Jaw-dropping flooding in Spain is shocking – but not entirely

Another violent flood, another day we can hardly believe how climate change is, well, changing our lives.

At least 72 people killed. Crops ruined, flights diverted, a high-speed train derailed.

The footage is jaw-dropping: torrents of water collapsing a bridge, vehicles swept away and dumped on top of each other as if they were just a handful of toy cars, people rescued from neck-high water.

But it is somewhat familiar.

It brings to mind similar scenes from eastern and central Europe just last month, or flooding in Germany and Belgium in 2021 that killed more than 200 people.

Of course, it is too early to say whether this exact event would have happened without climate change – that takes time and thorough scientific analysis.

But what we know already, and what scientists tell us every time the atmosphere unleashes heavy rain, is that climate change is making this kind of rare, immense deluge in Europe more common and more intense – and therefore more destructive.

It’s also true for most of Asia, central and eastern North America, northern Australia, northeast South America, and southern Africa.

A hotter atmosphere is thirstier and can hold more moisture. So even though something else – the DANA weather pattern – may have triggered this rain, climate change will have made it worse.

Heavy rain does not have to mean destructive flooding.

Plenty of other things humans do influence whether heavy rain can turn disastrous, including how we use the land, drainage areas in paved-over cities and early warning systems.

Which is why the…