• Science, Sociology
Etiquetas: , , , , ,

Introduction

Let me start with a disclaimer: I am not a climatologist, a meteorologist or a risk management specialist. This text does not come from academic research but from a concern. It comes from conversations with colleagues and people close to me, and from months of reading the news while the weather went from frost to fire with no stop in between.

In those conversations I noticed something that made me uneasy. Almost all of them ended in one of two stock phrases: “it was nature” or “it’s climate change.” Both sounded like answers, but neither explained much. I wanted to know what lay between them.

What follows is the result of a little research: an attempt to answer that question or, at least, to frame it better. I have flagged my own inferences and impressions as such, and left the sources at the end for anyone who wants to follow the trail. I share it because I suspect the unease is not mine alone.

The Whiplash

In less than ninety days, central Argentina went from a polar cold wave to a dry, windy and hot start of spring. In early July, a mass of Antarctic air brought temperatures 6 to 10 °C below normal across the center and north of the country, with consecutive frosts that dried out the grasslands accumulated during a first half of the year with the smallest burned area in five years in the province, leaving them as fine fuel. September and October brought days of out-of-season heat, dry gusts and wildfire outbreaks in the hills. (I am writing this before the National Weather Service and the provincial government publish their official reports for the period; I will update the figures once they are available.)

Two ready-made narratives circulate in the face of this sequence. The first is fatalistic: it was a natural disaster, bad luck, and the response is heroic, with firefighters and water bombers. The second is activist: it was climate change, and there is nothing more to discuss. They look like opposites, but they have something in common. Both talk only about what nobody controls.

This text proposes another reading, grounded in evidence rather than slogans. To get there, we need three words that public discourse uses as synonyms when they are not.

Three Words: Hazard, Erosion, Disaster

The hazard is the physical event: the polar air mass, the drought, the wind. On its own, it destroys nothing. A frost over an empty field is a weather fact; over a harvest, it is a loss.

Erosion is what slowly accumulates between one hazard and the next. It has three layers. The ecological one: cleared watersheds, unmanaged grasslands, plant fuel that nobody removes. The institutional one: unenforced laws, underfunded technical agencies, plans that exist only on paper. The social one: the fading idea that what I do on my land affects my neighbor. Erosion never makes the news, because it has no date and no image.

The disaster is where the two meet: a hazard striking an eroded territory. This is not this article’s opinion. It is the framework used by the IPCC and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction: risk results from combining hazard, exposure and vulnerability. The “pressure and release” model of Ben Wisner and Piers Blaikie (At Risk, 2004) describes erosion as a progression: root causes that generate dynamic pressures, which in turn produce unsafe conditions. The geographer Neil Smith summed it up in the title of a 2006 essay: there is no such thing as a natural disaster.

With these three words pulled apart, each axis of the problem comes into sharper focus. And each one dismantles a different narrative.

The Natural Axis: What Science Can and Cannot Claim

The first narrative to dismantle is the activist one, because it presents itself as scientific and is not always so. A single event does not prove climate change. Saying that the July cold wave “is” global warming is as unrigorous as saying it refutes it. Climate is statistics; a single day’s weather is a sample.

To understand what is shifting, we have to look at the long scale. Everything that organizes our lives, from land registries and the farming calendar to the public budget, was designed during the Holocene: the last eleven thousand seven hundred years, in which humankind invented agriculture, cities and law. On a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, that period of relatively stable climate was not the norm but an exception. (I call it a “thermal truce”: it is a metaphor, not a technical term.)

The Industrial Revolution did something unprecedented with that truce. It dug up deep time: coal, oil and gas formed over hundreds of millions of years from plants and plankton. And it burned them on the scale of human seconds, most of it in just the last seven decades. Carbon that the Earth took geological eras to store went back into the atmosphere in the span of a few generations.

That is the first collision of scales, and it is the one that manufactures the hazard. It does not announce each cold wave or each drought, but it shifts the odds of all of them.

What can be stated with evidence is that the distribution is shifting. In September 2026, the global average temperature stood 1.63 °C above pre-industrial levels, and attribution science, with groups such as World Weather Attribution, can now estimate how much more likely or more intense a specific event has become. That is the right language: probabilities, not prophecies.

The 2026 case shows why precision matters. El Niño was not behind the summer rains: at the start of the year conditions associated with La Niña still lingered, and El Niño was only declared in June. What the models actually expected for this spring was a risk of extraordinary rainfall and flooding, especially in the Litoral region. A dry spring in the center, if confirmed, runs against that signal. Nature did not follow the script, and that is exactly what makes managing by script useless.

