Is nature fighting back? Ten minutes of terror saw roofs destroyed and a child killed during a violent storm in Catalonia. It comes after a summer of extreme heat, droughts and climate destruction.
Icy missiles kill child in Spanish hailstorm
Is nature fighting back? Ten minutes of terror saw roofs destroyed and a child killed during a violent storm in Catalonia. It comes after a summer of extreme heat, droughts and climate destruction.
It was like a scene from a disaster movie. On Tuesday night, as storms raged across north-eastern Spain, a shower of pebble-sized hailstones fell on the town of La Bisbal d'Emporda.
The hail shattered windows, dented cars and injured dozens of people. Then, a tragedy happened. A 20-month old girl was taken to hospital, where she died of her injuries.
Hailstones are balls of ice. They form in clouds when drops of supercooledWater that is below the freezing point of OC but is still liquid. water meet ice particles. The water freezes and sinks to the bottom of the cloud, then is blown back to the top by an updraftAn upward current of air.. The hailstones ping-pong back and forth growing each time, until they become too heavy and fall to the ground.
Giant hailstones are formed in storm clouds with very strong updrafts. They can be as big as a grapefruit: the largest one recovered in the US was 20cm in diameterThe distance from one point on a circle to the other side, crossing the centre.. And they fall fast. A baseball-size stone will fall at about 100 miles per hour.
This combination of speed and weight can cause huge damage. A 1984 shower in Munich damaged 200,000 cars. One near Mumbai in 2014 killed over 500 cows and around 2,000 sheep, goats and donkeys.
Following a global pandemic and summer of extreme heat and drought, it might seem as if nature is fighting back against humans.
This idea has long run riot in the popular imagination. Numerous books and films have imagined animals and plants attacking humans, whether the shark in Jaws (1975) or the alien greenery in John Wyndham's sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids (1951).
In his 2006 book The Revenge of Nature, the environmentalist James Lovelock argued that the Earth was punishing us for using fossil fuels. He wrote: "We live on a live planet that can respond to the changes we make, either by canceling the changes or by canceling us."
In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), the English economist Thomas Robert Malthus claimed that populations grow much faster than the amount of food produced to support them. When the planet is too full, drought, famine and disease result - a sort of fight-back.
Others doubt these theories. Malthus's ideas, writes The Economist, "defy the experience of the past two centuries". And Lovelock's belief that nature can respond to us has been criticised by many scientists, who claim that it lacks evidence and is bad science.
Natural disasters and bad weather have been around long before humans. And they will be around long after.
<h5 class=" eplus-wrapper" id="question">Is nature fighting back?</h5>
Yes: Nature is a vast, interconnected system that sustains all life, including humans and animals. When you attack an animal, it fights back. Why would the system that sustains them not do the same?
No: Freak weather is not specific to our times. In 1360, a hailstorm in Chartres, France killed an estimated 1,000 English soldiers, long before the Industrial Revolution accelerated climate change.
Or... The idea that nature is fighting back against humans is a distraction. Given the scale of the climate disaster, we should be focused on the solutions, not speculating about unproven symptoms.
Supercooled - Water that is below the freezing point of OC but is still liquid.
Updraft - An upward current of air.
Diameter - The distance from one point on a circle to the other side, crossing the centre.
Icy missiles kill child in Spanish hailstorm

Glossary
Supercooled - Water that is below the freezing point of OC but is still liquid.
Updraft - An upward current of air.
Diameter - The distance from one point on a circle to the other side, crossing the centre.