In 2019 I saw the effects of man-made climate change with my own eyes.
It was a scorching 40°C outside, well above the usually mild June temperatures of the Ligurian Riviera. The air was blistering hot, like the devil’s breath. The pitiful shrubs and the wilted flowerbeds on the sidewalk reminded me of something from a bygone era, like fossilised remains of a poor urban planning from another century. The few and far-between palms on the boulevard provided no shade at all. An elderly lady fainted a few metres from me, collapsing lifeless on the ground. Two customers from a bar nearby helped her cool down in the shade of the outside dining area while another called an ambulance. Meanwhile, the charred sidewalk was sweltering and the fata morganas on the horizon were magically conjuring images and dancing silhouettes as if we were in the desert. It was increasingly painful to breathe, and the plastic stench coming from the baking road asphalt was sickening. Luckily, the paramedics were swift and efficient. As they brought the poor old lady inside the ambulance, I started to feel dizzy myself and I rushed to go home with the groceries. I couldn’t get out of my A/C-less flat for the next three days, resorting to quick nighttime incursions in the city centre to buy something to eat. [1]
It was as if someone had summoned Hell on Europe. The entire continent was in the grip of two deadly heatwaves, but we were the lucky ones. 400 kilometres away from us, in Southern France, temperatures were peaking at around 45°C (BBC 2019; Stylianou and Guibourg 2019).
The year before, the “weatherproof membrane” covering the roof of the Science Centre in Glasgow, Scotland, failed to withstand a peak temperature of 32°C and melted like butter or, as the BBC journalists described it, “like black goo” (BBC 2018).
Today, Lytton is no more. Most of the lovely village of 250 in British Columbia, 150 km north-east of Vancouver, has been consumed by wildfires after experiencing a scorching 49.6°C, the highest temperature ever recorded north of the 50th parallel north (Cecco 2021a). At the same time, some places in Western Canada were warmer than Dubai, with cables melting and roads buckling because of the heat (Hill 2021). More than 500 people and over 1 billion marine animals may have died as a consequence of the heat dome hovering above British Columbia (Cecco 2021b; Cecco 2021c).
The unlikeliest hellish circle of all. Left: a car fleeing the wildfires in Lytton, BC; top right: the charred remains of the village of Lytton; bottom right: the website depicting the environs of Lytton before the heat dome and the wildfires. Sources: The Guardian; Village of Lytton website.
In the same week, a 40-year old Miami condo, Champlain Towers South, collapsed because of “design flaws and deteriorating waterproofing” in an area at high risk of salty water intrusion because of rising seas (Milman 2021).
Everywhere infrastructures are failing. People are dying. Ecosystems are collapsing (Weston 2021). Our planet, our only home, is moribund. 38.6°C recorded in Siberia (Gardner 2020). 18.3°C in Antarctica (Millard 2021). Extreme heatwaves, unprecedented cold snaps, rising sea levels, pollution, microplastics, grave health issues, pandemics, loss of biodiversity… The diagnosis is simple: man-made climate change, the consequence of more than two centuries of industrial and capitalistic mass production based on the economic dogma of an endless growth.
In hindsight, all these events look like the bad CGI inception of a hellish disaster movie – and that’s bad, because we have become accustomed to watching cheap disaster movies, to the point that we don’t even care anymore. What’s worse, it doesn’t even look that scary, because climate change is happening in slow motion. A summery autumn is a boon. A mild winter is very fine. A warm spring is even better. No one feels really threatened. No one plans for the worst.
