Mario Tozzi’s analysis –

The search for the six missing people – three men and three women – from the wreck of the Bayesian sailing ship, which sank at dawn on Monday 19 August in Porticello (in the province of Palermo), resumed this morning. The teams of speleo-divers from the fire brigade, who arrived from Rome, Sassari and Cagliari, have resumed inspections of the wreck, which lies at a depth of about 50 metres. This is a tragedy that is being discussed with bitterness and regret. The experts, in addition to trying to understand why a tornado caused the vessel to sink, are also trying to insist on the emergency of climate change. Among them is Mario Tozzi, geologist and esteemed science communicator.

“The natural event that swept the sea in front of Palermo, causing the sinking of the Bayesian sailing ship, is one of the many signs of how the climate crisis is changing the rules of the game also with regard to weather, bringing particularly energetic events even outside the regions traditionally affected”, he wrote in an article in La Stampa. The expert wanted to remember that “phenomena of this magnitude were, in the past, decidedly less frequent or absent”, while today “it is a growing phenomenon that affects above all the Po Valley, the coasts of the Tyrrhenian side, the central Apennines, Salento and Sicily”.

“What we know – continued Tozzi – is that, in recent decades, violent meteorological disturbances have been constantly increasing throughout the world in number, intensity and frequency. And that they tend to break out even outside of the characteristic seasons and outside of the usual regions to which they belong”. Thermal energy would be at the base: “The greater quantities of thermal energy available to the atmospheric system, generated by global climate warming, are probably at the origin of this recrudescence that is starting to have repercussions in Italy too”, concluded the geologist in his analysis.