By Jo Nova
Oh the Dilemma?
More than 219 people have drowned and another 80 are still missing after the devastating floods in Valencia, Spain. The UN expert climate scientists say that shutting coal plants and building windmills is the best way to stop floods.
Matt Ridley is wondering if removing 133 dams had anything to do with it, or if perhaps they should have built the big dam that was approved in 2001 but stopped by the Socialists in 2004:
Dam shame: what really caused Valencia’s floods?
Matt Ridley, The Spectator
… Valencia had a similarly terrible flood in 1957, in which 81 people died, long before climate change became the go-to excuse for any bad weather. After that flood, to prevent a recurrence, the Spanish government built a string of dams in the hills to hold back water and diverted the Turia river away from the city. For more than six decades the system worked well. Why did it fail this year? Because the unusually warm sea made for an unusually bad storm, say some. Yet charts of rainfall in Spain show no trend towards a higher frequency of more extreme downpours…
Indeed, 24 hour torrential rainfall records back to 1940 don’t sing the Climate Change song. Since 1982 human emissions of CO2 have grown from a cumulative total of 640 billion tons up to 1,800 billion tons and it hasn’t made the slightest difference to downpours.
That’s a 280% increase in man-made CO2 and there’s nothing to show for it.
Matt Ridley points to the enthusiastic dam removal programs the EU has been ordering:
In the past few years, the Spanish government has been removing dams at a furious rate. Under a European Union programme to encourage the restoration of rivers to their wild state for the benefit of fish migration, Spain set about dismantling barriers of all kinds. In 2021 it got rid of 108 dams and weirs; in 2022, another 133. That year, according to Dam Removal Europe, a coalition of seven green pressure groups, it was Europe’s proud league champion at dismantling them…
The billionaire’s ski club called the WEF brags about how many dams they have removed: The removal of dams in Europe is reviving rivers and boosting biodiversity
The BBC was touting the environmental wonders of dam removal in Europe only 6 months ago:
They not only cause biodiversity loss, impacting fish and microorganisms, but also prevent nutrients and sediments from flowing downstream, hindering fisheries and the livelihoods that depend on them.
Research now shows that at least 1.2 million instream obstacles block river flows in 36 European countries, with about 68% less than 2m (6.6ft) in height. “Even barriers as small as 20cm (8in) may impact or delay the movement of some organisms,” says Carlos Garcia de Leaniz professor in Aquatic Biosciences at Swansea University and coordinator of Amber, a project that created the first atlas of European river barriers.
Some dams are sacred though — no bureaucrat is going to get rid of a hydro-dam. They stop floods by reducing human CO2 emissions which may in a thousand years, slightly reduce world temperatures in such a way as to change jet-streams, and maybe possibly, lessen the intensity of downfalls. Screw the fish eh?
Acknowledging that dams have a detrimental effect on ecosystems doesn’t mean denying hydropower’s benefits in supplying energy, however. “Absolutely nobody is proposing to blow up or remove barriers which are in use,” clarifies Garcia de Leaniz…
But as Matt Ridley notes, the Cheste dam was “was specifically designed to prevent flooding, to ‘regulate the flows coming from the upper basin of the Poyo and Pozalet ravines’.” It was abandoned in 2004. “Could it have saved Valencia?” he wonders, pointing out that “the city of Aragon was saved last month by a dam built by the emperor Augustus.”
In the tragedy of the Spanish flood, an ancient Roman dam saves the city of Aragon 🇪🇸
Built nearly 2,000 years ago by Emperor Augustus, the 34-meter dam prevented destruction and loss in the region
This is the tallest surviving Roman dam in the world! pic.twitter.com/Xqz8IPtzYd
— Mambo Italiano (@mamboitaliano__) November 4, 2024