If this was an embarrassing Michael Bay-style CGI-pandemonium on TV or a clip on YouTube, at the very least we could save ourselves by channel hopping. Alas, this time all streaming services are broadcasting the same movie. Anthropocentric climate change and all its disrupting effects are here to stay. Problem is, we cannot hold on much longer. Bacteria will undoubtedly thrive. Many invertebrates and maybe a few lucky generalist vertebrates will resist. But our Goldilocks zone is under threat. Human civilisation is not built to withstand a planetary cataclysm like man-made climate change. And yet, resilience has become something like a buzzword. “Building resilience” is the new motto à la page, but too often it’s a travesty to justify the economic status quo (e.g., IMF 2020). If we do not radically change our lifestyle now, we cannot survive. It’s just as simple as that. There’s a limit to our resilience. We are not immortal. No one is immortal. Ask all the past civilisations that collapsed. Ask the non-avian dinosaurs.
Full disclosure: I am no meteorologist. Nor am I a politician. I am merely a historian. But I can tell you one thing: I have a hunch no one will ever do anything useful. This is just the new normal. And with normalisation comes sloth. Idleness. I want to be proven wrong. I really do. But so far I have seen no clear sign of a change of attitude. The 2020 pandemic lockdowns gave us the unprecedented opportunity to stop and rethink everything. We didn’t. We want our lifestyle back. Corporations and politicians in cahoots want us to reclaim our old lifestyle back. To keep buying and consuming as if there was no tomorrow.
And it looks like there won’t be any tomorrow. The first paragraph of a recent article published on The Guardian reads:
“The world’s demand for oil will rebound to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2022, as recovering economies require oil-producing countries to pump more fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) (Partridge 2021).
It’s astounding (and most embarrassing) how we always fail to learn.
When it came to facing the impending crisis with courage and confront the reality of the unprecedented and dramatic challenges ahead, people decided to do nothing. Voters were lulled into a false sense of security and control by crass alt-right politicians well known for their lies, passing the buck and choosing simple post-truth narratives in both the UK and the USA. Western Europe is apparently following suit. Eastern Europe has been already conquered by a swarm of Machiavellian and unprincipled radical-right politicians. Some of the remaining most populous and economically relevant nation-states are not even democracies – so don’t expect them to challenge the status quo any time soon. Major institutional religions are either powerless or complacently silent. Fundamentalists are either blatantly ignoring climate change or cheering for the end of times (Bardon 2020). They fear nothing in the afterlife they believe in, anyway: they’re the chosen ones waiting to ascend to Heaven while watching the world burns. The answer of egocentric billionaires and capitalist tech moguls who contributed shamelessly to climate change? Leave Earth to roast and dream of colonising Mars (Herne 2021).
Because of people like them we’ll have to deal with unprecedented health issues because of global pollution. We’ll have to deal with mass migrations because of global warming, the likes of which humankind has never witnessed on such a short timescale (Gleick 2021). We’ll have to deal with rampant ultranationalism because of political resistance to change fostered by fake news, post-truth, and digital disinformation (Ambasciano 2021). We’ll have to deal with Big Oil companies and shareholders powerful beyond human imagination and unwilling to go down without a fight [3]. Eventually, if no action is taken, we’ll have to deal with worldwide wars.
In the meantime, those with money can still buy their short-term survival anyway, thanks to A/C, intercontinental travels, and all climate luxuries afforded by their income. Remember US senator Ted Cruz leaving Texas with his family for the comfortably sunny Mexico in the midst of the state-wide infrastructure failure caused by a combination of cold weather and the poor management of the regional electric system (Gabbatt 2021)? No one did anything after that. No one among the powers that be did anything in the aftermath of the deadly European 2019 heatwaves. No one will likely do anything now for Canada (Berman 2021). We’ve already run out of time. We’re already living in a climate emergency (Holthaus 2021).
