DAVID JONES on the people fuelling a climate of hysteria

2023-07-22

When super-fit cyclist Andrea Sechi collapsed and died from a heart attack in Sardinia last weekend, it was instantly blamed on global warming despite it being 8.30am and just 22C. DAVID JONES investigates the people fuelling this climate of hysteria

Within hours of his death, Andrea Sechi was being held up as the latest climate change martyr. While riding his racing bike along the southern coast of Sardinia with friends last Saturday, the keen amateur scientist had collapsed and, though efforts were made to revive him, he died at the roadside.

First to report the incident was a popular local news website. Since Mr Sechi was only 48 years old and seemingly super fit, and as the island was in the grip of a heatwave, they declared that his fatal heart attack was ‘probably linked’ with the freakishly high temperatures.

And as the mercury soared across southern Europe, turning dramatic TV heat maps from dark red to black and starting a stampede for alarmist headlines, the news that a weekend cyclist had fallen victim to global warming was seized on by foreign news outlets and internet doom-mongers.

This hasty assumption was perhaps inevitable. For here was a human story that perfectly played into the narrative of the moment, which held that Armageddon had reached our very doorstep.

Andrea Sechi was only 48 years old and seemingly super fit when he collapsed and died while riding his bicycle in Sardinia last Saturday

That, with the politicians still wringing their hands over how to reduce carbon emissions, the continent had already been plunged into a lethal, and perhaps irreversible catastrophe.

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Which brings us to another truth. For tourists such as them, who tend to stay on the coast, the heat is tolerable — even pleasant, so long as you stay inside when the sun is highest. The people who are genuinely suffering are the locals who live inland.

Yet even there, one finds a minefield of misinformation. Seeking to slake my thirst in the ghostly interior town of Vallermosa, where only mad dogs and English reporters brave the midday sun, I swooned into a local bar and struck up an amiable conversation (via Google Translate) with a retired policeman.

Ordering up beers, he painted his own vision of hell.

Sheep dying in their thousands following an outbreak of bluetongue, an insect-borne disease imported from Africa; fruit and vegetable crops withering; broiling seas invaded by tropical fish and electric-blue crabs; old people dying by the dozen in homes with no aircon.

In fairness, some of the disasters he described proved all too real.

I later visited a farm in Assimini, an hour’s drive south, where one-third of this summer’s crop of cherry and mini-plum tomatoes — worth 15,000 Euros — has been killed off by day after day of vicious sunlight and under-irrigation, with the water supply too hot to use.

Gasping for air in a greenhouse where the temperature had pushed into the mid-50s, farmer Antonio Mereu, 49, led me along rows of stunted fruits withering.

The baby Italian tomatoes beloved of British shoppers are sweet and crimson: these were yellow and tasted bitterly acidic.

‘Normally, these plants produce vegetation to protect themselves from the sun, but this year the rise in temperature has been so sudden that they didn’t have time to react. So now the fruit is burning,’ explains Mr Mereu, whose father started the farm 35 years ago.

He gives a hollow laugh. ‘If these summers become a regular thing, maybe I’ll start growing bananas and pineapples. But I don’t think I could compete with the Caribbean.’

The Sardinian wine industry has been badly hit, too. The grape varieties commonly used on the island, such as Vermentino (for white wines) and Cannonau (for reds) have been bred to thrive in hot, dry conditions, but not of this severity.

At a time when there is a pressing need for evidenced facts on which to base clear-headed decisions, the debate is being polluted by outlandish rumours and hyped-up half-truths

Driving into the Su’entu Winery, at Sanluri, one of the most oppressive towns I visited this week, I wondered why there weren’t any familiar green bunches dangling from the vines.

But as Roberta Pilloni, one of the family owners, later showed me, the grapes were there — they were just too small to see.

‘They should be this size,’ she told me, making a grape-sized circle with her fingers, ‘but since the heatwave began they have stopped growing, so now they are still like this.’ The second shape she made was no bigger than a pea.

Fortunately, her winery sits above an underground spring, 600 ft below the hills. So, assuming the weather soon cools down, this year’s vintage will simply be late.

However, those wineries without a supply of water face die-offs, she says; and, given the startling change in the country’s weather, a respected Sardinian viticulturist has warned her that the industry could disappear within 20 years.

Miss Pilloni, 38, is less pessimistic. Already, she says, oenologists on the island are experimenting to create more heat-resistant grape varieties that will be harvested 20 or 30 years hence.

The mayor of Sanluri is similarly upbeat. Though he says the townsfolk ‘feel more in Africa than Italy’, he says they are adapting stoically and pragmatically.

Some companies are giving their outdoors workers a couple of days off; the air conditioning has been turned up in public buildings; during the day, children and old people are staying in their homes, many of which are insulated with thick stone walls and window shutters.

If a desert climate does become the norm, the official mantra is that Sardinians — who have tended to ‘live in the moment’ long before the phrase became trendy — will adapt. That said, it won’t be plain-sailing. Emphasising the discomfort facing the island’s agriculturalists, Ms Pilloni says the ferocious heat is even killing the sparrows that flitter around the vines.

