John Gibbons: The floods in Spain are just the tip of the giant climate iceberg coming our way

WASHED AWAY AMID the chaos and the carnage in the Spanish city of Valencia as a year’s rainfall crashed down in barely four hours was the conceit that humanity is somehow in control of nature. This was always a dangerous falsehood, but now it is being painfully exposed as extreme weather disasters hit ever harder.

The death toll at the time of writing has passed 150 for this single incident. As recently as July 2021, horrific flash floods killed more than 180 people in Germany and Austria and caused damage costing billions of euros. Flooding this month in Nigeria killed at least 300 and impacted a further 1.2 million people.

Just the last two weeks have seen extreme flooding in southern France, the Liguria, Savona and Bologna regions in Italy, the Democratic Republic of Congo, New Mexico, Taiwan, Croatia, Saudi Arabia, Andalucía in Spain, Marrakech in Morocco, Oman and Malaysia.

Breaking the wrong records

Meanwhile, October 2024 has seen temperature records smashed around the world. By 15 October, Phoenix, Arizona had endured the longest heatwave in US history, with 21 consecutive hottest-ever days, breaking the previous record set during the disastrous Dust Bowl era in 1936.

Closer to home, English farmers have just endured the second worst food harvest on record, as persistent heavy rains turned entire regions into morasses. If by now you are beginning to sense that there’s a clear pattern emerging, you are absolutely correct.

Commenting on the flooding disaster in Valencia, Dr Friederike Otto of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) expert group stated: “No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change; with every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to heavier bursts of rainfall.”

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In the first week of October, the 2024 State of the Climate report was published by a panel of top specialists. Its conclusions were stark: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled”, they wrote.

This report, endorsed by more than 15,000 practising climate scientists, added that we are witnessing “the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence.”

Nothing in 100 centuries of human civilisation can compare with today’s global climate crisis. “We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus,Homo”, the scientists warned.

All this chaos and devastation, bear in mind, is being wrought as a result of a rise in global average surface temperatures of around 1.3ºC. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is the largest shift in planetary climatic conditions since the end of the last Ice Age around 12,000 years ago. On our current pathway, worse, infinitely worse, is in store.

A new review of the 10 worst extreme weather events of the last 20 years by WWA researchers concluded that every event had been made more intense as a result of human-caused climate change. “If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue”, the report noted.

Political will

This is not inevitable. The technologies exist to rapidly transition away from fossil fuel usage. Renewable energy is now in almost all cases cheaper than fossil fuels, yet governments continue to subsidise oil, coal and gas burning. In Ireland alone, €2.9 billion was spent in subsidising fossil fuels in 2021 alone, much of this to enable cheap aviation via tax-free jet kerosene.

Ireland’s per capita carbon emissions are among the very highest in the EU, largely thanks to our highly polluting livestock herd, which is a major contributor to global warming due to its release of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. While politicians like Taoiseach Simon Harris and Tánaiste Micheál Martin talk the talk on climate, with statements like “the planet is on fire”, they also stand squarely behind the major polluters, be they the aviation industry, data centres or the industrial livestock sector.

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Nor are they alone. There is little indication that any of our main political parties, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or Sinn Féin have any real appetite to challenge our heavily polluting business-as-usual model predicated on relentless economic growth. The system that is churning out more and more flying, more SUVs, more throwaway consumerism and ever more meat-rich diets is the very system that is accelerating humanity and much of the natural world towards the climate abyss.

Despite this, most Irish politicians, policymakers and the great majority of our media are either oblivious or completely indifferent to this epic unfolding tragedy. You may by now think I’m overstating the risks and running well ahead of the science. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

The recently published UN Emissions Gap report found that current policies put in place by governments around the world take us to a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.1ºC this century. A major scientific study on the ‘future of the human climate niche’ found that over the next 50 years around one-fifth of the land surface of the Earth will become too hot for human habitation. This will likely force between one and three billion people to migrate as crops fail, animals die and their homelands have to be abandoned. But migrate to where?

Time to look up

Put simply, this is an impending tragedy quite unlike anything in human history, a disaster against which even the world wars of the 20th century pale into near-insignificance.

Still unconvinced? Did you know that, globally, 2023 was not just the hottest year on the instrumental record, but almost certainly the hottest year on Earth for the last 125,000 years? Well, summer 2024 has topped even that, and this year as a whole is now on track to overtake 2023 as the hottest year on record.

We now know where all this is headed. The only question remaining is whether we are prepared to change course. Some brave individuals and groups, including Greta Thunberg and Just Stop Oil have been trying to raise the alarm, using disruptive but non-violent tactics. They have been met with police violence, media ridicule and long prison sentences.

The reality remains the same: either we rapidly bring the era of fossil fuels to an end, or climate collapse will assuredly bring human civilisation to a fiery end. The choice, for now, is ours.

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and commentator.

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