Summer glamour. Big Oil companies are deploying all their skills to sway public opinion and lobby governments to water down any proactive initiative to fight climate change (McGreal 2021). The new trend is to glamorise climate change. Neutralise it by appealing to its potentially positive aspects. On the 4th of July 2021, the Italian weekday La Stampa supplement Specchio (“Mirror”) featured a celebratory - and irresponsible - cover hailing both the healing power of summer and the end of pandemic restrictions. The supplement cleverly managed to do that by reminding its readers of St Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures (1224), in which the Italian friar thanked God for giving humankind the warmth and the light of Brother Sun (“Fratello sole”). Even the BBC put up a shameless educational page about the “benefits” of climate change, like “healthier outdoor lifestyles” and “more resources, such as oil, becoming available in places such as Alaska and Siberia when the ice melts” (Horton 2021; the page was later removed). © La Stampa
And I knew. I knew before anyone else among my friends and schoolmates. I knew because of my father.
In the early 1970s, industrial IT was the future, and my father was part of it. Way back when, computers were ginormous, cumbersome machines that occupied entire rooms. Processing was slow, and programs were run by feeding punch cards into them. My father studied Classics, Literature, and History at the University but at that time, it didn’t really matter. It was a different time back then – jumping between occupations regardless of your background was still normal. All it took was one’s ability, attitude to problem solving, and willingness to learn fast. And the world of IT was so new and shiny, no one really knew that much anyway. He quickly became senior programmer, then system analysts, and then directeur informatique for an industrial automotive manufacturing company.
We know now, as it was well known back then, that the fossil-fuel and the automotive industries have an outstanding environmental impact (National Geographic 2019). And all I heard from my father regarding his company when I was a kid confirmed that we were doomed. I also happened to grow up in one of the most polluted cities in Western Europe, which helped cement my down-to-earth realism (Legato 2021). Where I lived, the air was so polluted by the huge bus depot just at a stone’s throw that, on a bad day, the laundry hung outside the balcony absorbed so much smog that by the time it was dried it already smelled. And the stench of oil, clapped-out tires, and diesel fuel was disgusting. Makes you wonder what we inhaled into our lungs and accumulated in our arteries, in our organs, in our brains. Frankly, it’s really scary. [2] Yet, my father was blind to the long-lasting damaging effect of industrial pollution on the environment and on our health. He had faith in the industrial “magnificent, progressive destiny” of humankind. He thought that automation and economic empowerment through corporate labour would lead eventually to a better, brighter, democratic future for humankind. And he sincerely believed in eternal economic growth within a more just, responsible, sustainable, and ethical corporate-capitalist system with a human face (cf. Leisinger 2001).
In a sense, he was right: our way of living is now synonymous with mass consumerism while automation has all but conquered manufacture, and many scholars and researchers claim that, as far as social progress is concerned, and despite all the political setbacks and social protests, we are living through the best period any human civilisation ever experienced (e.g., Pinker 2018). But this view is complacently myopic. [3]
When I read an introduction to Darwin by Italian evolutionary biologist Pietro Omodeo, I challenged my father: how could there be infinite growth in a world of finite resources? (I didn’t actually say these very words, but the concepts were there). He said something patronising to defend his company and dodged the question by adding something else to the effect of, like, come, come, you’re too young, in time you’ll understand. Now it is painfully obvious to me that he never really understood the question. I was 12 or maybe 14 years old (Folks, please, don’t you ever patronise your kids: they might be cleverer than you.)
One day, in the early 1990s, my father showed me the pictures he took during one of his many travels abroad to oversee his IT projects. It showed a landing strip in a cleared area of the Brazilian forest, close to a brand new factory. I mean, it was virgin forest as far as the eyes could see. Except for that sacrilegious human blemish. I asked him if they had to chop down that area of forest. He said yes. And he was proud: where I saw destruction and long-term unsustainability he saw modernization, progress, and economic prosperity for all. I didn’t need to ask him anything else. I knew corporations wouldn’t just stop there. Endless growth means no rest until every resource has been depleted in the name of profit for all the company’s shareholders.
