Editorial, Il Fatto Quotidiano

According to Copernicus measurements, the European Union’s main climate monitoring program, Europe is experiencing record-breaking temperatures this summer due to a “heat dome” covering the entire Mediterranean basin. The sea has never been so warm, with some areas having temperatures 5 degrees above normal. This prolonged and extreme heatwave has devastating effects on the environment and human health (a recent study published in Nature Medicine indicated that over 60,000 people in Europe lost their lives due to last summer’s heatwaves). It also impacts various animal species and conditions that increase the likelihood of wildfires. The recent heatwave has made it clear that with rising temperatures, the hottest days are becoming more common, and the coldest days are becoming less so. This implies that, in the long term, with climate warming, we will witness an increasing number of summer days with very strong heat stress and, in Southern Europe, more days of extreme heat stress.

While we can systematically monitor short-term weather for hours and days using weather stations and satellites, we can never do the same for periods ranging from decades to thousands of years. The main reason for controversies regarding the effects of global climate change and its human impact lies in the fact that data, until relatively recently, were scarce, and models were not very sophisticated. The theoretical problem is that the physical laws governing atmospheric behavior are well-established, but the complexity of atmospheric dynamics makes it extremely challenging to understand how global climate changes affect weather conditions. Some causes of long-term climate change are well-known: variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics, volcanic eruptions, and so on. However, today, we know with absolute certainty that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are a significant driver of recent and rapid global warming, leading to the weather phenomena we can observe almost daily.

In theory, humans should be “rational economic agents” who use information to maximize their utility or pragmatic enough to understand how to manage risk. In practice, discussions often revolve around climate skepticism, orthodoxy, and heresy, as if it were a religious issue. However, these discussions rarely focus on observations, measurements, statistics, results, and models, in other words, on science. Instead, anecdotal arguments are presented, such as the claim that Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants or that it was warmer in the Middle Ages, etc. It’s a magical and irrational mindset that questions the link between emissions and global warming or even denies that climate change is occurring.

This attitude, mainly exhibited by small but vocal groups, stems from the awareness that solutions require a redistribution of power, environmental taxes, erosion of rents, and the fight against inequalities. It’s a path that intersects with social justice, both nationally and internationally, making it too complex and ambitious. Thus, it’s simpler to convince those affected by floods or droughts that it’s just the “usual hot summer – cold winter” cycle. The goal is to persuade the public that nothing can be done because the causal link with greenhouse gas emissions is not provable, and even if it were true, Italy’s role is so marginal that there’s nothing we can do about it.

These individuals are retired academics who have dealt with various subjects throughout their lives but not climatology. They have never worked with the big data of satellite measurements, supercomputer simulations of sophisticated theoretical models, and so on. These individuals bear the responsibility of providing the scientific alibi for journalists who exploit them to promote views absent from the international scientific debate (another legacy of good old S.B.). The question is, what will happen in the face of the rapid growth of extreme weather events? Perhaps it will be too late, and the eventual awareness will struggle to translate into collective action because the institutional foundations of civilized living will crumble. What is certain is that we are not only facing a climate crisis but also the failure of the solutions proposed so far, and we need to work on proposing different solutions.