“60 degrees in Spain”: Sandrine Rousseau assumes her tweet and defends the principle of a “wake up effect”

2023-07-17 16:06:06

In a terse tweet published last Thursday, the Green MP for Paris Sandrine Rousseau was alarmed by the temperature in our Iberian neighbors: “It is 60 degrees in Spain. 60 degrees. However, the shock figure of 60 degrees referred to a temperature on the ground, and not to the temperature of the air, which the elected official had not specified. Some environmental activists and meteorologists felt that his tweet served the cause.

The Green MP justified this Monday having deliberately written an alarmist tweet by her desire to cause a “wake-up effect”: “That is to say, I want people to wake up to the gravity and the magnitude that to this global warming,” she said on BFMTV-RMC. “How do we raise awareness and create action around the climate? she wondered.

???? “I want to do a ‘wake up’ effect”

Sandrine Rousseau explains her controversial tweet where she states that it is 60°C in Spain, without specifying that it is the temperature on the ground pic.twitter.com/uavgwh1WhH

— BFMTV (@BFMTV) July 17, 2023

A political tactic

“The fact that we finally talked about it all weekend is also a way of alerting us to what is currently happening in Spain”, defended the deputy for Paris, who assumes her tweet that she perceived as a political tactic. Sixty degrees on the ground, “it’s 60° for the plants, for the fauna, for the animals, and for the children who are at ground level”, she insisted on Monday.

Many scientists, such as the agroclimatologist Serge Zaka, had addressed him many citrics on his freedoms with reality. “You have to be careful with his speeches which are a little bit catastrophic, taken from the context and then above all without source”, declared the scientist to BFMTV, believing that the deputy gave “grain to grind” to climatosceptics, by feeding “certain theses on ecologists” according to which “they exaggerate on the impact of climate change”.