It was like a scene from a disaster movie. On Tuesday night, as storms raged across northeastern 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.

The storm turned tragic. A 20-month old girl was taken to hospital, where she died of her injuries. Local mayor Carme Vall told reporters: "There wasn't much that could be done for her and she died today. It was a terrible accident."

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 massive 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 that ground economies to a halt and a 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, from the shark in Jaws (1975) to 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 fuelsFuels made from decomposing plants and animals, including coal, natural gas and oil. These fuels release carbon dioxide, causing global warming.. 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.

Some modern thinkers have built on Malthus's theories to argue that human population must be reduced to save the race as a whole. As biologist Paul R. Ehrlich¹ said: "Whatever your cause, it's a lost cause without population control."

Others look at these theories with scepticismHaving doubts about whether something is true.. Malthus was wrong on the rate of population growth. He failed to predict that technology would make food production more effective. His ideas, writes The Economist, "defy the experience of the past two centuries".

Lovelock's belief that nature can respond to us has been criticised by many scientists. As David Waltham says, it "lacks unambiguous observational support and has significant theoretical difficulties". In short, bad science. 

Natural disasters and bad weather have been around long before humans, and they will be around long after.

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.