All because you refuse to turn your AC off
Spain’s deadly floods and droughts are two faces of the climate crisis coin
Residents of Chiva, a small town on the outskirts of Valencia, can expect a grim future of worsening drought as the planet heats up and the country dries out. But on Tuesday, they also witnessed a year’s worth of rainfall in a matter of hours.
The torrential rains that flooded southern and eastern Spain on Tuesday night, ripping away bridges and tearing through towns, have killed scores of people. Fossil fuel pollution plays a role in warping both extremes of the water cycle: heat evaporates water, leaving people and plants parched, but hot air can hold more moisture, increasing the potential for catastrophic downpours.
“Droughts and floods are the two sides of the same climate change coin,” said Stefano Materia, an Italian climate scientist at Barcelona Supercomputing Centre. He said studies had linked droughts in the Mediterranean with the climate emergency through changes in atmospheric circulation at the same time that global temperature rise had severely heated the region.
No matter what happens, the answer for the Cultists is always “climate doom”. Or, should I say “climate breakdown”?
The damage that climate breakdown is doing to southern Europe is most startling in heat death figures. On Tuesday, researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health found climate breakdown was behind more than half of the 68,000 heat deaths during the scorching European summer of 2022. The heat-related death toll – which was about 10 times greater than the number of people murdered in Europe that year – was largest in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal.
Yeah, that cult descriptor is gaining traction. Of course, they ignore that flooding is nothing new in the Valencia area, such as the 1957 flood, when CO2 was below the safe threshold of 350ppm
(Valencia International) On the 13th of October of that year (1957) heavy rains of up to 300 litres per square metre fell in the basin of the River Turia. On the 14th the rains continued causing two flash floods to hit the city. The Turia flooded its banks at 2 in the morning and then again at midday after a brief respite, the levels of water reaching two metres in some parts of the city.
The river has its source near Albarracin in Teruel province and falls a total of 1,600 metres during its 280 kilometre descent to the sea.
It is a river that often barely deserves the name, but in epochs of heavy rains in Spring and Autumn it often swells and overflows its banks. These epochs of torrential monsoon-like rain are known as the “gota fria” (cold drop) by Valencians and although brief, are often considerably destructive.
So, they actually have a name. 81 people died in those floods
One of the earliest documented floods occurred in October 1321, followed by others in 1340 and 1358, the latter, following a drought, destroying all the city’s bridges and killing 400 people.
There have been around 75 floods since that 1321 one. But, obviously, this time it’s totally your fault. So says cult dogma.
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Photos and video of the flood in Valencia, Spain????#Spain #valencia #Europe #USA pic.twitter.com/qJGoddmvPO— News Headlines on X (@NewsHeadlineX) October 30, 2024
Hey, my AC hasn’t been used for well over a month, so it ain’t my fault!
We have been running the heat-pump based HVAC system, as it’s been getting into the 30s and 40s overnight, and I s’pose that’s approved by what Rush Limbaugh used to call the environmentalist whackos, but I’d point out that our sparktricity comes mostly from a fossil-fuel burning power plant!
And we redisarranged the den, returning the den, putting the comforters back in front of the propane fireplace. Guess that I’ll be headed back to climate jail.