Spain's apocalyptic floods reveal two undeniable truths: the climate crisis is getting worse and Big Oil is killing us Spain

Move on. There's nothing to see here. Just another ordinary, everyday apocalypse.

If past experience is any guide, the world's response to last week's flooding in Spain will be similar to that of highway drivers at an accident scene: slow down, take in the horror, outwardly express compassion, inwardly thank the fate of someone other – and put your foot on the accelerator.

This is the pattern in our climate-change era, where extreme weather disasters have become so commonplace that they risk becoming normalized. Instead of outrage and determination to reduce the dangers, there is an insidious feeling of complacency: this happens. Someone else is responsible. Someone else will fix it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The unnatural catastrophe 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 only just gaining momentum, and we must quickly kill the fossil fuel industry before it takes hold us around.

That should be the main message of the UN climate summit Cop29, which begins next week in Baku, because the only way to stabilize the climate is to stop burning gas, oil, coal and trees. For this to happen, we must combat the tendency to normalize disaster scenes.

Cars rocked through the city streets like bowling pins, cars rocked in streams of mud, cars turned into death traps. The images from Valencia and other regions of Spain are shocking and familiar at the same time. In Italy last month, vehicles were washed away as roads turned into rivers. Before that, it was the turn of France and, in September, Central Europe, where 24 people died in floods in Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. There was also heavy rain in England.

Of course, floods have always happened, and local factors—atmospheric, geographic, economic, and political—contribute to the impact, but it is the global physics of a world destabilized by fossil fuels that weighs the cube toward catastrophe. The warmer the atmosphere becomes, the more moisture it can hold. This means longer droughts and heavier rainfall. In Spain, some regions received a year's worth of rain in less than half a day, killing at least 205 people.

“Events of this kind, which used to occur every few decades, are now becoming more frequent and their destructive power is greater,” said Dr. Ernesto Rodríguez Camino, a senior state meteorologist and member of the Spanish Meteorological Association.

No one can say they weren't warned. It has been 32 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 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Yet global temperatures continue to reach record highs and emissions are rising faster than the average over the last decade. In other words, your foot stays on the accelerator even though the pile-ups are so close that they are almost banal.

Governments continue to focus on economic speed rather than climate security. They have been slow to reduce risks and prepare society, but many, including the UK, have been quick to lock down those who shout warnings and obstruct traffic. The legal system effectively forces citizens to accept disasters.

What else should you call it? In recent years, apocalyptic images seem to have migrated from Hollywood disaster films: During the Subway Line 5 flooding disaster in Zhengzhou, China, commuters were swept off subway platforms or trapped in train cars as water reached their necks stood and the glass wall was torn down the side of a Vietnamese office tower during Super Typhoon Yagi, which also snapped giant wind turbines like branches in Hainan, China. Every grotesque clip dampens the impact.

We live in a time of unwelcome climate superlatives: the hottest two years in world history, the deadliest fire in the United States, the largest fire in Europe, the largest fire in Canada, the worst drought in the Amazon rainforest. The list goes on. This is just the beginning. As long as humans pump gases into the atmosphere, such records will be broken more and more frequently until “the worst ever” becomes our default expectation.

But we shouldn't allow our baselines to shift so easily. These are not isolated cases. They are part of a disturbing pattern predicted by scientists and the UN. The cause is clear and so is the cure.

World Weather Attribution scientists have shown case-by-case how much more intense and likely storms, droughts, floods and fires have become as a result of human-caused climate disruption. These include the late summer floods in Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon that killed more than 2,000 people and displaced millions; the flash floods that killed at least 244 people in Nepal from September 26 to 28; and the floods in southern Brazil that killed more than 169 people earlier this year, as well as the devastating hurricanes – notably Helene and Milton – in the United States, which killed 360 people and caused over $100 billion in damage caused. In any case, the poor and the elderly are most at risk. In Spain, too, many of the bodies filling mobile morgues were old people unable to escape their first-floor homes and delivery drivers caught in the torrents that flooded the streets.

That all of this is happening with global warming of just 1.3 degrees Celsius should be an urgent warning to reduce emissions, the authors of those studies said.

“At COP29, world leaders must truly agree to not only reduce but also stop the burning of fossil fuels, with an end date. The longer the world delays replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, the more severe and frequent extreme weather events will become,” said Friederike Otto, head of World Weather Attribution at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.

The United Nations appears to lack the vocabulary to describe how serious the threat is. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has declared “code red for humanity”. UN Climate Minister Simon Stiell warned: “We have two years to save the world.” And last week, the head of the UN Environment Program, Inger Andersen, stressed that “it really is time for a climate crisis.”

But the agenda is set by those who want to expand fossil fuel production. Azerbaijan is the third consecutive cop host to plan to increase oil and gas production, after the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Host Brazil next year also wants to increase production. This also applies to many of the world's richest nations, including the United States, Australia and Norway. This year's talks are about how to finance a “transition away from oil and gas” – the vague goal that was finally adopted last year after three decades of talks at the Cop.

The dissonance between this sluggish response and the apocalyptic scenes in Spain and elsewhere should galvanize global consciousness. After all, the original meaning of the apocalypse is revelation – the lifting of the cover, the revealing of things. But for that to happen, we must truly embrace and respond to the horror of what the world is going through and stop pretending we can carry on as usual.