Under water Storms lash Europe amid rising tide of climate denial

In the week between Christmas and the New Year, two Spanish men in their early 50s- friends since childhood, popular around town - went to a restaurant and did not come home.

- Ajit Niranjan

Francisco Zea Bravo, a maths teacher active in a book club and rock band, and Antonio Morales Serrano, the owner of a popular cafe and ice-cream parlour, had gone to eat with friends in Málaga on Saturday 27 December. But as they drove back to Alhaurín el Grande that night, heavy rains turned the usually tranquil Fahala River into what the mayor would later call an "uncontrollable torrent". Police found their overturned van the next day.

Their bodies were found after an agonising search.

"We are used to some floods.

Not many," said Conchi Navarro, the headteacher of Los Montecillos secondary school, who Zea Bravo was supposed to succeed upon her retirement at the end of the school year. "But since December, these borrasca [squalls] have come one after the other." The quiet fallout of a broken climate - a book club short one member, a rock band without a bassist, a cafe that lacks a pastry chef - has been echoing around western Europe for weeks. The back-to-back storms that battered Spain have killed at least 16 people in neighbouring Portugal.

Soils across France have reached unprecedented levels of saturation.

Parts of the UK have broken records for the number of days without a break in the rain.

This is Europe's new reality: under water in winter, withered in summer. Yet even as weather extremes worsen, the voices of denial have grown louder and more influential.

"We're moving toward selfdestruction of the planet," said Navarro, adding that at the age of 60 she had witnessed the effect of climate change first-hand. "It's something I've seen. How can anybody say this is an invention?" The answer, particularly in the US, is with breathtaking ease.

Donald Trump has ramped up his attacks on climate policy in recent weeks - quitting the Paris agreement again and repealing a finding that underpins pollution controls - while going global with his "drill, baby, drill" policy.