“I failed for all of us,” esteemed scientist Millán Millán wrote to poet Rob Lewis, not long before his death in Valencia, on January 12, 2024. In 1995, he had discovered the underlying cause for why weather was becoming more extreme in Valencia and other Mediterranean areas – but he could not convince the powers that be to take the actions necessary to turn the tide.

Over many decades, summer rains in the region had been declining, while sudden autumn super-storm intensity had been growing. Millán Millán had discovered why. It didn’t matter. He was ignored. Even though his data was rock solid, and he was a respected and well-established scientist, the cause – as he was explaining it – was politically unacceptable.

For Millán Millán had discovered an awful secret. Modernity itself was causing climate collapse. Like Ireland, Spain had rapidly modernised, filling in coastal marshes and cutting down forests – and that changed the weather.

CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS

On October 29, 2024, the type of superstorm that Millán Millán had predicted back in 1995 hit Valencia. It was a Tuesday and everyone who knew anything about weather was terrified. Something awful was building in the Mediterranean. To understand what and why, we need to go back almost eighty years, to when Millán Millán was a young boy and he and his father planned how they would avoid the summer rains on their treks in southern Spain.

These rains came like clockwork every day around 3 pm. Then, as the years passed, the rains stopped coming and the land began to suffer severely, with much of it turning to desert and bare rock. Why?

After years of meticulous physical experiments and testing, Millán Millán found the answer. The summer clouds that came in from the Mediterranean rarely had enough water to make rain. In the past, they would cross the coastal marshes, picking up moisture, then cross the great oak forest picking up even more, finally meeting mountains, rising and pouring down.

Millán Millán

Then, as the population increased, the marshes were filled with cities, towns and factories. They cut down the forests for mining, paper and biomass. The hungry clouds now came and found little moisture in hot concrete and stressed soils. They hit the mountains, rose and sullenly headed back out over a heating sea.

This happened repeatedly: one day’s clouds sitting on top of another’s, like layers in an unstable cake. Then, the cold autumn winds came down from northern Europe and, combined with the other effects of global warming, the stage was set for a superstorm.

The authorities would ignore Millán Millán’s science because it contained a terrible and universal truth. Even as that fateful day of October 29 approached, and the evidence was overwhelming that a superstorm was brewing, the climate change deniers were out in force.

LIMITS TO GROWTH

They had come to power in Valencia after the 2023 regional elections. With undue haste, the new government of Carlos Mazón shut down the Valencian Emergencies Unit, whose purpose was to respond to flood crises. It was considered a “superfluous expense.”

On October 25, four days before the storm happened, Spanish state agency meteorologist Juan Jesús González Alemán warned of the upcoming danger. Climate change denying storm troopers rushed onto Musk’s Nazi Bar X so as to ridicule him. At 07:36 on October 29, the Spanish State Meteorological Agency issued a red weather warning. “At 13:00, Valencian President Carlos Mazón held a press conference to claim the storm would dissipate by 18:00,” it is recounted on Wikipedia.

That night, Mazón’s social media team would delete a tweet claiming the storm would dissipate. When I spoke with climate journalist and independent MP in the Valencian parliament, Juan Bordera Romá, he was very clear. It was “criminal behavior”, he told me. Even as the flood raged, and hundreds were dying in trapped cars and buildings, the State response was desperately slow. There were stories of firefighters having to go to the disaster zones on their own time because the government refused to mobilise properly.

Change the land and you change the weather. Modernity. Progress. Development. Since the 1970s – and even before – those who wanted to know understood that there are limits to growth. It’s all so much more connected than any computer model can hope to map.

“Cut down a tree in Almería and you get a storm in Dusseldorf,” Millán Millán warned. There are consequences. There are costs. For centuries, modernity and civilisation has been at war with Nature. We’ve won almost every battle. We will lose the war.