As a guest today, at 6.30 pm, of the CuneiForme review, at the Politeama Theater, the meteorologist Luca Mercalli will talk about “Us and the environment”, about the urgent need to (re) discover a healthy and respectful relationship with the ecosystem and the climate .
Is it possible, in your opinion, that the man rediscovers this relationship?
“It would be, the problem is we don’t want to do it.”
Pwe are free from hydrogeological risk. Italy is historically exposed. What makes these events even more dangerous?
“Two things have changed. The first, which has taken place for 50 years, is the use and consumption of the territory, increasingly occupied by concrete works, infrastructures, warehouses, roads. With the same events equal to 100 years ago today, we are more vulnerable because we have more exposed capital in which the speed of water flow increases, which a natural soil would instead absorb underground. The ground and space are not infinite: in 50 years we will have a unique building from Pinerolo to Udine. And we are already close to this scenario ».
Plus there is climate change.
«Today’s violent rains will be even more violent and frequent tomorrow. The already precarious balance will be increasingly so. And if land consumption is the responsibility of individual territories, like what happened in Piedmont, the problem of change is global. The fault lies with the whole world, from America to China ».
What are the most alarming signs of the climate crisis?
“The temperature reached is the highest in 2,000 years and is continuing to rise. It could do it by another 4 degrees by the end of the century, an intolerable amount first of all for us as humanity. And there is no doubt that all of this is our fault. Two Nobel Prizes have even been awarded, to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann, together with Giorgio Parisi, for their mathematical simulation models that explain climate change ».
Is politics beginning to understand the urgency?
«Politics speaks and does not listen, otherwise we would see the measures we have been asking for for 30 years. The green economy has been talked about since the end of the 1980s, and everyone has screwed it up to give priority to money and the economy. The climate, however, responds to physical laws and not to economic ones, and will make us pay a bill that will become increasingly salty. Today is the conference in Glasgow, we’ll see what they decide ».