(Paris) Rain planes, purposely destroyed dams, rationed water to subjugate or control populations: the wave of drought affecting the western Mediterranean brings to the surface a flood of fake news and theories of conspiracy widely relayed in climatosceptic spheres.
A hot, dry air mass from North Africa brought all-time April temperature records to Portugal and mainland Spain at 36.9 and 38.8 degrees respectively – levels worthy of the month of April. July.
In Morocco, local records were also broken and temperatures exceeded 41 degrees in places. In Algeria, they have crossed the 40 mark.
An unprecedented situation widely commented on on social networks, especially in conspiratorial spheres who see it, not the consequences of climate change, but the hand of the authorities who, according to them, seek to “submit” the population.
“There is no drought, it is looting”, we could read on Facebook about the situation in Spain. “Climate change, it is they who cause it” by “destroying” dams and dykes, say other publications spotted and debunked by AFP verification teams.
These accounts are proof of this by the destruction of dams, under the Spanish government of Pedro Sanchez, with a record number of infrastructures demolished in 2021, according to the collective Dam Removal Europe.
In reality, most of these facilities were disused and their demolition is part of the European Union’s strategy to restore the free flow of at least 25,000 kilometers of waterways in European countries by to 2030.
As for drought, it is the direct consequence of global warming, recalls Simon Mittelberger, climatologist at Météo France.
“There is a very simple physical principle: as soon as you have one degree higher in the atmosphere, you have 7% more water evaporating into the air and therefore 7% less water either in the soil, or in the water tables,” he explains.
“Catastrophe”
Well known to conspiracy experts, the “chemtrail” theory, which had lost steam in recent years, has also resurfaced.
According to the proponents of this repeatedly denied theory, the contrails of planes visible in the sky are the trace of chemicals spread deliberately for secret reasons, which change according to the news. In the current context, these chemicals would aim to stop the rains and cause drought.
In France, it was the announcement of the “sobriety plan” on the water by Emmanuel Macron a few weeks ago which put some pieces back into the conspiratorial machine. Accounts have seen in “this new narrative of drought and water shortages” the desire “to strengthen control over populations” via “monitoring tools”.
“With the drought, we have a dream subject,” notes Laurent Cordonier, research director at the Descartes Foundation, specializing in issues related to information and misinformation.
“We have on the one hand those who say that the drought is orchestrated by the government, and on the other hand people who say ‘we are being lied to, there is no drought, look it is raining, look the rivers are full” – it’s easy and it joins a whole trend of disinformation on the climate”, adds the researcher.
Far from being confined to social networks, this misinformation sometimes finds an echo in the political class. This is the case in Spain where an elected official recently publicly asked the government if it was manipulating “the weather through the spreading of chemicals”.
For Laurent Cordonier, “this is the worst that can happen”.
“This brings out of the universe of social networks unfounded hypotheses which will affect a population which until then was not aware of these theories and which will potentially say to themselves “if a deputy says it, then…”. It’s catastrophic “.