We should be used to it by now, typhoons coming and typhoons going, they leave the same expected devastation, destruction, or loss of lives and property. We are hit but we rise again; it’s in our DNA.

Using a colorful national language, we describe how a flood is roaring in, furiously rampaging, shouting to be let in; oh, the drama/melodrama of it all. The pictures on the screen tonight, in the newspapers the next day. Government workers and volunteers pitching in to help the victims, feed them, move the “bakwit” to evacuation centers.

Seasonal words, these: tropical depression, stormy weather; how to translate “climate change” into Filipino/Tagalog? As former President Estrada put it, ever so playfully but accurately, it’s all a matter of “weather weather lang,” i.e., “pana-panahon lang” — did he mean weather, climate, or timing, but then it sounded like he was talking psychology rather than meteorology.

Strictly speaking, the English language makes a difference between weather and climate, a difference that may not exist or be obvious in the national language. (As I’m not a linguist, you don’t have to take my word for it.) Quoting Chambers, weather is “the atmospheric conditions in any area at any time with regard to sun, cloud, temperature, wind, rain, etc.” Climate, on the other hand, “is the average weather conditions of a particular region of the world over a long period of time, usually at least 50 years.”

Ours is a tropical climate, though we have seasonal changes in weather coming and going. These are times when we miss an explainer like the late Rey Punongbayan, volcanologist, who taught us in simple sentences what an earthquake is and isn’t, how to stand up to a thunderstorm expected in the next 20 hours, etc. At one time, President Noynoy Aquino endured a four-hour-long conference with scientists, mostly meteorologists, in preparation for the arrival of a supertyphoon.

I was watching TV last Wednesday night when my attention was caught by a modest-looking, three-story house losing its moorings and sliding down a hillside. Considering the wind and rain, the slide was (seemingly) bound to happen. What was unusual was that 30 people lived in that house; the story did not say how or if all 30 had been evacuated.