Threatening knowledge | Opinion | The country

This man in the photo does not look like a threat to anyone. It is one of those people in which the baldness seems like a natural condition, more than an misfortune or a sign of decline. It is a solid bald, firm bone, complemented by austere glasses, without the slightest trace of coquetry, or of that modernity that they established in the eighties architects and designers, which proclaimed by the color or shocking shape of their glasses the degree of their talent, not always corroborated by the originality of their works. In a world in which so many people exhibit a narcissistic effort of singularity, whose paradoxical result is the monotonous repetition of the same, this man gives the impression of an opposite impulse and already very outdated, that of not attracting attention, with his so common face, his baldness, his glasses, his discreet blue shirt, the backpack with which he carries, which he looks like, as he looks like it is reports and studies that transport in it, and in which the statement that has made or is about to do is based as a granite ashlar.

Because this man who would not remember if you were crossing it down the street, but in which you would instinctively trust if you depended on him in a serious matter – if be your fiscal advisor, your lawyer, the doctor who receives you in the consultation -, José Ángel Núñez, went to declare in another day the Court of Catarroja, in Valencianot with the purpose of avoiding a responsibility, or to sow confusion, but to establish as far as possible the reality of the facts and omissions that caused the greatest death on October 29 of last year for a natural catastrophe that has been recorded in our country in more than half a century. Spanish politics is A debased and debaser chopper of true scandals and artificial and well staged scandals that converts everything into a toxic pulp where reality ceases to exist, and where each new abuse evicted from the present and condemns indifference and oblivion the previous abuses. The devastated areas of Valencia are recovering with intolerable slowness, And the suffering of those who survive would move away from today as quickly as the names and memory of the dead, If it weren’t for the heroic activism of your relatives and by A Valencian tradition of civic resistance that seems as rooted as the festive impulse. But the political carnaza supply is so overwhelming, and so continuous that it takes everything ahead, and the same as the corrupt confesses and convicts distract their guilt accusing others of corruption, those directly responsible for the Disaster of Valencia adopt an air of aggrieved dignity and trust the confusion and simple passage of time for time not responding to incompetence in which there is a lot of literally criminal.

It is then that the man in the photo appears, with his quiet face and his restrained informality to present himself in the court, jacket and no jacket or tie, backpack in his hand, and not behind his back, perhaps because of the weight of so much evidence, which equals quite precision to the weight of the fault of which others want to slip away. This man, José Ángel Núñez, It is in possession of a fearsome weapon: the knowledge of things, in a field with few possibilities of academic or intellectual stardom, The geography. Since the years I studied it at the University, with less anell than I had, the geography suffered a discredit that perhaps was harmful, especially in primary and middle education. For the triumphal psychopedagogues, the sin of geography was that it could barely teach from direct experience. It is true that one can hardly have the immediate experience of the Amazon or the Gobi desert, but the human imagination and the ability to learn allow the inaccessible and the very distant to be understood. The geography shrunk as the ambitions of the teaching also shrunk, victims of a propensity to the narrow region propalad with the same devotion by all political parties. And all that formed and sadly is part of the great discredit of knowledge which is a secular misfortune of Spanish life. The fewer truthful information, and less intellectual tools to understand and judge, greater impunity can enjoy those who come to power without further merit than the political, and more devastating the victory of the feudal lords of money.

José Ángel Núñez, a geographer and professor with more than 40 years of experience, is head of weather at the State Meteorology Agency (Aemet) of the Valencian Community. They have called him to declare the court and have told what he has seen and what he knows with a clarity of a scientist who understands that a part of his duty is to explain to citizens, in everyone’s language, the nature of exceptional climatic events, and evaluate the way in which the institutions responded or not, and to what extent they could have been preversation, avoid or at least reduce their dreadful consequences. Appealing to his notebook, Núñez listed from the first very anticipated indications of what was coming, nine days ago, to the increasingly peremptory notices that he was sending to the authorities. In Spain, almost all facts are lost in a word fog, a cacophony of living and deaths, accessions and rejections, fierce opinions and without any foundation. Núñez’s story is a shocking conciseness: « On Thursday 24 it was already specified that the affected areas would be the Mediterranean area, of the Valencian Community and Murcia (…) On Friday 25 a more specific prediction was made: from tomorrow a Dana from north to south is going to take off. » As in a dream, the wave was growing and approached and the witness who saw her coming was paralyzed, and when she raised her voice she felt no one listened to it, as if she did not get out of her throat. The night before says that he barely slept, he told Joaquín Gil, « because he knew something fat was going to happen. » When the disaster had already been unleashed, on the morning of the day of the thrombus, Núñez’s quiet face must have pale when he saw that the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, ignoring the knowledge and prudence, although perhaps not the greed of the hospitality entrepreneurs on the eve of a long and prosper journey and went to the mountain range of Cuenca.

As a scientist and public servant, José Ángel Núñez He consciously measures his words, but he does not bite his tongue. He is part of, I do not know if thoroughly, of that international people and with a lot of experience that they know what they do and that have become the greatest danger, the most fearsome enemy for satraps and demagogues of politics, the beneficiaries of collective ignorance: in the United States, purges are not for now of political dissidents, but of technicians and experts from the Federal Administration, of the great health agencies, Environment, education, scientific research. Thanks to people like José Ángel Núñez we know now, step by step, almost minute by minute, How and where and when the razing storm originated from Valencia. But with all the knowledge and technological tracking systems we have It still does not know what he was doing during the worst hours of disaster That raging man and shrugged shoulders to which the maximum responsibility in remedying it corresponded.