Goodbye to a topsy-turvy year

IT’S time to bid 2025 goodbye. And it’s not a fond adieu from me. It will be remembered as a year of loss and tragedy by many people, I’m sure.

My family had our personal loss with the passing of my mother. But while her demise was something we were bracing for as she suffered from many ailments and dementia, for many people, their loss of loved ones was unexpected and shocking.

I am referring to the recent Hong Kong Wang Fuk Court high-rise apartment complex fire that took 161 lives as well as the mass shooting at Bondi Beach, Sydney, that killed 15 people and injured dozens more.

We know about these two tra­gedies because they were widely reported. Less known, or even overlooked, are other tragedies going on elsewhere, like in South Africa which is said to be frighteningly crime-ridden.

On Sunday, seven men and two women were killed in a tavern near Johannesburg by 12 unidentified gunmen. This follows a mass shooting in early December when three gunmen randomly shot dead 11 people in a hostel in Pretoria.

Human-caused violence is all over the world. There was a stabbing rampage in Taipei that killed three and injured 11. Closer to home was the stabbing of a 16-year-old female student by a 14-year-old boy in their Bandar Utama school, which is just down the road from my home in Petaling Jaya. That stunned all of us as such violence in a Malaysian school was unprecedented.

There are so many incidents of violent killings that we have all become numb to it all. After the initial shock and horror, we shake our heads, sigh and just move on.

Apart from human-made violence – and that includes all conflicts going on, like the Russo-Ukrainian war, the Palestine conflict and the Thai-Cambodian skirmishes – there is increasingly bad news about how climate change is wreaking havoc all over the world too.

According to non-profit organisation Climate Central, quoted by theguardian.com, the first half of 2025 was the costliest on record for major disasters in the United States: 14 weather-related disasters cost US$101bil (RM412.1bil) in damages. The bulk of the damage was caused by the wildfires that razed parts of Los Angeles in January, destroying 16,000 buildings and leading to the indirect deaths of 400 people.

This was also a year of extremes for India, which was hit by disasters on 331 of 334 days, or 99% of the days, between January and November, as reported by downtoearth.org.in.

The country experienced a near-continuous series of floods, heatwaves and storms that claimed 4,419 lives and damaged 17.4 million hectares of crops. This, say experts, signals a “dangerous new normal” where climate extremes are now occurring across all seasons.

Sri Lanka wasn’t spared either. The country was struck by Cyclone Ditwah in late November that led to widespread flooding and landslides all over the island.

Then came Cyclone Senyar that formed in the Malacca Strait and caught the attention of climate scientists all over the world. As Nasa (the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) noted, tropical cyclones almost never get started so close to the equator but on Nov 25, a tropical depression intensified into Cyclone Senyar, just the second documented case of a tropical cyclone forming in the strait.

North Sumatra took the brunt of Senyar’s force with more than a million people displaced and over 1,000 killed. We were more fortunate. By the time Senyar turned east, it had weakened but still had enough power to cause havoc across central and southern Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia. Thailand recorded at least 297 fatalities and 102 injuries across 14 provinces, and Malaysia reported three deaths.

What is now absolutely undeniable is that this is the dire consequences of human-caused global warming. Experts kept sounding the alarm but one intergovernmental climate conference after another never really achieved anything.

Climate scientist Dr Sarah Kew, quoted in that Guardian report, describes the combination of heavy monsoon rains and climate change as a deadly mix, with the storms’ intensity growing abnormally.

Increasing storm intensity comes as no surprise to Earth science professor Benjamin Horton from the City University of Hong Kong. In a podcast with Al Jazeera, he says that scientists have been warning about the impact of increasing greenhouse gas emissions for years. He points out the target of limiting the long-term increase in the Earth’s average surface temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels was set in the Paris Agreement way back in 2015.

“But we are at the boundary right now and we should be doubling down on solving the problems with the solutions that we have,” he adds.

That includes solar energy, which he says is the cheapest form of energy in the world.

If we don’t double down, then the planet’s temperature will rise further and so will sea levels as glaciers melt. People living on low-lying coastlines will be forced to migrate – and that is already happening.

Rising sea levels are sinking the Polynesian nation of Tuvalu in the South Pacific. It is predicted that 95% of the nation – which is made up of four reef islands and five coral atolls – will be submerged at high tide by 2100. Already two atolls have almost been lost.

Its people have become the world’s first “climate migrants” – the first group arrived in Australia this month under a 2023 bilateral treaty in which Australia will provide migration pathways for people from Tuvalu facing the existential threat of climate change. It is touted as the world’s first bila­teral agreement on climate mobi­lity.

This year also marks the start of something else: The birth of a new generation called Beta.

In case you are a Baby Boomer like me (people born between 1946 and 1964), and have lost count of the different generations, Beta is the term given to babies born between 2025 and 2039. They have taken over from Generation Alpha (people born between 2010 and 2024). Before that, were Generation Z (1997-2010), the Millennials (1981-1996) and Generation X (1960-1980).

Researchers are predicting all sorts of things for the Betas, like they will be the urban generation and the most tech savvy ever and make up 18% of the world’s population by 2050.

But if we don’t solve Earth’s most pressing problem – greenhouse gas emissions and climate change – pronto, Gen Beta will be facing a very strange new world where the most important survi­val skill they must learn could very well be swimming.

May the year close on a happier note, so merry Christmas to those celebrating, and here’s to 2026, come what may!

The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.