Global Warming Blamed for Spain’s Deadly Floods as Citizens Lash out at Royal Family

The climate crisis was a major factor in the deadly flooding that struck Spain’s eastern Valencia region last week, causing widespread death and devastation.

Spain’s deadliest floods serve as a stark reminder that Europe remains unprepared for the consequences of a superheated atmosphere, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned last week.

‘This is the dramatic reality of climate change. And we must prepare to deal with it,’ she said.

The death toll currently stands at 211, after nearly a year’s worth of rain fell in just eight hours around Spain’s third-largest city, with 1,900 people still missing.

On Sunday, frustration erupted in the flood-ravaged region as locals confronted Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s motorcade and hurled mud at King Felipe VI.

In the town of Paiporta, one of the worst-affected areas, angry crowds also directed their discontent at a royal entourage that included Queen Letizia.

Residents are accusing authorities of inadequate warnings about rising floodwaters and a lack of visible recovery efforts in the disaster’s aftermath.

National officials have voiced frustration, claiming that regional authorities, responsible for emergency management, have been slow to accept Madrid’s offer of additional recovery support.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the deployment of 5,000 soldiers and 5,000 police officers to the region, marking Spain’s largest-ever peacetime mobilisation of troops.

Climate Change to Blame?

Scientists looked at historical observations of rainfall, which they say indicate that one-day bursts of rain in this region are increasing as man-made emissions warm the planet.

The downpour has been attributed to the ‘gota fría’ or ‘cold drop’ phenomenon, which occurs when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean, creating atmospheric instability that causes warm, saturated air to rise rapidly, leading to heavy rain and thunderstorms.

Analysts at World Weather Attribution (WWA) said climate change means a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, leading to heavier rainfall.

‘We haven’t had time yet to do a full attribution study about the flooding that’s just taken place in Spain. But what we have been able to do is to look at observations of rainfall in the area,’ said WWA member Clair Barnes.

‘And based on the recorded rainfall, we’ve estimated that similar events have become about 12 per cent more intense, and probably about twice as likely as they would have been in a pre-industrial climate, about 1.3 degrees (Celsius) cooler, without human-caused climate change.’

Barnes, a statistician who researches extreme weather events and climate change at the Imperial College London, added a warning.

‘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.’

Since the mid-1800s, the world has already heated up by 1.3 degrees Celsius up from previous estimates of 1.1 or 1.2 degrees because it includes the record heat last year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s annual Emissions Gap Report released last week.

The world is on pace to hit 3.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. But if nations somehow do all of what they promised in targets they submitted to the UN, that warming could be limited to 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the report said.

Ben Clarke, a researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy, also based at Imperial College London, pointed out that a powerful typhoon made landfall in Taiwan on Thursday, just after the flooding in Spain.

‘These back-to-back events show how dangerous climate change already is with just 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming.’

Europe’s most disastrous recent floods came in July 2021, killing 243 people in Germany, Belgium, Romania, Italy and Austria.