Spanish floods yet another reminder of the climate battle we’re losing

After the storm receded, having dropped a year’s worth of rain in a few hours, and the rescuers began to wade through the mud and wreckage with the cadaver dogs, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told his nation, “For those who at this moment are still looking for their loved ones, the whole of Spain weeps with you.”

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

The news still emerging from Spain is horrific. In one retirement home, residents – some in wheelchairs – were sitting down to dinner when the water rose suddenly.

“I could hear people from the residence screaming, ‘help, help’,” Marisol Lara, a 62-year-old woman, said through tears, London’s Daily Telegraph reported.

Six died in the retirement home, just as five died last month in a retirement village in Florida. Climate disasters have a way of finding the most vulnerable.

I don’t doubt Sanchez’s sincerity for a moment, but the assertions of grief by politicians after climate disasters are beginning to echo the empty offerings of thoughts and prayers we hear after mass shootings in the United States.

Everyone knows both the cause of the tragedies and the solution, but our leaders remain unwilling or unable to take corrective action.

The city of Valencia copped a lethal slug of rain because the Mediterranean, like all the world’s seas and oceans, has been heated by climate change. As a result, it releases more moisture into the atmosphere via evaporation. And because the atmosphere itself is warmer, too, it can hold more of that moisture in it.

In the right conditions, that water falls from the sky. When weather patterns are slow-moving, the rain concentrates over smaller areas, compounding its destructive potential.

People cross a bridge through piles of debris after major floods caused extensive destruction and loss of life in eastern Spain.Credit: Getty Images

The same circumstances contributed to two major hurricanes that hit the south-western United States over recent weeks, the floods that flattened Lismore in 2022, and the last once-in-a-thousand-year flood event hitting Europe in 2021, prompting a “shocked” Angela Merkel to offer her sympathy to the “families of the dead and missing”.

In Sudan in 2020, more than 700,000 people were displaced by storms, while the following year, in China’s Henan province, 850,000 were evacuated due to floods.

According to the World Meteorological Organisation, the number of annual extreme-weather events increased by a factor of five between 1970 and 2019, and researchers at Barclays Investment Bank believe the cost per event has risen by 77 per cent over the past 50 years.

Just as climate change is exacerbating floods, it is increasing the ferocity of storms, the danger of fires, and the intensity and duration of droughts. We know all this. The science is simple and settled. The data keeps rolling in.

On Thursday, the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO published their latest biennial State of the Climate report, showing that Australia’s average temperatures have risen by 1.5 degrees since records began in 1910 and that the world is on track to overshoot the Paris Accord’s more ambitious target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.

On Monday, the World Meteorological Organisation released its annual greenhouse-gas bulletin, showing that, far from emissions falling, last year they surged to an all-time record. “Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than any time experienced during human existence, rising by more than 10 per cent in just two decades,” it said.

The heat-trapping potential of warming gases in the atmosphere has increased by 51.5 per cent since 1990.

Last week, the United Nations released its 14th annual emissions-gap report, Broken Record. It showed that if world governments maintain their current climate policies and commitments, the world will warm by between 2.6 and 3.1 degrees.

“If nations do not implement current commitments, then show a massive increase in ambition in the new pledges, followed by rapid delivery, the Paris Agreement target of holding global warming to 1.5C will be dead within a few years, and 2C will take its place in the intensive care unit,” said Inger Andersen, the UN environment chief.

Weirdly enough, there is some good news in this. Had the world taken no action, we would likely have been heading for more than 5 degrees of heating. Despite the effective lobbying of the fossil fuel industry, the energy transition is happening fast. Last year, renewables generated 30 per cent of the world’s electricity, up from 19 per cent in 2000. It is already probably forcing down demand for fossil fuels even as overall energy demand surges due to growing economies and electrification.

Later this month world leaders will meet for the next round of climate talks, this time in Baku, the oil-drenched capital of Azerbaijan.

There, if past talks are anything to go by, a handful of recalcitrant nations will push back at the demands for greater ambition by climate-vulnerable nations. Fossil fuel lobbyists will be there in force to prod for delay. At last year’s talks in Dubai, 2456 fossil fuel lobbyists attended, outnumbering the official delegations of every nation except Brazil and the host nation.

In Dubai, they fought against the first direct reference to fossil fuels in a climate treaty. They failed at the last minute as nations agreed to a declaration calling on all nations to “transition away from fossil fuels” to avert the worst effects of climate change.

As the incidence of disasters like the one that has just struck Spain increases, politicians should ignore these voices in Baku and commit to a faster transition to clean energy and far more ambitious greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, they will be relegated to wringing their hands and mouthing their platitudes as the death toll climbs.

Nick O’Malley is the Environment and Climate editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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