As Libyans in Derna recover from the sudden flood that devastated a quarter of their city, they have every reason to be angry at officials who told them two hours earlier the dams upriver were safe.
They could direct their anger at the Yugoslavian engineers responsible for the dams' fatally flawed 1970s design or at Muammar Gaddafi, the dictator who ruled their country for 32 years and used oil revenue to fund the military and foreign terrorism rather than maintain and build the vital infrastructure the country needed.
“Scientists say the Mediterranean storm that dumped torrential rain on the Libyan coast is just the latest extreme weather event to carry some hallmarks of climate change,” reports the French public broadcaster France24. Yet the pseudo-scientific gloss applied to such claims fails to erase the unsubstantiated assumption that man-made global warming is to blame for every storm, drought, tornado, hurricane or wildfire.
Instead, the water rose until it ran over the top, a hazard that clay-cored rock-fill dams cannot sustain. If the heavy rain can be attributed to climate change, it would be an outlier to global flood trends, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported.
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