THE EDITOR: On September 22, 2017, I wrote a letter in which I tried to warn the nation "that the storms which are coming upon the world in this century will be the worst they have ever seen." This was shown to my uncle on September 23, 1978.

I went on to explain that this 21st century, according to the Roman calendar, is not as God counts time. This century, which is calculated according to the Jewish calendar, started around 1940 and will end around 2039.

I ended the letter as follows: "With about 22-23 years to go before the end of this century, we can look forward to even more disturbing 'storms' - hurricanes, earthquakes, asteroids hitting the Earth, tsunamis, wars and rumours of wars on scales never before imagined. All we can do is pray for God's protection."

Since then we have seen storms on a scale hitherto not experienced.

On August 21, 2018, TT was hit with a major 6.9 earthquake. Thankfully, there was no loss of life.

On August 14 it rained, for the first time ever, at the peak of Greenland's ice sheet, at a summit of 10,551 feet.

According to CNN, "temperatures rose above freezing...and the warm air fuelled an extreme rain event that dumped seven billion tons of water on the ice sheet. It was the heaviest rainfall on the ice sheet since record keeping began in 1950."

Tom Scarbos from the University of Colorado told CNN that "this is unprecedented."

Jennifer Mercer from the US Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation said that "we need to consider weather events that we have not had to deal with before in the history of our operations there. Increasing weather events including melting, high winds and now rain...have occurred outside the range of what is considered normal...and these seem to be happening more and more."

In TT, we may get a tornado once every 20 years. In the past two years, we have been hit by five tornadoes. The most recent was last month.

On August 16, a tornado hit the village of Los Iros in south Trinidad. It caused some damage but no loss of life.

On August 21, Central Park in New York City received almost 1.94 inches of rain in one hour, during Tropical Strom Henri. This was the wettest hour on record for New York City since record keeping began.

Ironically, that record was smashed less than two weeks later when on September 2 the remnants of Tropical Storm Ida dumped 3.15 inches of rain in Central Park in one hour.

Early on the morning of September 3, many citizens in TT were awakened by winds blowing in a manner they had never seen before. One woman said it was like a "thunderstorm."

Some may say these things have always been part of the human experience. We should pay attention to the scale. God is warning us but we are not listening.

Heavy rains indicate to us what we need to do. It shows us our shortcomings with respect to the environment.

Unfortunately, we are not a proactive nation. It is only when death and destruction come that we will wonder why and look to curse God.

LINUS F DIDIER

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