I would be remiss if I did not add one last event that happened around that same time. One day, my mother took me to a tiny river close to the diminutive village where she was born, a bucolic place in the mountains not unlike Lytton. She remembered it from her youth as an astounding ecosystem where many European crayfishes thrived – so many that the river was in fact called Rio Gambero (gambero is Italian for crayfish). She was eager to show me, but, quite disappointingly, in a whole day we ended up seeing just two specimens – a tiny one and a dead one. Now, crayfishes are important bioindicators of water quality (Kuklina et al. 2018). Basically, if they vanish, it means that the water is not that good anymore. Something had happened – and that something was environmental negligence from the people living there coupled by water pollution from industrial facilities. It was quite an astonishing, pristine, and wild corner where the Alps meet the Mediterranean Sea, now all but destroyed by ignorance and industrial greed. I felt tiny, powerless, helpless, robbed of something that was meant to be there for all of us.
“Comics should not be read only by children.” From left to right: the first page of Giorgio Pezzin & Guido Scala’s “Uncle Scrooge and a City in Plastic Fever” From Topolino #1538 (1986). Originally published by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore; Massimo De Vita’s cover on recycling, Topolino #1742 (1988), The Walt Disney Company Italia S.p.A.; Marco Rota’s cover, Topolino #1578 (1986): “Cheers for ecology!” The Walt Disney Company Italia S.p.A. All rights reserved © Disney. All images from Grand Comics Database. Topolino is an Italian weekly comic magazine which publishes original Disney stories. I inherited my older sister’s collection and I kept on expanding this family collection for as long as I could. As a kid, Topolino’s groundbreaking stories and reports about ecology informed my sense of responsibility. “To educate children with regard to gardening and nature protection can and should be done without missionary zeal but rather with a sense of humor and perhaps also with some self-mockery. That could be one message to be gained from comic literature. Maybe comics should not be read only by children, but also by those who have to deal with their education (Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Gröning 1994: 242). Let me rephrase that last sentence: everyone should read comics. Full stop.
I took refuge in what I really loved – history books, encyclopaedias, dinosaurs, and comic books. I started spending hours in bookshops and libraries, much to the chagrin of my friends who couldn’t actually understand why I was doing this. When I started reading Marvel comic books in the mid-1990s, I was already well acquainted with the shady operations of the real-world counterparts of Roxxon, Osborn Industries, and Alchemax. Even before I discovered Marvel comics, there was Topolino with its ecology-driven stories. It wasn’t just entertaining escapism, fun, or science-fiction to me; it was a call to arms against real inequity and inequality. Against man-made pollution. Against greedy corporations and slimy politicians. However, I knew from my father’s job and all the lobbying and political shenanigans behind the scenes, that no matter what you do, even if you win a battle, corporations always win the war. Dissatisfied and let down by humankind, years later I chose to become a historian because I wanted to know more about the past and forget everything else – the future was going to be a wasteland. [5] And here we are now.
If corporations win – and it surely looks like they will – we’ll all sink together. But even if we win and reform everything from our lifestyles to our institutions, there’s no way we can be certain that planet Earth won’t end up being a greenhouse inferno like Venus (Billings 2013). Even if we stop all emissions right now, there is enough carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to ensure that global warming can continue unabated for centuries (Frölicher, Winton, and Sarmiento 2013). We’d need to come up with new technologies to capture carbon dioxide (if proved to be a viable solution), to mitigate the current effects, and to adapt as quickly as possible. And we’d need a 180° degree change in all our industries. But we lost decades, and we still lose precious time, by electing politicians unwilling to take climate change seriously. Funds necessary to develop new geoengineering technologies, to update our aging and inadequate infrastructures, and to develop a real green economy are constantly and astutely being diverted to corporations fighting to maintain the status quo. Denialists are ten a penny among the powers that be, so much so that it might be too late at this point. Researchers are beginning to sound the alarm (Bradshaw et al. 2021). Last year, Australian National University emeritus professor Will Steffen said this:
“Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse” (W. Steffen in Moses 2020).
So, what’s the point in even trying?
