The sea at thirty degrees

From a news item on the ARA Baleares, signed by Laura López Rigo: 'The Balearic Sea is boiling at a record temperature of over 30 degrees.' reads the headline. A few lines later, we learn that, on Saint John's Day, the temperature-measuring buoy in Mahón registered 29.33 degrees, while the one in Dragonera reached 30.5 on the last day of June. Miquel Gili, a meteorologist with the Aemet (Mexico City Meteorological Agency), states that magnitudes like these "have never been recorded in June." The Mediterranean is a warm sea, but even so, for the water to reach 30 degrees is terrible news. It's alarming if it hits at any time during the summer, but if it does in June, it's terrible. And extremely dangerous, both for the fauna, vegetation, and seabed, as well as for the human species. The risk posed by this situation shouldn't be too difficult to understand.

However, our ability to normalize what isn't normal, or to force ourselves to find middle ground that doesn't exist (between scientific evidence and the opinions of our brothers-in-law, for example) seems endless. There's also always someone who tries to downplay the situation, or outright deny it, arguing, for example, that some summers have always been hotter than others, etc. Scientists around the world have been explaining (and will continue to explain, with the patience of saints) the problem of climate change for years, the consequences it can have in the long, medium, and short term, and the possible solutions that exist to minimize the damage, which necessarily involve two difficult things to achieve: a change in priorities, mainly in rich countries. Information and arguments, therefore, are available to everyone, and those who don't want to listen will no longer listen. Irrational positions are irredeemable and, furthermore, climate change denialism is often included in an ideological package that also includes preferential treatment of immigrants, feminist dictatorship, LGTBIQ indoctrination, the imposition of Catalan, the conspiracy of the 2030 agenda or conjology. woke, among other great achievements of the far right. Arguing with those who hold these views is often rather pointless.

It does make more sense to oversee the work of our leaders and hold them accountable. It's quite obvious that islands with sea water at 30 degrees Celsius in June don't need to soak 20 million tourists during that month and the following ones. Nor do they need to expand the airport to attract even more millions of visitors each year. And they need even less to deregulate construction and give free rein to the destruction of their own natural resources, as is done by the planning amnesty for illegal construction and the free rein for rural construction, even in the Tramuntana mountains. A destruction that, by the way, is leading us to economic decline, given that the Balearic Islands' main industry consists of the intensive exploitation of their landscape and climatic conditions. Having sea water at 30 degrees Celsius is equivalent to killing the goose that lays the golden eggs and heading firmly towards self-destruction. If the true masters of these islands and their collaborators (that is, certain tourism industry entrepreneurs and certain political leaders) have not decided to play the nihilistic card of making the last big deal, it is urgent that current tourism and urban planning policies be reconsidered and reversed, with a genuinely worked-on social consensus, and not just with photo ops.