Media, Including Me, Recently Wrongly Ignored A Cataclysmic Climate Calamity

Destruction in Libya after last month's extreme flood,
made worse by both climate change and political
instability. This will happen again and again, unfortunately. 

Severe, record floods have been all over the new recently, as climate change has contributed to some epic inundations around the world.  

Yes, heat has been in the news for months, and so have floods. I can point to Vermont a few months ago, where we got tons of media attention for our horrible floods. 

Meanwhile, how many of you have heard details of the big flood last month in Libya? Sure, it's been in the news, sort of, but that calamity has not been a headline grabber. I also haven't touched this story, which is actually a shame. 

Two or three people died in Vermont's floods. Which is undeniably horrible. 

Over in Libya, the death toll was around 20,000, making it among the worst floods in modern history.  At least another 40,000 people have been displaced by the flood, just in the city of Derna. It pretty much got passing notice in the media. Can you imagine the uproar if God forbid a flood killed 20,000 people in the United States?

The Libya calamity was important, and we should have covered it more for this among other reasons: 

It was a classic example of how climate change teams up with humans' propensity for evil, corruption and incompetence to really mess things up. 

The storm that caused the flood, Storm Daniel, was turbo-charged by climate change. It formed over the Mediterranean Sea in September, and took on some tropical characteristics because of the record warm water temperatures out there. 

This along with the fact warmer air can hold more moisture than chillier air, helped Storm Daniel unleash incredible amounts of rain on Libya and elsewhere. It's another example of what climate change can do. 

On top of that, Libya's so-called government is in shambles.  As the BBC reports:

"Libya has been in political chaos since long-serving ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and killed in 2011 - leaving the oil-rich nation effectively split with an interim, internationally recognized government operating from the capital, Tripoli, and another one in the east."

That other government is in control, as it were, with Derna.  Due to the chaos, Libya had no real system like stable nations to warn the population of the impending danger. 

When the big floods hit us here in Vermont this summer, we had a well-organized government agency, namely the National Weather Service, broadcasting precise, timely warnings.  That prompted people to get out of the way. People fled flood prone areas, based on the warnings they'd received.

Vermont's state government, especially Emergency Management, and well organized local first responders, rescued dozens of people. The national agency, FEMA, swooped in to provide aid. 

In other words, the system more or less worked, and fatalities were kept to a minimum. 

In Libya, had there been a functioning government, what ever their equivalent of the National Weather Service would have issued dire warnings. The government would then order evacuations. Derna would still have been largely destroyed, but perhaps tens of thousands of lives would have been saved. 

We've always been really, really bad, corrupt governments with fatal, often genocidal results. I'm not minimizing that. It's just that some humans, anyway, are incredibly cruel and indifferent beyond belief.

So there's a feedback loop between climate change and unstable governments.  It isn't and won't be just Libya. There are plenty of unstable governments one storm away from disarray and dissolution. Additionally climate change can destabilize governments. 

Migrants continue to flow toward Europe and the United States. That migrant flow is contributing to  political and societal divisions in both regions.  Please note I'm not taking sides on this issue here. But however you feel about migrants and immigration, fairly or not, it's causing political strife, discord, and most distressingly, either threats of violence or actual violence. 

Most of the migrants are fleeing crime, corruption, poverty and war. Increasingly, climate change is finding its way into the calculus when migrants decide whether to leave their homeland.

As PBS points out, it's hard to tease out how many are fleeing climate problems, because most migrants flee for more than one reason.  For instance, in El Salvador, crop failures due to climate driven droughts and floods and prompting people to leave. But those same people are also leaving due to gang violence and government corruption. 

So was it climate change, gangs or a bad government that prompted Mr. El Salvadorian to try fleeing to the United States? Probably a combination, but we'll never know. 

Meanwhile, here in Vermont, I'm still seeing bits and pieces of updates on the news regarding recovery from our July floods. I haven't heard a peep about Libya in weeks, it seems. 

Thursday a did a search on Google news "Libya flood." 

I did see one article from BBC published two days earlier titled "Libya floods: The flawed response that increased Derna death toll."

Other than that, there's a Washington Post story from a week ago, and nothing else for over two weeks. That's not to say there wasn't any other news story recently regarding the Libya flood, but you're left to wonder what's going on over there.

Yes, big new events are overshadowing Libya, the biggie being the Israel/Hamas mess and tragedy. 

But the dearth of updates on Libya and other international disasters leaves me thinking the victims are basically on their own with the aftermath. I know there are good international relief agencies trying to help, but there's only so much they can do.  

The Libya flood is definitely out of the headlines, for better or worse. We will just wait, dreading the next climate and human tragedy