After the storm receded, having dropped a year’s worth of rain in a few hours, and the rescuers began to wade through the mud and wreckage with the cadaver dogs, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told his nation, “For those who at this moment are still looking for their loved ones, the whole of Spain weeps with you.”

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

The news still emerging from Spain is horrific. In one retirement home, residents – some in wheelchairs – were sitting down to dinner when the water rose suddenly.

“I could hear people from the residence screaming, ‘help, help’,” Marisol Lara, a 62-year-old woman, said through tears, London’s Daily Telegraph reported.

Six died in the retirement home, just as five died last month in a retirement village in Florida. Climate disasters have a way of finding the most vulnerable.

I don’t doubt Sanchez’s sincerity for a moment, but the assertions of grief by politicians after climate disasters are beginning to echo the empty offerings of thoughts and prayers we hear after mass shootings in the United States.

Everyone knows both the cause of the tragedies and the solution, but our leaders remain unwilling or unable to take corrective action.

The city of Valencia copped a lethal slug of rain because the Mediterranean, like all the world’s seas and oceans, has been heated by climate change. As a result, it releases more moisture into the atmosphere via evaporation. And because the atmosphere itself is warmer, too, it can hold........

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