‘Everyone has their own conspiracy theory’. That already seems like a pretty lousy thing to say for a minister. But for Barry Madlener (PVV), this was just the starting point, on the back of more than two hundred deaths in Valencia, to indulge in an ugly piece of climate denial.
The climate science on the floods in Spain is clear and unequivocal. Because we are burning so many fossil fuels, the earth is warming significantly. A warmer Mediterranean sea causes more seawater to evaporate. Warm air can also absorb more water. If that warm and humid air collides with cold air high in the atmosphere, more water also comes down. To be precise, record rainfall in a single day has become 12% more intense and twice as likely at the current warming of 1.3 degrees. See: Extreme downpours increasing in southeastern Spain as fossil fuel emissions heat the climate – World Weather Attribution
How do you recognise when people are trying to pull the wool over your eyes anyway?
A tried and tested tactic is to pretend that ‘climate’ has nothing to do with ‘extreme weather’. According to Madlener, ‘you can’t link a flood like this to climate change one-to-one. It is a weather situation, a weather phenomenon, […] to link that to climate change also seems to me to be going too far’. Similarly, pretending that science hasn’t figured it out yet is a classic tactic to sow doubt: ‘The science is interesting, and important, but the science about weather, or climate, isn’t completely crystallised either’. And finally, you can suggest that there are very big differences of opinion: ‘hence we have all sorts of scenarios that are vastly different’.
How do you recognise when people are trying to pull the wool over your eyes anyway?
With many decades of observations, we don’t need scenarios at all to map changes in temperature and extreme weather. We also understand these changes well because the natural science basis has been unchanged for about a hundred and fifty years. And the increase and/or intensity of floods, storms, droughts and forest fires are now so clearly visible that we can also attribute individual weather extremes to climate change.
I recently wrote about the disinformation spread by MPs like Henk Vermeer (BBB) together with far-right colleagues about the floods in Spain. But the fact that even a Dutch minister now seems to be getting away with climate denial is another degree worse…
My Volkskrant opinion piece on desinformation strategy of BBB (in Dutch): Van Trump naar de BBB: desinformatie is dichterbij huis dan je denkt.
Voor de Nederlandse versie zie mijn LinkedIn post.