If past experience is any guide, the world’s reaction to the floods in Spain last week will be similar to that of motorway drivers at a crash scene: slow down, take in the horror, outwardly express sympathy, inwardly give thanks that fate picked someone else – and foot on the accelerator.
That is the pattern in our climate-disrupted era when extreme-weather catastrophes have become so commonplace that they risk being normalised. Instead of outrage and determination to reduce the dangers, there is an insidious sense of complacency: these things happen. Someone else is responsible. Somebody else will fix it.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The unnatural disaster in Spain – Europe’s deadliest flash floods in at least half a century – is evidence of two undeniable truths: the human-caused climate crisis is just starting to pick up ferocity, and we need to quickly kill the fossil fuel industry before it kills us.
That should be the primary message at the UN Cop29 climate summit that opens in Baku next week because halting the combustion of gas, oil, coal and trees is the only way to stabilise the climate. For this to happen, we must fight the tendency to normalise scenes of disaster.
Cars skittled like bowling pins in urban streets, cars bobbing in rivers of mud, cars turning into death traps. The images from Valencia and other regions of Spain are both shocking and familiar. In Italy last month, vehicles were swept away as roads turned to rivers. Before that, it was the turn of France, and in September, central Europe, where 24 died in floods in Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. There have also been freakish downpours in England.
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