My family is from Valencia, so that makes me Valencian.
And Valencians saw the future this week. 200 people dead and other hundred missing in the largest flood of our century. Thousand showed up today to help find the missing ones, support families that lost everything and to clean and rebuilt their city and towns.
The storm was caused by a cold front colliding with the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea, which have been super-heated by climate change.
You try to understand the implications of the situation and suddenly you start feeling guilty for having a second hand gasoline car, because it was cheaper and more convenient than an electric car. You feel guilty for taking a plane for a 30 mins speaker slot at a conference or a meeting you could have clearly done online. You feel guilty for getting Amazon to send you a driver home just for a computer cable. You feel guilty when your plastic waste is five times your organic waste (and you hope it is recycled when you put it in the plastic bin). You feel guilty when you scuba dive and you don't see colourful coral reefs anymore, but white dead coral due to warmer waters. You feel guilty when you travel to Valencia for holidays and instead of finding the paradise you where looking for, you just feel like another monkey in a jungle of concrete.
You feel terribly guilty because with your lifestyle you are directly contributing to global warming.
But then you realise that you are way too small, and this problem is way too big, and that you are a tiny part of an immense global machine that you yourself are not able to stop.
And then you start to sink in that by now we will not be able to stop climate change. The climate has changed. And the climate will continue to change. With uneven consequences distributed across the globe, but with even impact for everyone in the globe.
And finally you understand. We will not be able to stop climate change. We will have to learn to adapt to it. As simple as that.
How to do it, we don't know exactly yet.
But behind all these despair. There remains hope.
Humans, we are good at creating our own problems. But we are also good at solving them.
And I know for a fact that there are many great minds and many great entrepreneurs out there working against the clock to find solutions to some of our present and future problems. And that many more great minds will commit to work on this task for the decades to come.
And I know for a fact that Valencians now understand the implications of climate change and will start working from today on to mitigate it and to be more prepared for the next event. Because unfortunately there will be many more storms like this.
Sadly, climate change will take many lives. But remember, that while there is life, there is hope. And hope is the last thing you lose. Even after a storm!
Now lets take the shovel and the buckets and let's get started. There is a lot of work ahead of us.
