Stop Blaming 'Climate Change' For Spanish Flooding!

 

We can’t let the authorities off the hook for this horrific tragedy.

Rob Lyons
Columnist

5th November 2024

The devastating impact of the flash floods in Spain has shocked the world. Heavy rainfall first hit eastern and southern regions on Monday last week. The resultant flooding submerged villages and transformed roads into rivers. In the worst-hit region of Valencia – and in the city of the same name – water and mud tore through densely populated areas causing death and destruction. So far over 200 people have been reported dead. But the death toll is expected to rise still further as rescue teams enter hitherto inaccessible areas.

The scale of the human tragedy in Valencia is vast. The city itself has been inundated and surrounding towns and villages have been ravaged by the ferocious flooding. But the devastation and huge loss of life hasn’t stopped Western media from using it all to advance a climate-alarmist agenda. As a BBC News headline put it, ‘Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse’.

It’s very easy today to blame the horrific impact of a particular extreme weather event on climate change. It is also misleading. What turned last week’s deluge in the Valencia region into a disaster can’t be explained by the single, catch-all answer of ‘climate change’. Rather this disaster was the result of several complex factors, involving geological and climatic conditions, and human interventions.

For a start, Valencia has always been a fairly dry and hot region, surrounded by hills and mountains. It doesn’t rain much – the city of Valencia averages about 450 millimetres per year and averages just one day of rain in July. When it does rain, the water hits dry, hard ground. This means that when it lands on the hills and mountains, the rainwater runs off rapidly downhill and towards the population centres on the coastal plain. It’s no surprise, then, that Valencia has a long history of serious flooding. There was a major flood in October 1957, for instance, which caused 81 deaths.

Climate change might well make a burst of rainfall more intense. But the truth is swathes of eastern and southern Spain have long been at risk of serious flooding.

Likewise, the particular cause of the recent floods is not new. It is attributable to a long-standing seasonal phenomenon known as depresión aislada en niveles altos (‘isolated depression at high levels’), otherwise known as gota fría (‘cold drop’). This occurs when cold air passes over the Pyrenees and hits the warm air of the Mediterranean coast. This creates atmospheric instability, causing the warm, moist air to rise rapidly and quickly form into huge clouds that then dump heavy rain across Spain’s eastern regions.

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Given flooding is an age-old problem in Valencia and elsewhere, the key questions now should centre on what flood-prevention measures were in place to mitigate the impact of heavy rainfall. Was water being diverted towards less populated areas (like farm or park land)? Were a sufficient number of dams and reservoirs in place to hold rainwater back and regulate its outflow?

At this stage it’s difficult to tell exactly what went wrong. But it’s clear that state decision-making will have played a significant role in turning this extreme weather event into a human disaster. Questions about everything from investment in flood-prevention infrastructure to where people live, should now be asked of the government at all levels.Some have claimed that a European Union directive calling for the removal of dams, so as to benefit river-dwelling wildlife, might have increased the flood risk. But local reports have played down this claim. Journalists insist that no major dams or reservoirs have been demolished since 2001. They say that just 28 small river barriers (weirs and small dams) have been removed in accordance with the EU directive. They also claim that these small water obstructions would likely have made the flooding even worse should they have remained in place.Others have suggested that the decision of Valencian authorities, after the 1957 floods, to re-route the Turia river three kilometres to the south of its original course through the city centre may have played a role. As geologist Matthew Wielicki argues, 

this was initially a brilliant technical fix to the problem of flooding. But the authorities then undid their good work by allowing ‘unchecked development right around this newly created flood channel’, placing people ‘directly in harm’s way’. Wielicki may well be right, given the area he identifies was the worst affected by last week’s floods. Although it should be said that the devastation extended well beyond the city of Valencia itself.

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