One hypothesis offered to explain these atmospheric blocking patterns is that warming weakens the jet stream. It should be presented for what it is: a hypothesis formulated for the Northern Hemisphere and still debated. In the Southern Hemisphere, other factors weigh more, such as the Southern Annular Mode. Stating it as certainty hands the denier exactly the mistake he needs.

The natural axis, then, leaves a conclusion that is uncomfortable for both camps. Extreme events are increasingly likely, but none can be predicted on the timeline of a political calendar. The only thing to do with a hazard like that is to be prepared. And that is no longer physics: it is management.

The Scientific Axis: The Sensor Switched Off

Between the hazard and the territory there is only one possible mediation: the technical knowledge that makes anticipation possible. Argentina’s National Weather Service (SMN) forecasts a cold wave days in advance. The National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) measures soil moisture and plant fuel load. The National Space Activities Commission (CONAE) detects hotspots and maps burned areas by satellite. The National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) produces the models that connect it all. None of these agencies prevents the hazard; all of them reduce the disaster.

Here the argument shifts ground and becomes hard to refute from any ideology. Suppose someone doubts global warming. Even so, the frost comes, the drought comes, the wind comes. What changes is whether they come with a warning or blind. Defunding the scientific system is not a stance on climate: it is switching off the sensor. (I have not traced the budget history of these agencies here; the argument holds for any cut that weakens their capacity to measure and warn.)

The analogy comes from engineering, not activism. In a critical system, monitoring is the last thing to be cut, because its cost is small and visible while its absence is enormous and invisible until the moment of collapse. Any infrastructure administrator knows this: you do not switch off the alert system to save power. (This is the author’s inference, not a data point: the cost-benefit ratio of early warning systems has been studied, but there is no local figure for 2026.)

The scientific axis works as a hinge. It tells the fatalist that the event was foreseeable, and it tells the activist that what is missing is not more awareness but more instruments.

The Social Axis: Erosion With a Name

This is where the fatalistic narrative falls apart. If disaster were natural, it would have no authors. But erosion is built from concrete decisions, dated and signed.

The first layer is territorial. Housing developments are approved in the interface between woodland and town, on slopes with no evacuation routes or water reserves. Upper watersheds that regulate runoff are cleared. Each of those approvals was an administrative act with a case file. The Candonga case, in the Sierras Chicas next to the Chavascate River, shows it in full. In 2010, the provincial Environment Secretariat authorized a real estate project on native forest in a red zone, the highest protection category. Residents litigated for more than a decade. In 2021, the Córdoba Superior Court ruled in their favor and ordered the works halted. In 2023, the former secretary who signed the authorization was convicted for that act. In 2024, the Civil Court of Appeals annulled the authorization for “manifest illegality.” Meanwhile, construction had kept going despite a suspension order in force since 2019. Something similar happened in San Antonio de Arredondo, where a residents’ injunction stopped land clearing for a development on the San Antonio River watershed. Erosion, in these cases, is not an abstraction: it has a signature, a resolution number and a ruling.

The second layer is regulatory, and it is the most revealing. Argentina has the legal framework: Law 27,287 created the National System for Comprehensive Risk Management in 2016, and Fire Management Law 26,815 was amended in 2020 by Law 27,604, which prohibits changing the land use of burned areas and shields them from real estate speculation. That amendment targets the perverse incentive to burn first and build or farm later. The problem is not a lack of laws. It is the gap between the law and its enforcement.

The third layer is cultural. The logic of “on my land I do as I please” is better understood in economic than in moral terms. Whoever burns pruning waste on a high-wind alert day keeps the benefit and shifts the cost: someone else’s home, the watershed, the fire service. It is a textbook negative externality. (That this behavior has increased since the pandemic is the author’s impression, not a measured fact; I hold it as a hypothesis.) It is also worth being fair about the timeline: the ignition is usually human, but it is only the trigger. Accumulated fuel, the lack of firebreaks and the occupation of the woodland prepared the fire months in advance.

The social axis strips the disaster of its alibi. The hazard is natural; everything else has someone responsible.

Why Nobody Talks About Erosion

Both agenda-driven narratives fail for the same reason. The fatalist talks about the hazard because bad luck has no one responsible. The activist talks about the hazard because global climate is a convenient enemy: distant, abstract, attributable to everyone and therefore to no one in particular. Neither wants to talk about erosion, because erosion has a name, a date and a case file.

That, in full, is the collision of scales in the title. In geological time, the hazard was manufactured: millions of years of carbon released in a few generations. In administrative time, the erosion was manufactured: years of small decisions nobody watches. In news time, the disaster happens, and it is the only one of the three we see.

Governing risk means working on the middle scale, the only one within our reach. We cannot control the hazard. We can measure it, anticipate it, and stop manufacturing the territory where it turns into catastrophe. Everything else is talk.

Sources