Spain’s Climate Catastrophe
A Glimpse into the Near Future
In the 35 years since we first protested for action against climate change on the streets of London, we have often wondered what it is exactly we are trying to avert. Sometimes, notably in the wee small hours, we have tried to imagine how a destabilised climate might one day cause society to collapse. Would the lights just go out? Would supermarkets suddenly be empty of food? Would there simply be no-one to call for help? Would law and order progressively vanish from a newly barbarised world? For a long time, this all seemed like far-distant, dystopian science fiction.
Unfortunately, the catastrophic floods in Valencia, Spain offer a glimpse of how, in the absence of the kind of drastic action that is currently nowhere on the horizon, human societies will ultimately be dismantled and destroyed.
The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, described the floods as the ‘worst natural weather disaster’ Spain has witnessed ‘this century’.
But of course, there was nothing straightforwardly ‘natural’ about what hit Turis, Chiva, Paiporta and other towns in the region. Yes, high-altitude isolated depressions, known locally as ‘cold drops’, are a painful fact of life on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, but this ‘cold drop’ was different.
The town of Turis, for example, received 771.8 mm (30.4 inches) of rainfall in 24 hours; the equivalent of a year and a half’s rain in one day. Rubén del Campo, the spokesperson for Spain’s meteorological agency Aemet, commented:
‘A relatively strong storm, a powerful downpour like those we see in spring or summer, can bring 40 mm or 50 mm. This storm was almost 10 times that amount.’
Dr Ernesto Rodríguez Camino, a senior state meteorologist and member of the Spanish Meteorological Association, observed:
‘Events of this type, which used to occur many decades apart, are now becoming more frequent and their destructive capacity is greater.’
The floods left at least 223 dead with 32 people missing. Power outages have affected 140,000 people, closing more than 50 roads and most rail lines.
An idea of the scale of the event is also provided by the fact that more than 100,000 cars were damaged or destroyed. These now constitute 100,000 obstructions weighing about 1.5 tons each that take half an hour to be removed by heavy machinery. Moving them all may take months. An estimated 4,500 businesses have been damaged, around 1,800 of them seriously.
Despite his awareness of the severity of the floods, Prime Minister Sanchez has not covered himself in glory. While 7,500 soldiers and 10,000 police officers, trucks, heavy road equipment and Chinook helicopters have been deployed, they were desperately slow to arrive. After one week, many residents were reportedly still surviving without electricity and water, and without seeing a single emergency worker. Numerous streets remained filled with debris and increasingly toxic mud.
The sight of elderly couples sleeping outside on balconies without heating, water or light one week after the rains offered a glimpse into the near future. The Spanish authorities have clearly been overwhelmed by the scale of the event. We can imagine how this will become an overwhelming problem as temperatures rise – the lights will go out one day and will stay out.
Widespread anger at the inadequate relief effort culminated in mud, rocks, sticks and bottles being thrown at the Spanish King and Queen, and Sanchez, on a visit to the disaster zone. Two bodyguards were treated for injuries: one receiving a bloody wound to the head. While the King braved the angry crowd, and the Queen was hit in the face with mud, Sanchez beat a hasty retreat as citizens screamed ‘Killer!’ and ‘Son of a bitch!’ The PM’s car was repeatedly kicked and hit with sticks that smashed the rear and side windows. At the weekend, more than 100,000 protesters took to the streets in Valencia, clashing with riot police.
Again, this offers a glimpse of how escalating climate disasters devastating communities will fuel extreme, ultimately uncontrollable, anger and violence. People who lose everything, including their loved ones, will be looking to blame local authorities and national governments, not carbon emissions, or fossil fuel companies.
Climate deniers have made much of the fact that Spanish engineers have described how the extreme loss of life was the result of a failure to properly maintain and clear flood channels. This led to blockages in the flow of floodwater which, when subsequently breached, released a tsunami-like wave of water that tore through residential areas at lower levels where it had not even been raining. But the fact is that nearly a year’s worth of rain fell in just eight hours. Dr Friederike Otto, who leads World Weather Attribution (WWA) at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, commented:
‘No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change.’