The point, as I see it, is this: we do have a moral responsibility. If we are to go down with the ship, what have we got to lose if not our own moral compass? Is there anything more important than our conscience? More important than the future of the planet – the future of your own children? There’s a good fight that needs to be fought here, regardless of the outcome. Change has to start somewhere. That is why, despite all my efforts, I can’t help but feel guilty. To this very day I still cannot forgive myself for having failed at making my father change his mind earlier.
As soon as I hit puberty my father and I started to argue, bicker, and fight about the environmental state of the world. He proudly stood his ground and minimised the role of man-made climate change for years. Like many others did and still do, he usually resorted to short-term weather fluctuations (“it’s always been like that!” or “that year long ago was even worse!”) with the intent to downplay long-term climate change and the effects of industrial pollution. He was always ready to defend the company for which he worked – even though he suffered mentally and physically, from relentless mobbing to constant exertion and stress, which ultimately caused a heart attack (chain-smoking didn’t help). And he always dissociated power and responsibility – he considered himself as the tiniest cog in the machine (to which I always replied, yes, sure, but responsibility has to start somewhere). Only in the last few years, incapable of denying the truth of climate change anymore, he has begun to admit, albeit reluctantly, that he was wrong and that I was right – most of the times still verging on the passive aggressive and sarcastic. If anything, this late change of heart makes me feel even more powerless than ever. Why didn’t he trust me? Why did he mock me as a pessimist for years? If a son failed to make his father understand in time the sheer gravity of the situation, how on Earth can we really stand a chance in making the politicians and the CEOs of today rethink their approach?
Look today on the remains of Lytton, ye Mighty, and despair: our house is on fire and nothing beside remains.
The new normal. Flames engulf the Canadian town of Lytton after experiencing a blistering 49.6°C. Source: The Guardian, Photograph by J. Zimmerman,
Notes
Please note that the post has been updated on 9 July 2021.
[1] Two weeks later, as my wife and I were travelling by train across Europe to lower our carbon footprint, I caught the nastiest bout of hand, foot, and mouth disease. When we arrived at St Pancras railway station, sweaty and feverish, I started reading Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (2019) and thought about my old research on ancient epidemics. I wondered about the hypothetical deadly combination of climate change and a global pandemic. Unfortunately, I didn’t have to wait for long to see my feverish and dystopian nightmares coming true.
[2] A huge chunk of my childhood and adolescence recollections is either smog grey or bad-smelling. My father smoke heavily, and even though he would smoke on the balcony, all our clothes smelled of cigarettes (and no one gave a damn about passive smoking back then). Years later, I worked in an Irish pub while in high school and had to quit after a while because of all the secondhand smoking I was inhaling while working. On weekends there were so many people smoking in that pub that the air was as thick and grey as varnish. (Yes, it was before the ban on public smoking.) I had bouts of uncontrollable coughing. My eyes were always watery and itchy. I usually came back home between 2.30 and 4.30 a.m., completely exhausted, went straight to bed, and when I woke up in the morning my white pillow displayed grey patches from the residual smoke on my hair and face. Then I started sleeping at school. That was considered quite normal; there was something very, very wrong with our society.
[3] To be fair, my father also correctly preconised that the unregulated bottom-up organisation of the Internet – which he had access to before anyone else I knew because of his job – would eventually lead to the disruption of society through the sheer amount of noise and the unprincipled questioning of all basic knowledge. In the early-1990s he presciently dubbed it Infernet – the infernal net. Additionally, he knew well that numbers and statistics can be easily used to lie, whether knowingly or unknowingly, and this is a fact that many Big Data analysts today, ranging from epidemiologists to wannabe historians, are painfully unaware of.
[4] Big Oil corporations have amassed a whopping $2 trillion since the 1990s. Just to put things into perspective, that’s way more than all Oscorp revenues (see Taylor and Ambrose 2020). I frankly find this scary, if you ask me.
[5] Well, to be honest, I wanted to become a palaeontologist since I began to read, but the way I see it, being a historian is pretty darn close.
Refs.
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