Let’s Retire ‘Acts of God.’ Disasters Are Human-Made.
As Storm Daniel’s devastating ruins show, the cause is terrestrial.
Water flows through the ruins at the site of the ancient Greco-Roman city of Cyrene in eastern Libya, west of Derna, on Sept. 21, 2023, in the aftermath of a devastating flood.
Photographer: Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images
At the start of September, torrential rain in the Mediterranean led to severe flooding, infrastructure damage and deaths in multiple countries. As climate change expedites more extreme weather events like this, we need to consider how they’re framed. These so-called natural disasters are often construed as “Acts of God,” both actuarially and colloquially, but most of time the blame more fairly lies on human actions.
A low pressure system, named Storm Daniel by the Hellenic National Meteorological Service, dumped downpours over 10 days across several nations, including Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and Libya. The rain in Spain fell over just a few hours, yet major flooding still led to five fatalities. Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey had precipitation for four days, submerging Greece’s agricultural center, the Thessalian plain. The storm then strengthened into a “medicane,” a Mediterranean hurricane, dropping record-high amounts of water on Libya over 24 hours on Sept. 10-11. Many areas were reported to have received between 150 millimeters and 240 millimeters of precipitation, with the town of Al-Bayda getting 414.1 mm. By comparison, in an average year, the coastal city of Derna — the epicenter of Libya’s resulting crisis — gets just 274 mm of rain.