Feel free to continue, there is nothing new here, just another ordinary apocalypse. Judging by previous experiences, the world's reactions to the floods in Spain will be similar to the reactions of drivers on the highway when they pass by the accident scene: they will slow down and look, they will feel sorry, they will be relieved that it happened to someone else, and then they will hit the gas and drive on. .
This is the pattern of behavior in our climate-disrupted age, when disasters caused by extreme weather are so common as to be almost normalized. Instead of indignation and determination to do something, we are overwhelmed with indifference. Such things just happen, someone else is responsible, someone else will take action.
That couldn't be further from the truth. The unnatural disaster in Spain, the deadliest floods in Europe in the last half century, reveals two indisputable truths. The man-made climate crisis is just starting to take off and we need to shut down the oil industry quickly before it shuts us down. That should be the main message at the UN Cop29 climate summit in Baku next week, because the only solution to stabilizing the climate is to stop burning gas, oil, coal and wood. The first step towards this is the fight against the normalization of climate disasters.
Cars rolling like cones through city streets, cars floating in rivers of mud, cars like death traps. The images from Valencia and other regions of Spain are shocking but familiar. In Italy, roads recently turned into rivers carrying vehicles. This happened both in France and in Central Europe, where 24 people died in floods in Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Unusual rainfall was also recorded in England.
Of course, there have always been floods and local atmospheric, geographical, economic and political factors contribute to their impact, but today we are led into the abyss by the global physics of the world destabilized by fossil fuels. The warmer the atmosphere, the more moisture it holds. This implies longer droughts and more intense showers. Spain received its annual amount of rainfall in a couple of hours. "Events like this, which used to occur at intervals of several decades, are becoming more frequent and their destructive power is greater," says Dr. Ernesto Rodríguez Camino, senior state meteorologist and member of the Spanish Meteorological Association.
We have been warned many times. It has been thirty-two years since governments agreed to address climate issues at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and nine years since the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1,5°C above pre-industrial levels. Yet global temperatures continue to break records, and emissions are rising faster than the average of the past decade. In other words, the foot is still on the gas even though we are heading into a chain collision.
Economic efficiency is still more important to countries than climate security. They are slow to reduce risks and educate citizens and in many of them, including Britain, they arrest climate protesters when they block traffic. The legal system practically forces people to accept climate catastrophe.
What else to call it? The past few years have seen apocalyptic scenes straight out of a Hollywood movie: passengers swept off the platform or trapped in carriages by flooding on a subway line in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a glass wall collapsing from a Vietnamese office tower during super-typhoon Yagi, which then easily breaks wind turbines in Hainan, China.
We live in a time of unwanted climate superlatives: the hottest two years in the recorded history of the world, the deadliest fire in the US, the largest fire in Europe or Canada, the worst drought in the Amazon rainforest. There is no end to the enumeration. This is just the beginning. As long as humans release gases into the atmosphere such records will be broken more and more often until "worst ever" becomes our standard expectation. We must accept that these are not isolated cases, but part of a disturbing pattern predicted by climate scientists and the UN. The causes are clear, as are the solutions.
Experts from the World Weather Attribution organization have shown how intense and frequent storms, droughts, floods and fires have become as a result of human-induced climate disturbances. These include floods this summer in Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon that killed more than 2.000 people and displaced millions, torrential rains that left at least 26 dead in Nepal from September 28-244, floods in southern Brazil that earlier this year claimed more than 169 lives, as well as devastating hurricanes in the US, especially Helen and Milton, which killed 360 people and caused more than $100 billion in damage. At the same time, the poorest and the oldest are the most vulnerable. In Spain, the victims were primarily elderly people who failed to escape from their homes, in addition to food and goods delivery drivers who were trapped in their cars. And all this is happening with only 1,3°C of global warming. That should be enough of a warning that it is necessary to urgently reduce gas emissions, say the authors of these studies.
"At Cop29, global leaders really need to agree not just to reduce, but to completely stop burning fossil fuels, with a specific deadline. The longer the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is delayed, the more severe and frequent extreme weather events will become," said Friderike Otto, head of World Weather Attribution at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.
UN officials are already at a loss for words to describe the seriousness of the danger. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres declared a "red alarm for humanity". UN Climate Executive Secretary Simon Steele warned that "we have two years to save the world." And last week, the head of the UN Environment Program, Inger Andersen, emphasized that this is "the last moment to solve the climate crisis".
However, the agenda is set by supporters of the expansion of fossil fuel production. Azerbaijan is the third host of the COP conference in a row, after the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, which plans to increase oil and gas production. Next host Brazil also intends to increase production. Many of the richest countries in the world do the same. This year's talks will focus on how to finance the "oil and gas phase-out," a vague goal that was finally accepted at last year's Cop after three decades of negotiations.
The gap between this sluggish progress and the apocalyptic scenes in Spain and elsewhere should be sobering. After all, the original meaning of apocalypse is revelation - to take off the cover, to reveal things. But for that to happen, we need to truly understand the horrors the world is going through and respond to them without deluding ourselves that life as it was might be possible after all.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net, translation: L. Đorđević)
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