The Hon. M. Nizam Kariapper, PC

¶ 01 Hon. Deputy Speaker, Hon. President, a cyclone can break bridges, uproot hills, claim lives, and destroy embankments. But a cyclone can never destroy a society. Only one thing can fully ruin a society: ignorance. Ignorance is more dangerous than a cyclone.

¶ 02 So the greatest cyclone we face is not “Ditwah” but ignorance. The question is: does this ignorance lie only among the public, or also among professionals who must inform, and among the political leadership who must guide officials?

¶ 03 Public understanding about severe weather in the Intertropical Convergence Zone is very low and often wrong. This extreme weather is battering many countries, not only Sri Lanka. Yet there is little deep social discourse. Even among officials, political leaders, and within Parliament, discussion on such severe disasters is often piecemeal, casual, and unscientific. Regretfully, even this august Assembly has not honestly acknowledged errors or forged a national consensus to move forward.

¶ 04 What should we have done first? Examine scientifically the scale, extent and strength of Cyclone Ditwah. This is not a matter for drain cleaning, distributing political relief and posting on Facebook. Restoring lives is necessary—and I accept that—so is relief. But the foundation must be correct data and realistic understanding.

¶ 05 Our scholars have quantified Ditwah’s severity. None of that has reached public or parliamentary debate. For example, on 27 November alone, about 200 mm of rain fell in ten districts. That is over 5.2 billion cubic metres in one day. The total capacity of all our reservoirs is only about 6 billion cubic metres. When such a water mass cascades from elevations over 3,000 feet, imagine the potential energy.

¶ 06 A senior academic calculated that potential energy at about 13,300 trillion joules. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb yielded about 600 billion joules. In one day, from ten districts of our small island, a water cascade equivalent to the potential energy of about 200 Hiroshima bombs flowed to the sea. I believe the Hon. President, being versed in physics, would appreciate this.

¶ 07 Given this reality, the solution is to combine our expert knowledge, scientific planning, regional cooperation and national responsibility to confront these challenges.

¶ 08 I will wind up with a note, unrelated to the Debate but historic. Today, the third confirmed interstellar object—Comet 3I/ATLAS—makes its closest approach to Earth and is being watched by NASA, ESA, China, India and Russia. This enigmatic visitor behaves unlike anything known to modern physics, forcing science to question its limits. Perhaps it reminds us the universe is far larger, and far less lonely, than we believed.

¶ 09 I state this only so that when this day is written in history, it is recorded in Hansard that a Sri Lankan MP spoke of it in this Chamber. Thank you.