Climate change is pushing some governments to the breaking point
2024 is on track to become the hottest year since humans have been keeping track, beating out 2023.
The extraordinary back-to-back record-breakers amplified disasters like heat waves, hurricanes, and torrential downpours around the world, claiming thousands of lives and causing billions in damages.
Few countries have emerged completely unscathed over the past two years, but one place known for its welcoming climate, was especially wounded.
In 2023, Spain experienced a searing early-season heat wave with temperatures topping 101 degrees Fahrenheit in Córdoba in the south of the country, followed up by more severe heat across the country in July and August. It led to more than 8,000 heat-related deaths, the second-highest toll in Europe behind Italy. The high temperatures worsened an ongoing drought, depleting water supplies and causing its economically vital olive oil production to fall in half. Intense wildfires ignited across the country, including the Canary Island of Tenerife and on the mainland in Gandia. The Asturias region in northern Spain suffered the single-largest wildfire in its history, torching more than 24,000 acres. Record rainfall in Toledo triggered flash floods that killed at least three people.
Dangerous heat, fire, and drought continued to rage this year. But in October, Spain experienced a disaster that still managed to shock the climate change-wracked country.
The Valencia region in eastern Spain suffered an unprecedented downpour, receiving a year’s worth of rain in just a few hours. It triggered flash floods across a vast expanse and killed at least 224 people, making it the deadliest flood on the continent since 1967. And warming clearly played a role: Climate research groups reported that these storms were stronger and more likely to occur due to warming caused by humans.
“It was mostly a surprise. We started seeing it in the news, huge floods, cars floating,” said Marcos Masa, 19, a university student in Valencia region. “The first reports were about 10 deaths. It was already too much. We never expected to get to 200 [deaths].”
In the aftermath, locals directed their outrage at local officials and the national government, which they blamed for what they saw as delayed, inadequate warnings and a botched response. Spain’s military mounted one of its largest peacetime operations in its history to assist with the recovery effort, but it came days after the rainfall had stopped. Tens of thousands of Valencia residents joined protests and called for Carlos Mazón, the regional leader for Valencia, to resign. When Spain’s king, queen, and prime minister visited one of the flooded towns, locals threw mud at them.
Spain’s 47 million residents and 95 million annual tourists have long savored Spain’s ordinarily nice weather, but the disasters over the past two years illustrate that it’s not something anyone can take for granted. The recent catastrophes didn’t just claim lives and destroy homes; they shook the country’s political system and for some Spaniards, rattled their sense of home.
“The climate you were born in no longer exists,” said Andreu Escrivà, an environmental scientist and author. “Spain is no longer that paradise where you could spend a very mild winter and a very nice summer.”
Spain stands out for having so much happen in one relatively small country — about the size of Texas — over a short period. But it’s ahead of the curve on a global trend: Around the world this year, warming has exacerbated disasters, which in some cases in turn triggered protests. Spain didn’t necessarily reach the highest temperatures, suffer the biggest fires, or suffer the most intense rain in the world; it was the failures of preparation and response that worsened the destruction these events caused and fueled the ensuing anger.
This is all happening at a moment when global climate politics are set to become more tumultuous. The US is the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter and President-elect Donald Trump is likely to pull the US back from its international climate commitments. He also wants to impose stiff tariffs on goods from European Union countries unless they buy more US oil and gas. That could hamper Spain’s ambitions to expand its clean energy footprint in the US with solar and wind technologies.
Global politics are only getting more complicated, and climate change will add to ongoing political tensions and destabilize governments in unexpected ways.
2024 raised temperatures and tensions around the world
While the planet has been warming on average, the past two years were hotter by a wider margin than some scientists expected. The soaring temperatures were a result of natural variability building on top of warming induced by humanity’s relentless combustion of fossil fuels.
On top of that, the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, was in its warm phase. That’s when hotter water along the equator in the Pacific Ocean sloshes eastward, altering weather patterns and generally heating up the globe. The 2023 El Niño was one of the strongest on record. Although it began to weaken earlier this year, some of its effects still played out over the summer and into the fall. In particular, the world’s oceans remained at record-high temperatures, one of the key ingredients for severe rainfall and tropical storms. The Atlantic Ocean in particular saw record-high temperatures and underwater heat waves that devastated marine life.
Aerosols, tiny airborne bits of soot and dust, played a role in the recent warm weather as well. In the atmosphere, they can block enough sunlight to cool the area below, but weather conditions like weaker winds over Africa suppressed natural aerosol sources like dust from the Sahara desert. A law to limit pollution also had an ironic twist: Because of a new international shipping regulation to limit sulphur pollution, there were less aerosols over the oceans — and more warming. Policies to limit air pollution in countries like China contributed to warmer waters too.
Right now, the El Niño Southern Oscillation is in its neutral phase. The Pacific Ocean is forecasted to tip into its cool phase, known as La Niña, early next year. It’s likely global average temperatures will come down in 2025 compared to this year. That shift brings its own weather consequences, like creating more favorable conditions for hurricanes.
However, if people keep pumping out greenhouse gases, years as warm as 2024 will become more common in the decades ahead and we can expect even hotter years to come.