‘If you came back this afternoon, you’d see them lying about in the fields,’ she says.

‘I don’t know why it’s happening. Maybe they are confused by the heat and fly too low, hitting the trees and walls, but they just seem to be dying mid-flight and falling from the sky.’

It’s an eerily dystopian image. Another that the doomwatch brigade might well latch on to, as proof we’re all bound for hell in a handcart.

But back to that well-meaning ex-policeman in the bar: what substance is there in his other calamitous assertions? Not a great deal, it would seem. Take bluetongue, a disease symbolic of environmental ruination if ever there was one.

As it turns out, this lethal mutton plague hasn’t suddenly descended on Sardinia.

It has been around for at least 20 years and was at its most lethal in the early 2000s, before climatic fluctuations were being spoken of here. There have been no reported incidences of it this summer.

Then there are those sinister-looking blue crabs, a photograph of which our worried retired policeman showed me on his mobile phone. With their other-worldly coloration and outsized claws, there’s no doubting their scariness.

But have colonies of them really been washed on to the shores of Sardinia because its coastal waters are now a tepid bath? Not according to a rather more reliable source, respected Italian marine biologist Luca Garibaldi.

While some invasive species, such as parrotfish and blue-spotted cornet fish, had migrated from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean after the Suez Canal opened, and rising sea temperatures had also enticed them, he told the Mail, blue crab, which are native to the Atlantic Ocean off the Americas, were not present in any great number.

And what of the plethora of heat-related deaths: some 200, according to the man in the bar. Maybe this figure will prove accurate, though one hopes not. However, ask as I did this week, in town after scorching town, I was unable to find a single case to back it up.

I repeat, this is not to make light of all this. With fields aflame, tarmac melting, and an eerie emptiness enveloping the usually-bustling town squares, I have seen some alarming sights this week.

I just think we would all be better served if things were kept in perspective. If the hysteria were to be toned down.

In this, I am not alone. Let’s look at the two names coined to personify the recent back-to-back anticyclones that have turned Europe into a ‘giant pizza oven’ (to borrow Reading University climate scientist Hannah Cloke’s slick metaphor).

The first blast was quickly dubbed Cerberus, after the fearsome, three-headed hound who guarded the gates of the Underworld in Greek mythology. This week’s even more hellish calefaction is being called Charon, another chilling character from the Classics: a boatman who ferried the souls of the dead down to the fiery depths of Hades.

So, who dreamt up these darkly melodramatic epithets, which have been widely accepted, not only by the public but many leading meteorologists and climatologists?

Step forward Antonio Sano, a one-time engineer and self-schooled weather-forecasting hack who founded his own website, il meteo.it, 23 years ago, and, with his charisma and eye for publicity, made it a commercial success.

He first began naming unusual weather events after mythological and historical figures, such as Roman generals and warriors, in 2012 making front-page headlines in Italy’s leading newspaper.

Since then he has been at it every year, drawing attention — and advertisers — to his weather site. But, as he told me, this summer’s sobriquets are his crowning glory.

‘I was already famous in Italy, but now I’m also famous abroad,’ he said with ill-disguised glee.

Indeed so. Yet, as he acknowledges, the Italian Meteorological Society, whose members include many of the nation’s most august weather scientists, are deeply unhappy that he has hyperbolised the heatwave using words suggesting the world is heading for annihilation.

Sano, who predicts that the 50c barrier will be broken somewhere in Europe in the next few years — and plans to christen the continent’s next heatwave Lucifer —suggests they should lighten up.

‘Yes, these names are evocative of Hell,’ he told me. ‘But I don’t think I’m frightening people. That’s not the intention at all. It’s like a joke.

‘When the temperature gets high, everybody always talks about the infernal heat, so these are simple names that everybody can understand.

‘The problem is that in Italy the official weather forecast is provided by the military. They just don’t want a private website to become popular.’

Perhaps not. Then again, in a week when wildfires raged across Spain, insufferable heat closed the Acropolis (a feat last achieved by the Persians in 480BC), and the temperature at the 15,800 ft summit of Mont Blanc rose to zero for the first time, perhaps the sober suits in the Italian weather service are responsibly keen to avert a wave of panic.

Though scientists concur that man-made climate change has greatly increased the frequency, intensity and duration of unusually hot spells of weather in recent decades, it is, as yet, too early to assess the likelihood of whether this is what has brought southern Europe to the gates of hell in recent days.

That should become much clearer in the coming weeks, after leading experts have fed all the data into computer models.

In the meantime we would do well to cool the rhetoric and stop bending the facts to fit the scariest script.

We might start by recognising that the collapse of one unfortunate cyclist, on a breezy seaside path, is not a portent of doom.

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DAVID JONES on the people fuelling a climate of hysteria

When super-fit cyclist Andrea Sechi collapsed and died from a heart attack in Sardinia last weekend, it was instantly blamed on global warming despite it being 8.30am and just 22C. DAVID JONES investigates the people fuelling this climate of hysteria

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