IT upsets me to learn that psychologists have coined the phrase “doomsayer’s delight”, referring to satisfaction derived by pessimists from being right when something bad happens.
It appears that there exists a group of people with the tendency to form bleak prognostications and pessimistic opinion, and then make it known when their gloomy predictions come true.
Since rough weather conditions started in September, there have been rumblings on social media about lacklustre beach conditions at Pantai Esen on Penang island’s southeast corner.
Social media posts on the state of the beach became a public issue on Oct 21 when some news portals picked up on it.
They quoted locals saying that “black sludge” originating from reclamation works, some several hundred metres off the shore, was polluting Pantai Esen.
The Star’s Penang team went twice to check – once at low tide and again at high tide – taking photographs to find out what was going on.
The low-tide scenario was the usual muddy scene because almost all of the island’s entire southern coastline is a mudflat.
The high tide revealed something else and from our photographs, it was not black sludge.
The photographs showed a mass of floating pieces, some sort of algae.
Close-ups of the high-resolution photos showed that tens of thousands of these floating algae “pieces” had washed ashore.
They had many little round air pockets causing them to float up from the seabed.
Washed ashore and under the sun, these eventually decomposed into scum to produce methane and hydrogen sulphide gases, letting off a sulphuric smell akin to rotten eggs.
Weather-wise, the last two months have not been kind to Penang and many other parts of the world.
The harvest moon of the Mid-Autumn Festival on Sept 16 and the super moon on Oct 17 created spring tides that, in Penang, was up to 2.9m high and down to 40cm low.
Tides change every six hours — this is a perennial fact.
On neap tide seasons, the difference between high and low tides might be as little as 50cm, meaning that there is little movement of water at sea.
During spring tides, the difference is so much more, meaning that tidal currents are forceful since such vast amounts of seawater is moving.
Seaside restaurants in Penang were destroyed, planks on heritage clan jetties were torn up and unsurprisingly, ripping up algae on the muddy seabed which then floated and landed on the shore.
But “doomsayers” are quick to blame the nearby reclamation works to say “I-told-you-so”.
In truth, the floating algae was a result of a temporary weather phenomenon, nothing more than that.
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