Dr Linda Speight, lecturer at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment (SoGE), said:
‘Unfortunately, these are no longer rare events. Climate change is changing the structure of our weather systems creating conditions where intense thunderstorms stall over a region leading to record-breaking rainfall – a pattern that we are seeing time and time again.’
Otto adds:
‘With every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to heavier bursts of rainfall. These deadly floods are yet another reminder of how dangerous climate change has already become at just 1.3°C of warming.’
In fact, last week, the European climate agency Copernicus reported that our planet this year reached more than 1.5°C of warming compared to the pre-industrial average. The Mediterranean Sea had its warmest surface temperature on record in mid-August, at 28.47 degrees Celsius (83.25 degrees Fahrenheit).
The wider context is deeply alarming:
‘Fuelled by climate change, the world’s oceans have broken temperature records every single day over the past year, a BBC analysis finds.
‘Nearly 50 days have smashed existing highs for the time of year by the largest margin in the satellite era.’
An additional factor is that the ground in many parts of eastern and southern Spain is less able to absorb rainwater following severe drought.
WWA expert Clair Barnes commented:
‘I’ve heard people saying that this is the new normal. Given that we are currently on track for 2.6 degrees of warming, or thereabouts, within this century, we are only halfway to the new normal.’
The results of Valencia’s floods will also be felt elsewhere. Dr Umair Choksy, senior lecturer in management at the University of Stirling Management School, said:
‘The severe flooding in Spain could lead to shortages of many products to the UK as Spain is one of the largest exporters of fruits and vegetables to the UK.’
Shoppers have already suffered fruit and vegetable shortages in supermarkets this year in the weeks after storms wrecked Spain’s greenhouses growing food exported to Britain. The Daily Mirror reported:
‘Spain provides a quarter of Britain’s fresh food produce, mostly from Almeria, where 4,500 hectares of 13,000 hectares of greenhouses and polytunnels have been damaged by hail and floods. Cold weather in the region in February 2023 hit harvests, and saw many British supermarkets forced to ration customers to two or three items of peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, salad, cauliflower broccoli and raspberries.’
It is not hard to imagine how an escalating stream of climate disasters will one day genuinely threaten the food supply.
Top Ten Extreme Weather Events: The Role of Human-Caused Climate Change
Valencia follows a dizzying list of similar disasters in Europe and globally. Earlier in October this year, flooding killed 27 people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, causing landslides and major damage to infrastructure. In September, Storm Boris caused 26 deaths and billions of euros in damages in Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Austria and Italy, in what was described as the worst flooding to hit Central Europe for almost 30 years. In June, Baden-Wurttemberg and Bavaria in southern Germany suffered massive flooding, with some areas receiving a month’s rainfall in 24 hours. In September, in the United States, Hurricane Helene was the deadliest mainland storm in two decades, claiming 233 lives, cutting off power to 4 million people and causing damage estimated at $87.9 billion.
WWA published an analysis of the ten most deadly extreme weather events of the past 20 years as a result of which more than 570,000 people died. George Lee, environment correspondent for RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster, reported:
‘They concluded unequivocally that, yes, human-caused climate change intensified every single one of those most deadly events.’
Four of these top ten global weather disasters occurred in Europe:
‘Almost 56,000 people died during the 2010 heatwave in Russia from extreme temperatures made 3,000 to 7,000 more likely by climate change.
‘Nearly 54,000 deaths were attributed to the European heatwave of two years ago. Italy, Spain, France, Greece, Romania, Portugal and the UK were all impacted. Daily temperature peaks were up to 3.6C hotter and 17 times more likely because of climate change.
‘Then last year, 2023, yet another European heatwave made it onto the top ten, most deadly list.
‘More than 37,000 people died when mostly the same group of countries as in 2022 were impacted. Portugal and the UK escaped it this time.’
Impossibly, one might think, fossil fuels continue to benefit from record subsidies of $13m (£10.3m) a minute in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF analysis found the total subsidies for oil, gas and coal in 2022 were $7tn (£5.5tn). That is equivalent to 7% of global GDP and almost double what the world spends on education.
