Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
MOST climate change movies begin with a montage of sporadic weather mishaps - freak storms, earthquake jolts, flash floods, fearsome hurricanes, undersized tornadoes - around the world.
And, with an array of realistic graphics, hail stones seem to be falling hard in Japan, the Taj Mahal seems to be frozen over and the Leaning Tower of Pisa seems to be tethering in ferocious winds.
This surreal, apocalyptic prediction for human fate invokes a scoff or two. People aren't ready to believe in erratic atmospheric changes - they've been inhabiting Earth quite a while, pumping out oil, digging for gold and belching carbon dioxide fumes into the air and they can't accept the consequences of their actions.
It is hard to imagine the world we created, crumble after nearly hundreds of decades of hard work.
So though these movies are largely entertaining with a bucket of popcorn, the message they convey hardly hits home.
Watching Dennis Quaid toughing it out with a pick-axe in a blizzard in the movie The Day After Tomorrow the other day, I realised that it seemed to mirror what was actually happening in the real world with newspapers narrating the weather horrors in foreign lands, big headlines on TV screens with serious faces above the yellow tape of Breaking News, charity organisations appealing for aid, Arctic glaciers cracking and gigantic helicopters dropping relief from the skies.
All these events - these ominous warnings - that foretold the massive climate breakdown in the movie seemed quite similar to the headlines in newspapers and TV and radio news broadcasts.
Ruthless, vicious floods in Pakistan, heat waves and fires in Russia, deadly earthquakes in China - all these horrific unmatched events can find a link in the words, too often used but hardly understood, Global Climate Change.
Even in Bahrain, the summer seems harsher, sunrays more scorching.
These worldwide unpredicted snowfalls, tidal waves and draughts are foreboding signs. Are we too late? Have the solar cells in our calculators and recycled paper we use not saved the human race from its doomed fate?
Do we need to fulfil our bucket lists before that fateful day in 2012? Somewhere up there, the Mayan ancestors are shaking their heads and murmuring under their breaths - we told you so.
Maybe, it's late but it's not too late. Maybe, we can make amends. We can give it our last desperate try to change and be as we have christened the term, 'eco-friendly'.
It's either that or we have to get hold of Quaid's magic pick-axe.
Maybe, this is the beginning of our own little reality movie - we need to pray for a happy ending. Otherwise, you better stock up on the penicillin because it looks like it's going to be one hell of a dicey future.
