Seven people in Artvin did not die of a natural disaster

Indeed, the country has huge problems. Terror has revived; we get news of deaths every day.

The country is heading towards elections again, a situation that should leave all the political actors in the country ashamed. Because Sweden and Holland said, “If you can make it here we might think of something good for you,” tens of thousands of Syrian refugees are facing life and death every day in the Aegean Sea.

Next to all these big problems, we have another huge problem that we for some reason do not talk about. In fact, the lasting effects of this problem will be much bigger but let alone developing measures to combat it, we don’t even talk about it.

Yes, I am talking about global climate change and the effects it has over our country.

There are tens of works undertaken on that issue by Professor Miktat Kadıoğlu from Istanbul Technical University. One of them was done upon the request of the Environment and Forestry Ministry.

In his work Professor Kadıoğlu focuses on the increase in the number of disasters which are said to be “natural.”

Just looking at Kadıoğlu’s numbers, the big increase in the frequency of disasters such as floods and landslides is striking.

In other words, floods and landslides will not be incidents which take place from time to time but rather things that will happen very often.

In fact there were floods in the same week in Ankara, Istanbul and the Black Sea province of Artvin. In the previous week floods and landslides happened at the same time.

All of these incidents took place in August, outside the “seasonal norm.” Because we now have to get used to it. The concept of “seasonal normal” will change because the climate is changing in our country.

Obviously bad municipal engineering played an important role in the floods in Ankara and Istanbul due to heavy rains. 

But is the death of seven people in Artvin’s three provinces the work of nature? No, there were also man-made mistakes.

Firstly, humans are responsible for climate change. Then other humans, public officials who are not taking the necessary measures despite the risk of disaster, who construct hydro electrical power plants (HES) instead of fortifying rivers, are responsible.

Because, as I said before, Professor Kadıoğlu told us many years ago: There is already a serious increase in the number of these kinds of disasters and there will be many more such disasters.

Record temperatures every month

Perhaps it attracts your attention, perhaps it does not. You see this news every month in the papers, “This year’s month of July has been registered as the hottest July.”

You will read the same news for the following month August, and then September, October, etc.

Global warming or global climate change is at such a stage that from now on any  registered temperature  will be higher than before and this rise will continue until at least 2050.

The cost of the rise is the extreme climate incidents that we saw week.

Don’t think, “How great, it rained and the damns are full,” because actually what waits us is serious drought. 

There is a perception that the HES’ being constructed and planned in the eastern Black Sea are the issue of the environmentalists or the local people. But they are not. Turkey needs to review the situation in all of its rivers.