The first confirmation of the catastrophe caused by this DANA is that the weather warnings were correct but the alert was not sent to the population with the necessary notice and the second evidence is that we must understand once and for all that the climate emergency conditions everything.
The map of the floodable Mediterranean: why DANA has targeted València, Utiel or Letur
Colleague Salvador Enguix remembers that in the “pantanà” of 1982, the worst tragedy experienced in Valencia, with the entire region flooded, eight people died. There were no networks or mobile phones. Now, in the 21st century and with all the alerts, at least 92 people have died, to which we must add another two in Castilla-La Mancha and one in Malaga. For now.
There are not enough adjectives for such a tragedy nor consolation for those who have suffered it most directly. The obvious priority is to resolve the most pressing needs. The messages of help that many people sent throughout the night of Tuesday through calls to the radio (special mention of the coverage carried out by Cadena Ser), the information published by the editorial staff of elDiario.es in Valencia or the images that could be seen in real time (in this case we must highlight the coverage of À Punt) presaged the seriousness of the situation.
This week the AEMET had already warned that the forecast was worrying. “If everything continues as the weather models predict over the next 5 days, this DANA, due to its characteristics and behavior, has a lot of potential to enter the high-impact group. “One of those that will be remembered on the Mediterranean side,” warned the doctor in Physics and AEMET meteorologist Juan Jesús González Alemán in X. The text was accompanied by a graph prepared last Friday showing the location of the storm at that time.
So the first confirmation is that it was not prediction that failed, but prevention. Why was the alert that the Generalitat Valenciana sent to cell phones to avoid displacement sent when hundreds of people were already trapped? The message was automatically received on all phones in the province of Valencia at 8:12 p.m. on Tuesday. At that time there were already hundreds of people trapped in industrial estates, roads or shopping centers. Also in developments that should not have been built where they are. It’s too soon to have all the answers. But they will have to be given at some point.
Many of the comments on the alert that the AEMET meteorologist posted on Just a few months ago, José Gosálbez, one of the Vox councilors in the Valencia City Council, denied the obvious emergency in which we find ourselves. “This speech about the climate bubble has served nothing more than an ideological lure and a waste of public money,” he said in a speech.
Joan Escuer, professor of Geology, stressed this Wednesday that climate change causes and will cause more and more episodes like this. Experts have been announcing for some time that they will be more common and of greater intensity. It is obvious that the trend cannot be stopped from one day to the next. Hopefully. But it has been known for a long time that the increase in temperature that our emissions have caused in the Mediterranean, added to the greater atmospheric humidity, help explain meteorological behavior and extreme episodes like this one. They have stressed it to us, another thing is that we want to understand it and accept essential changes. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as cited as it is little heard, warned that an “unprecedented social transformation” is needed.
Economist David Lizoain argues in his book ‘Climate Crime’ (Debate) how climate policy concerns everything and everyone. “We live in the midst of a climate emergency. Now, all politics is climate politics. War, plague, famine, drought, migrations…; “Nothing can be separated from the backdrop that is the total transformation of the Earth caused by human actions,” he emphasizes in his essay.
The essential social transformation to avoid new deaths, whether due to droughts, the famines they cause, floods or other extreme phenomena, would involve a change in the economic model. Because the climate emergency has those responsible and some countries and companies are more guilty than others.
Emissions are divided by country. One fact: half of the world’s historical carbon emissions come from North America and Europe. China is the world’s largest emitter followed by the United States and India. And only one hundred of all existing companies are linked to 71% of industrial emissions. Among others, Saudi Aramco and Shell stand out. In other words, the “climate criminals” have a name although the majority of rulers prefer not to know it or not confront them.
Many of these rulers are those who have allowed uncontrolled urban planning and here there is no better example than the Valencian Community. The map of the Mediterranean as ground zero of flood-prone Spain that we published in elDiario.es portrays us as a country. Between the provinces of Valencia, Alicante and Murcia there are 280,000 homes built in flood-prone areas (27% of the total in risk perimeters in Spain). Some of the videos and photos of the catastrophe correspond to those streets.
Time is running out. Lizoain recalled in this interview that a UN report has calculated that, in the worst of its scenarios, there would be 100 million extra deaths in 2100. The deaths from what is the worst DANA so far this century are already part of the list of deaths that should never have occurred.
#prediction #failed #prevention