Why Spain was in the bullseye for disasters
For Spain, there were a few more factors that put it in the crosshairs of extreme weather. Escrivà, the environmental scientist, noted that Spain has a diverse range of climates. Some regions are hot and dry while others are cool and humid across mountains and low-lying coasts. The country has historically experienced periodic extreme weather as well. Valencia saw a major deadly flood back in 1957. In 1982, heavy rain led to a dam failure that flooded the region in up to six feet of water.
Still, Spain does have a deserved reputation for pleasant weather. Look at a map and you can see that New York City is roughly at the same latitude as Madrid, yet Madrid tends to have a warmer, drier climate. (And no one is eager to winter in New York.) The climate gives Spain its famous products like oranges, olives, wine, and dusty landscapes that have served as the backdrop of classic spaghetti Westerns.
The fact that Spain is situated on a peninsula has blessed the country with a historically temperate climate. The surrounding ocean acts as a temperature buffer and keeps conditions from swinging between extremes too often.
In addition to its geographical good fortune, Spain’s climate benefits from the Gulf Stream. This ocean current transports warm water from the Gulf of Mexico and sends it north along the US East Coast before turning east to cross the Atlantic, where it becomes the North Atlantic Current. Warm water heats up and introduces moisture into the air above it. Across Europe, this pattern moderates searing temperatures in the summer and cushions the bitter cold of winter. In Western Europe, air temperatures are about 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) warmer than the global average for its latitude.
But Spain’s climate stabilizers have started to destabilize. “The Mediterranean Sea has warmed more than one degree Celsius in the last 30 years,” Escrivà said. “And that’s kind of a big energy battery for the weather system. If you have an enormous mass of very, very hot water, it’s going to dissipate this energy. It’s going to explode somehow.” Warmer air also holds onto more moisture, leading to more severe rainfall events. Additionally, the Gulf Stream is warming up faster than the rest of the ocean and changing its course.
The Valencia floods were driven by a phenomenon called a high-altitude isolated depression. In Spanish, it goes by the acronym DANA or gota fría, meaning “cold drop.” This occurs when cold air at high altitudes moves over the warm Mediterranean waters. The warm moist air below quickly bubbles up and forms dense rain clouds that can stay parked over a region for a long time, leading to intense rainfall below. The October gota fría was one of the most severe storms to hit the Valencia region this century.
For Spaniards, the recent weather has been so jarring that they’re starting to reshape how they think of their climate. “We are experiencing extraordinary events in an ordinary way,” Escrivà said.
It wasn’t just the water that made Valencia’s floods so devastating
Of course, political unrest and anger toward politicians after a disaster isn’t unique to Spain. Storms like Hurricane Beryl and Hurricane Helene in the US sparked outrage at local and federal officials for inadequate planning and agonizingly slow recovery efforts. 2024 is the deadliest year for hurricanes in the US since 2005.
Viktoria Jansesberger, a researcher studying climate change and politics at the University of Konstanz in Germany, explained there are several variables that determine whether people see a natural disaster as just a force of nature versus a human-caused problem.
Generally, people do tend to extend grace to their leaders when they experience a catastrophe, up to a point. “When it comes to extreme weather events and disasters, it takes a lot of very visible mismanagement for people to really blame the government,” Jansesberger said.
Frustrations mount when there are unmet promises for aid, a long-lasting loss of services like electricity, and a sense of neglect when leaders don’t show up in time. Disasters can also expose long-simmering unhappiness around problems like corruption and underinvestment in a community.
But filling the streets with protesters requires coordination. “Discontent is not sufficient; it needs organization,” Jansesberger said. “This is something one can observe super nicely in the Spanish protests.”
Many of the rallies in Valencia were led by public sector labor unions who were already mobilized by campaigns over the past year for fewer working hours and better job conditions. There were also major public demonstrations across the country for affordable housing and against amnesty for Catalan separatists. The Spanish people were primed to protest.
The tipping point in Valencia came when residents were caught off guard during the floods. AEMET, Spain’s meteorological agency, issued alerts that a major storm was brewing, but many people didn’t get warnings on their phones until the flooding had already begun (AEMET did not respond to requests for comment).
“We all received the very late warning the day of the disaster,” said Franc Casanova Ferrer, a bioinformatics researcher living in Sueca in the Valencia community. “People are aware that flash floods can happen here but it’s the lack of warning that feels like a betrayal.”
Those warnings were desperately needed because some of the most severe flooding wasn’t in the places that had the most rainfall, but in places downstream of the downpours. Low and dry riverbeds quickly turned into chutes channeling water into downtown areas where many Valencians lived.
After the floodwaters receded, it took time to get power restored and roads cleared. “We didn’t have the tap water for around three weeks after the disaster,” Casanova Ferrer said.
Americans watching from afar may see a familiar story. The aftermath of Hurricane Helene raised many of the same concerns about inadequate warnings, confusion about leadership, and a complicated ad hoc recovery effort, which in turn opened fissures along existing political fault lines.
As global average temperatures rise and populations grow, more people and property will find themselves in the path of an onslaught worsened by climate change. It’s not just lives and homes that are vulnerable, but whole governments.