fog in Singapore. This used to be a regular occurrence because air is usually humid and the nights were cold enough. These days, a little mist on the roads after a light drizzle is probably a more common sight. Fog itself is neither good or bad in my opinion though there are studies made that found fog actually cleans air pollution. If that is true, then we had lost nature's blessing and protection. In the absence of a natural air cleaner, Singaporeans these days have to spend money to clean the air of their personal living space individually.

The inability for fog forming in most places in Singapore these days suggested that night temperature has risen considerably over the years, since air remains constantly humid. Environmental agencies in Singapore will conveniently point their fingers to global warming. They like the word global, because that depicts a global problem so everyone suffers from it and we will be consumed by inferno one day. So there is no need to scream about it.

How about this concept? Singapore had increased our number of buildings two, or three folds since our golden years which, in my opinion, isn't the present as one old god-man suggested two years back. Common science tells us that concrete releases latent heat that it absorbed during the hot sunny day very slowly. It was selected as our primary construction material out of good intentions. Since concrete releases heat slowly, it absorbs slowly too. That makes it a kind of insulation to slows our HDB flats from heating up too quickly. 

The solution ended up being a problem itself and there isn't a quick-fix way to get around it. Again, the first step is to accept the concept that there is a problem before anyone can decide to sit down to devise a clever solution or make necessary sacrifices. When you hear statements such as, "What do you want us to do?", "No amount of engineering can prevent this," or convenient blaming on global warming, we know that recognizing a problem isn't going to happen for a long while.