Sánchez, the butterfly effect and what has killed more than 200 people in Spain

In "A Sound of Thunder," American writer Ray Bradbury described a journey into the past by a man named Eckels.

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The time traveler arrives in prehistoric times. When he returns, he notices that there have been certain changes in the world he left behind. Looking at his boots, he sees a squashed butterfly and realizes the effects that this small change has had on the future. What Bradbury is proposing is what is often called the "butterfly effect," which applies to chaotic systems such as the weather.

I say all this because yesterday Pedro Sánchez decided to put an end to the criticism of his poor management of the cold snap catastrophe on October 29, which has caused more than 200 deaths, the greatest natural disaster of the century in Spain. The socialist leader has already found a culprit on whom to place his responsibility: "climate change kills" , he said in a speech in which he called for "preventing it from happening again, avoiding natural disasters from repeating themselves and multiplying."

So, from these words we can deduce that Sanchez believes that this disaster was due to climate change and that he has the formula to prevent it from happening again. The latter would be something miraculous, since until now no one else has managed to avoid something like that (not even Sanchez). As for the first, there were 14,500 floods due to rain and overflows in Spain from November 1035 to July 2019. The worst before the one in 2024 occurred in 1879 and left a thousand dead. Was all that also due to climate change, Mr. Sanchez?

I'm not going to go into a discussion here about whether the theory of anthropogenic climate change makes sense or not. In any case, it is not very coherent to warn about climate change while Sanchez is mobilizing two planes and a helicopter to travel to Azerbaijan to ask, among other things, for fewer emissions of toxic gases. Sanchez shows that he does not believe what he says about climate change every time he acts as if everything he pollutes means nothing and all the sacrifices are for others.

What is most jarring is to see how some politicians use "climate change" as a pretext to evade their responsibility, saying that what kills is a phenomenon over which we have little chance of influencing, despite which some commit enormous sums of public money, considerably increasing the tax burden, destroying our productive fabric and ruining our economy, all based on the belief that they can "avoid" natural disasters. A belief as rational as sacrificing three virgins on the altar of Zeus in order to stop the rain.

Obviously, if we believe in the butterfly effect, it is logical to think that the effects of what we do will be greater and will have more decisive consequences on the results of a natural disaster the greater our ability to intervene in the result. In this sense, as much as Sánchez says the things he has said, I insist on the obvious: at the moment we have no way of preventing a cold drop from happening again. Blaming a cold drop on those who disagree with the theory of climate change, as some do, is as irrational as blaming the cold drop on having sacrificed three virgins to Zeus instead of five or six.

No government can prevent a cold snap. What a government can do is try to mitigate its consequences by taking some precautions, such as:

• Building dams and other hydraulic infrastructure to try to prevent rivers from overflowing or, if they do, the effects will be less disastrous. An example of this is the New Riverbed of the Turia River, approved in 1958 (after the disastrous flood of 1957) and completed in 1973. Surely this New Riverbed prevented the flood of October 29 from having even more devastating effects.
• Build floodplains and storm tanks that can absorb some of the excess water in the event of a flood.
• Create clear protocols for red alert situations to keep the population safe.
• Deploy the Armed Forces as soon as possible, not only to help those affected, but also to avoid situations of looting such as those seen in Valencia.

That is precisely what the Sánchez government did not do. And I am referring to the government because it is the one with the powers to do so. Just a month ago, the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ), dependent on the government, refused to build storm tanks on the Elche-Santa Pola road, despite the fact that it usually floods every time there is a cold drop. Likewise, the Sánchez government refused to declare a national emergency after the disaster of October 29 and it took 4 days to order a large military deployment to come to the aid of those affected. And to top it off, rejected foreign aid.

If we apply the butterfly effect theory, the incompetence and negligence of the Sánchez government are what contribute to people dying, and not climate change. It is the same incompetence and negligence that the government already displayed during the pandemic, turning us into one of the countries in Europe with the most deaths and the one that is having the hardest time getting out of the ruin caused, in large part, by the measures taken by the government itself. This corrupt, incompetent and negligent government costs Spanish lives, and one day Sánchez will have to answer in court for it.

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Photo: La Moncloa. Pedro Sánchez at the "Global Solidariy Levies Task Force" event in Baku, Azerbaijan.