Famous meteorologist: "We are on the verge of the sixth mass extermination on Earth"

Famous meteorologist: "We are on the verge of the sixth mass extermination on Earth"

Could the consequences have been prevented and how much have climate changes affected the floods?

The head of the Directorate for Climate Activities of the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development, Dunja Mazzocco Drvar, spoke about this, as "Jutarnji list" reports.

"Things like this generally have to do with climate projects. However, for each individual thing, a weather event, a certain analysis must be done to see that it has to do with climate change, and studies are done when everything is over, when the damage is assessed. Certainly, extreme weather events are the main consequence of climate change. I wouldn't even say the consequence, but the phenomenon given that the consequence sounds like it will be in the distant future and this is something that is already happening," she said.

The question is whether the events could have been foreseen, whether something could have been done to avoid such tragic consequences? For example, evacuate people, or think about building a better flood defense earlier?

"The forecasts are getting better and better and it is certain that warnings will be issued on time. However, something like this is terribly difficult to predict, because if it does not happen, then it is just attributed to panic. We have not yet learned to live with those warnings. We have learned everything and we call it adaptation to climate change because in addition to working to reduce the harmful effects on the climate we are also working on adaptation, so there are various ways we will have to adapt to things like this because they will be more frequent and there will be more of them", Mazzocco Drvar emphasized for RTL Today.

Will there be more and more extremes like this? A few weeks ago, there was a record heat wave in the USA, and today they are fighting fires, a tornado ravaged the Czech Republic recently. Does nature want to tell us something?

"Well, I think that nature tells us in a very picturesque way that we have gone too far, that we have started to destroy it more than it can bear. There is a day in the year when, according to some calculations, we use what nature has given us and start living on credit and we see what it looks like, this year that day is estimated at July 29, and we just entered the second half of the year and then we live at the expense of nature and what it gives us. We have to stop taking advantage of what we have around us", she pointed out.

There is a different attitude in the scientific community - that such natural disasters have always been present and will be present in future, that it is the result of thousands of earth cycles... That is, that climate change in that sense is not such a factor, that it is more a political agenda?

"I wouldn't call it 'a different attitude', it's my standpoint, and I'll tell you that it was and certainly happened in some cycles, but in the spans of several hundred thousand years. There was also a rise in temperature and those other extremes and then it goes up and down. However as strong, as extreme as it is now, it has never been and of course it is a consequence of our actions in the last hundred years. What we now know that it happened in the past, that the planet survived all that, but we have had five massive extinctions in the previous X millennia and we are now on the threshold of the sixth. I think that is the best proof that something is happening to us that has not happened so far. But I believe we have solutions for that," she concluded.