When tragic floods hit eastern and southern Spain on October 29, particularly Valencia, the vultures swooped with their usual grisly haste. Scientific American emailed “Catastrophic flooding kills at least 95 people in Spain. It’s the ‘dramatic reality’ of climate change, says European Commission president.” And NBC didn’t wait for bodies to be recovered from cars washed into Valencia’s narrow streets before cawing “While autumn storms are not uncommon in Spain, the intensity of the flooding has stunned the country. Extreme weather events like this one are becoming more common around the world, with the scientific community saying the increased episodes are most likely linked to the climate crisis.” The scientific community, no less. Someone give us its phone number so we can check on that statistic-like object “extreme weather events like this one” becoming “more common around the world”. Also the “climate crisis” which is only just now happening in places that ever since humans began keeping records have always experienced episodes of devastatingly bad weather. For instance the Spanish city of Valencia, built around a river that has flooded many dozens of times over the centuries but now is flooding it due to the “climate crisis” that causes journalists to submit ignorant, lazy copy.

One alert reader sent us photos of the aftermath from the European Space Agency that clearly show what used to be a river through Valencia that had been diverted south after, um, deadly flooding in 1957. But, when heavy rains fell, it went from being a park to being a river again. And as we’ve observed, the more you build on floodplains, the worse flooding will be when it comes.

Reuters declared it “possibly the deadliest flooding to hit Spain in its modern history”. But it didn’t explain why only “possibly” or whether it knew of deadlier flooding in its premodern history, or when “modern” got here, as such things would have required research and even thought. On the research side we tried an online search for “Spain deadly floods” but got back “Deadly floods in Spain highlight need to cut greenhouse gas emissions” courtesy of our favourite climate scientists, the United Nations.

Then we added in “history” and got the same news stories again, including “Spain hit by deadliest floods in decades” from CNN and “What to know about the unprecedented floods that killed more than 200 in Spain” from, again, AP. Though it later referred to “Spain’s deadliest storm in living memory” so apparently it’s not so much unprecedented as precedented, especially given “in decades” from CNN which implies that there were others decades ago that were as bad or worse.

Like the ones in 1957? Well, AP brushes them aside, saying:

“Older people in Paiporta, ground zero of the tragedy, claim that Tuesday’s floods were three times as bad as those of 1957, which caused at least 81 deaths and were the worst in the history of the tourist eastern region.”

Three times as bad? Measured how, we ask? The death toll does seem to be about three times as high, possibly worse. But then again, Valencia has a lot more people than it did in 1957, right? And more crowded together into vulnerable locations, right? And does a better job of counting victims of a tragedy, right? Oh, and if only journalists had access to that deep and mysterious research resource, Wikipedia, they’d know that:

“A large number of floods have been recorded in Valencia, from 1321 to 1897. Up to 75 floods are estimated to have taken place in the seven centuries prior to the 1957 flood.”

Gee. Climate change can do anything, can’t it, including flood Spain in the Middle Ages because we heated the Mediterranean in the 21^st century. And in an unguarded moment Euronews says of Valencia’s agony:

“It is believed to be the worst flooding disaster in Spain since 1973, when more than 150 people were estimated to have died in floods in the southeast.”

Nineteen seventy-three? Before there even was climate?