Drought and dam demolition in Spain

After a January and February with normal temperatures, Spain has had an unusually hot March and April and is suffering a severe drought. As always, those who have made climate change their modus vivendi have taken advantage of the circumstance to retake the old term “global warming” and scare us with the apocalypse that never comes. You know, when cold waves occur (such as Filomena Snowstorm in 2021) they attribute it to a passing squall, but if it’s hot it must be climate change.

However, beyond the tiresome climate propaganda, it is astonishing to see how the same people who shed crocodile tears over the effects of drought are making life miserable for farmers and ranchers in the name of their own climate religion.

The War on Farmers

This is the context for the increasing restrictions on the use of nitrogen fertilizers, the immoral campaign against the consumption of protein (e.g., meat), the grotesque demonization of livestock as a methane emitter, or the restrictions on the use of pesticides through the “eco”, “organic” and “sustainable” labels, cute slogans with which the enlightened leaders of Davos, the EU and the UN hide their real objective: to reverse the Green Revolution, which made it possible to multiply crop yields and feed a growing population.

Add to this the increase in electricity bills caused by climate fanaticism itself and the endless absurd regulations that are suffocating the countryside, capricious rules decided by urban bureaucrats who, from their comfortable offices, use the weapon of subsidies and the threat of sanctions to exert absolute control over the primary sector.

These policies will have serious consequences. In fact, there are precedents for what can happen, taken to the extreme. In 2021, the Sri Lankan government decided to ban chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the grounds that the former increased the greenhouse effect, and the latter harmed the ecosystem. Its president boasted of this in a speech at COP26 in which he mentioned “climate change” in his first sentence and advocated “organic agriculture” and renewable energy, which he wanted to account for 70% of electricity generation by 2030. “Man must live in sync with nature,” he said[1] . His country achieved, of course, an ESG rating of 98.1 out of 100, almost perfect. Three years earlier, the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos had published an article by the country’s then prime minister publicizing his “vision”. Well, in just six months, measures to “mitigate” climate change led to a 20% drop in agricultural production and a 50% increase in prices[2] . Some products, such as tomatoes and carrots, increased fivefold in price. The country had to import rice, and in 2022 a terrible famine arrived, and the masses stormed the presidential palace. The president was forced to flee the country and, of course, the WEF deleted the abovementioned article from its website[3] , but the damage was done. Today child malnutrition is still a problem in Sri Lanka[4] .

Dam removal and the climate agenda

The opportunity cost of the climate agenda is immense. Imagine the alternative use of the billions wasted over the years on subsidizing inefficient renewable energies – which also detract from crop acreage – if they had been used to strengthen our water reserves in anticipation of our recurrent droughts. However, what the climate shamans who rule us from Madrid, Brussels, Davos, and New York have been doing is demolishing dams in favor of river fish and other wildlife, whose value in this dark age seems to be higher than that of human life.

Dams were invented to ensure irrigation and drinking water reservoirs, harness rainfall and prevent flooding. The oldest date back to the beginning of the Ancient Age: the dam of Jawa, in Mesopotamia, was built in 3,000 B.C. and that of Marib, capital of the kingdom of Sheba, around 2,000 B.C. The latter was used for 2,600 years, and its catastrophic collapse caused the migration of 50,000 people who no longer had a way to irrigate. The oldest still in use, built by the Romans about 2,000 years ago, are in Homs (Syria) and Merida (Spain).

Thus, these engineering works have always been considered an advance of civilization, until now. Indeed, since 2021, the Spanish government has demolished more than a hundred of them to favor the free circulation of river fauna. Although most of them have been small dams and weirs (with exceptions, such as the mind-boggling Valdecaballeros Dam demolition project), apparently only 15% of the european dams were obsolete or in disuse[5] . It is clear, once again, that destroying is the specialty of this government, and that destroying is always easier than building.  

However, the vandalism of the government and the fanaticism of the environmental organizations that promote these actions are not the only ones responsible for destroying dams on the eve of a severe drought. The origin of this measure can be found in the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030, which calls for “the removal or adaptation of barriers to migratory fish passage (…)” so that “by 2030 at least 25,000 km of rivers will be returned to free flow through the removal of obstacles (…)”[6] . This same strategy proposes to “reduce the use of fertilizers by at least 20% (…), reduce the overall use of chemical pesticides by 50% and manage at least 25% of agricultural land under organic farming”. Remember Sri Lanka? In turn, the European Commission specifies that its proposals “are in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the objectives of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change”, since point 6.6 of the 2030 Agenda proposes to “restore water-related ecosystems, including rivers (…)”. There you have it: environmentalism, climate change and Agenda 2030.  

Climate change again?

Indeed, the destruction of dams and the war against farmers are rooted in environmentalist and climate ideology, which takes advantage of local weather phenomena, such as heat and drought, for its propaganda campaigns.