The Disaster 0f Corporate Media Coverage
The standard pattern of responses in corporate media coverage continues. At the more idiotic end of the spectrum, we have the likes of James Whale in the Daily Express:
‘The flooding in Spain has been a tragedy. But blaming it solely on manmade climate change is short-sighted at best, and dangerous at worst. The climate has always been changing and the planet has changed with it.’ (Whale, ‘Climate change not sole reason for disasters,’ Daily Express, 4 November 2024)
Despite the highly credible evidence cited above, one BBC report was absurdly cautious:
‘The warming climate is also likely to have contributed to the severity of the floods.’ (Our emphasis)
Elsewhere, brief references to climate change do appear, typically towards the middle or end of news reports:
‘Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely connections to human-caused climate change. One is that warmer air holds and then dumps more rain. The other is possible changes in the jet stream – the river of air above land that moves weather systems across the globe – that spawn extreme weather.’ (Graham Keeley, ‘211 now dead after Europe’s deadliest floods in 57 years,’ Mail on Sunday, 3 November 2024)
To its credit, the Guardian went further in its leader on the floods, titled, ‘The Guardian view on climate-linked disasters: Spain’s tragedy will not be the last’:
‘In Spain, a large majority of the public recognises the threat from climate change and favours policies to address it. There, as in much of the world, catastrophic weather events that used to be regarded as “natural disasters” are now, rightly, seen instead as climate disasters. Policies that support people and places to adapt to heightened risks are urgently needed.’
Jonathan Watts wrote an Observer piece titled, ‘Spain’s apocalyptic floods show two undeniable truths: the climate crisis is getting worse and Big Oil is killing us’:
‘We are living in a time of unwelcome climate superlatives: the hottest two years in the world’s recorded history, the deadliest fire in the US, the biggest fire in Europe, the biggest fire in Canada, the worst drought in the Amazon rainforest. The list goes on. This is just the start. As long as people pump gases into the atmosphere, such records will be broken with increasing frequency until “worst ever” becomes our default expectation.’
Should we be impressed by Watts’ piece and the Guardian leader? In reality, these are the same worthy, toothless analyses we have been reading for the last three decades. The pattern is so familiar, so universal, that it is hard to perceive the true disaster of corporate media coverage. As Nietzsche said:
‘The familiar is that to which we are accustomed; and that to which we are accustomed is hardest to “know”, that is to see as a problem, that is to see as strange, as distant, as “outside us”.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘A Nietzsche Reader’, Penguin Classics, 1981, p.68)
Imagine if Valencia had been comparably devastated by an ISIS-style terror attack. Imagine if the same attackers had recently devastated Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Austria, Italy, the United States, and numerous other countries.
Yes, reporting would focus on the precise details of the attacks and their impacts. But would the agency responsible be mentioned as an afterthought towards the middle and end of news reports, and almost never mentioned in the headlines?
The terrorists responsible would be front and centre in lurid headlines, as was the case with Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Priority would be given to the blistering denunciations of Western political and military leaders, and their calls for immediate action to counter the threat. The public would be mobilised – each day, every day, for months and years – for ‘WAR!’
Almost none of this appears in corporate media in response to a rapidly growing climate threat which, as Valencia’s fate shows very well, is infinitely more serious than anything offered by terrorism.
The impact of climate change continues to be presented as a human-interest story, or as a niche scientific issue best covered by the likes of Sir David Attenborough in glossy BBC documentaries. It is not presented as an immediate, existential threat that dwarfs in importance literally every other subject – even Gaza, even Ukraine, even Trump’s re-election – on the front pages. The disastrous impacts are afforded massive, alarming coverage, but the causes are not.
The strange, fake, otherworldly quality of the ‘mainstream’ response to the crisis was captured in an encounter between a traumatised survivor of the Spanish floods and Spain’s Queen Letizia. The survivor, breathless with grief and despair, said:
‘They didn’t warn us. They didn’t warn us. That’s why this happened. Many dead. Many dead.’
Queen Letizia responded:
‘You’re right. You’re right.’
Did this despairing woman who had lost everything really need to have the truth of her experience affirmed by a member of the fabulously privileged Royal Family? Did the Queen have anything material or medical to offer a woman with nothing? Did she have any expertise on any related issue to render her reassurances meaningful?
Queen Letizia’s words, like the royal visit – like humanity’s entire stance on climate collapse – were a benevolent-seeming but vacuous public relations non-response to a desperately real problem that needs real solutions.Email
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