The first confirmation of the disaster 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 proof is that it must be understood once and for all that the The climate emergency conditions everything.
The map of the floodable Mediterranean: why DANA targeted València, Utiel or Letur
Colleague Salvador Enguix remembers that during the “pantanà” of 1982, the worst tragedy experienced in Valencia, with the entire region flooded, eight people died. There were no networks or cell phones. Today, in the 21st century and with all the alerts, at least 92 people have died, to which we must add two more in Castile-La Mancha and one in Malaga. For now.
There are not enough adjectives to describe such a tragedy nor consolation for those who suffered it most directly. The obvious priority is to meet the most urgent needs. The messages of help that many people sent throughout the night of Tuesday through calls on the radio (special mention to the coverage carried out by Cadena Ser), the information published by the editorial staff of elDiario.es at Valencia or the images that could be seen in real time (in this case it is necessary to highlight the coverage of À Punt) foreshadowed the seriousness of the situation.
This week, AEMET had already warned that the forecasts were worrying. “If everything continues as predicted by the weather models 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 physics doctor 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.
The first confirmation is therefore that it is not the prediction that failed, but the prevention. Why the alert sent by the Generalitat Valenciana on cell phones to avoid displacement when hundreds of people were already trapped? The message was received automatically on all phones in the province of Valencia on Tuesday at 8:12 p.m. At that time, hundreds of people were already stuck in industrial zones, roads or shopping centers. Also in developments that should not have been built where they are. It’s too early to have all the answers. But you will have to give them away at some point.
Many comments on the alert published by the AEMET meteorologist Just a few months ago, José Gosálbez, one of the Vox councilors of the Valencia City Council, denied the obvious emergency in which we find ourselves. “This talk about the climate bubble has only served as an ideological illusion and a waste of public money,” he said in a speech.
Joan Escuer, professor of geology, stressed this Wednesday that climate change is causing and will cause more and more episodes like this. Experts have been predicting for some time that they will be more frequent and more intense. It is obvious that the trend cannot be stopped overnight. Hopefully. But we have long known that the increase in temperature that our emissions have caused in the Mediterranean, added to the greater atmospheric humidity, helps to explain meteorological behavior and extreme episodes like this. They emphasized it to us, another thing is that we want to understand it and accept the essential changes. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also cited because little heard, warned that an “unprecedented social transformation” was necessary.
The economist David Lizoain explains in his book “Climate Crime” (Debate) that climate policy concerns everything and everyone. “We live in the middle of a climate emergency. From now on, all policy is climate policy. War, plague, famine, drought, migrations…; “Nothing can be separated from the context of the total transformation of the Earth caused by human actions,” he emphasizes in his essay.
The social transformation essential to avoid new deaths, whether due to droughts, the famines they cause, floods or other extreme phenomena, would require a change in the economic model. Because the climate emergency has those responsible and some countries and companies are more guilty than others.
The broadcasts are divided by country. Fact: Half of the world’s historic carbon emissions come from North America and Europe. China is the world’s largest emitter, followed by the United States and India. And only about 100 of all existing businesses are linked to 71% of industrial emissions. Among others, Saudi Aramco and Shell stand out. In other words, the “climate criminals” have a name even if the majority of leaders prefer not to know it or not to confront them.
Many of these leaders are the ones who have allowed uncontrolled urban planning and there is no better example than the Valencian Community. The map of the Mediterranean as ground zero for flood-prone Spain that we published on elDiario.es presents us as a country. Between the provinces of Valencia, Alicante and Murcia, there are 280,000 homes built in flood zones (27% of the total areas at risk in Spain). Some videos and photos of the disaster correspond to these streets.
Time is running out. Lizoain recalled in this interview that a UN report calculated that, in its worst-case scenario, there would be 100 million additional deaths in 2100. Deaths from the worst DANA of this century are already part of the list of deaths. this should never have happened.