However, local weather phenomena can never be considered proof of any “global warming”. First, because the world is a big place: the state of California, almost as large and populated as Spain, has suffered in 2023 the fifth coldest March since 1895[7] and no one has warned of a global cooling. Second, because the increase in global temperatures is negligible and inappreciable, except by suggestion. Since 1979, when satellite measurements began to be taken, and a particularly cold year to begin the series (in fact, if it had begun in 1998, we could not speak of any warming at all), the planet has warmed at a rate of only 0.13°C (thirteen hundredths of a degree) per decade[8] .

I have always thought that a fair-minded observer would consider this very small variation an amazing stability in the temperature of a fluid in the volume of the atmosphere within a system that is never in equilibrium, as is the climate. That same observer would perhaps say the same thing looking at the evolution of temperatures in Spain since 1961, adjusted to the urban heat island effect or UHI (source: AEMET):

The persistent drought

The relationship between temperature and rainfall is complex and not always intuitive. For example, the Antarctic continent is the coldest but also the driest continent on the planet, while in the Indian subcontinent it rains torrentially during the monsoon months coinciding with high summer temperatures.

Drought is a cyclical natural phenomenon that has always affected our country, a transitory rainfall anomaly that can lead to an inability to meet the demand for water for irrigation or consumption. In the USA the most severe drought in its history occurred between 1933 and 1940, while in Spain the worst took place between 1941 and 1946, when the Manzanares River dried up completely and the Ebro became a small stream. Another important drought, whose restrictions I remember clearly, was that of 1991-1995, although at that time the society was less hysterical and much freer than today, and climate change had not yet become a dogma. Of course, in those years the IPCC still said that “the observed temperature increase in the 20th century may have been largely caused by natural variability[9] .

Here is the evolution of annual rainfall in Spain until 2022. As you will see, although in the last third of the period there seems to have been a slight decrease, the trend is not significant (source: AEMET):

These are the data for Spain, but all over the world it is raining more and more. Indeed, worldwide -surprise, surprise-, rainfall has increased since 1900[10], and there has been no increase in droughts, floods, hurricanes[11] or forest fires[12] . All this data contradicts, time and again, the recurrent lies of climate propaganda.

But annual rainfall averages can mask the local reality of droughts: for example, in 2022, a year between normal-dry in Spain, in the same province of Badajoz some counties had a wet year and others, a very dry one, and while in much of Castile it was a normal-wet year, in the north of Spain it was very dry and in the East coast, very wet. Drought, at times, is counterintuitive: in 1752 a major drought affected the north of the Iberian Peninsula while the southern river Guadalquivir suffered floods, and in 2018, a very wet year in practically all of Spain (the fifth wettest since 1965), northwestern, usually rainy Galicia suffered a very dry year[13]  

No one has commented on the most relevant aspect of the current drought, that is, that no one – no “expert”, no model – has been able to predict it. However, the same people who were unable to predict such a cyclical phenomenon as drought, and who cannot tell us whether it will rain again in a few weeks, claim to know exactly what the planet’s climate will be in 100 years. Science is incapable of predicting local meteorology beyond a few days and can understand a multifactorial and chaotic system such as the Earth’s climate, plagued by feedbacks of opposite sign and rebalancing systems and in which reliable measurements in long series are lacking, and making predictions for a century from now?

The theory of anthropogenic climate change is based on extremely slippery assumptions: the climate has changed naturally since the dawn of time, and now it is only changing because of human action? Does something as complex as the climate depend on the control of a single variable such as the emission of a residual gas like CO₂, whose anthropogenic origin represents only a tiny part of 0.04% of its atmospheric composition? Do natural variations in solar radiation, orbital and rotational anomalies, oceans, and clouds no longer count? Why should we be the least bit concerned about an eventual temperature increase of 1.5°C when in the last 150 years they have apparently increased by the same amount without anything happening at all? Do we not adapt easily to temperature changes of 20 or 30°C between dawn and afternoon or between winter and summer?

It should be added that the astute citizen will notice that, coincidentally, the policies proposed to fight “global warming” are identical to those proposed at the time to combat the “global cooling” mania of the 1970s or acid rain, as Prof. Lindzen[14] , one of the world’s most prestigious climate experts, reminds us.  

The co-responsible parties

The Spanish government, the Brussels-Davos EU and the globalist UN have declared war on farmers in the name of an ideology that is the enemy of man. However, they would never have been able to reach such extremes without the complicity of other actors. Among them are the media, which apply censorship, stigmatize the “denier” (they, who ignore the most elementary data), and impose the climate ideology as a dogma of mandatory belief, under penalty of ostracism.

But unfortunately, civil society institutions (businesses, universities, etc.) are also accomplices who, either because of good intentions, economic interests, or political correctness, are dedicated to promoting the 2030 Agenda and the “sustainable” slogan as if it were a harmless fashion. I trust they understand that by doing so they are contributing to the destruction of our farmland.

Climate change is the greatest scam of all time and the most destructive ideology since the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, as it aspires to total power through the control of energy and food production. How much more evidence do we need? Will we have to reach poverty and hunger to react?