The hit-and-miss dance of climate change

The real problem we have with climate change is that you can’t see it, you can’t touch it but when it manifests itself it’s usually too late because it does so through hurricanes, floods or extreme drought. For example: January was the warmest January everAnd the eighth month in a row in which this inconvenient record is broken, but it doesn’t seem like a big problem. Life goes on. The objective – decided in Paris in 2015 – of keeping the increase in the Earth’s temperature within one and a half degrees compared to the period before the industrial revolutions is difficult to achieve: what will a degree and a half be? The relationships and the consequences escape us. If we see the photo of a white bear sleeping on a drifting iceberg – awarded a few days ago – we only think that it is a romantic photo, it does not occur to us that the ice there is melting faster and faster and that bear does not he can do it anymore. The challenge we face is to make it clear that we are all on that drifting iceberg. We are the sleeping bear and what is happening concerns us not because we must show solidarity with those who are far away, which would also be a duty, but because life around us is changing and it is not good news. The weather forecast apps we have on our smartphones try to make a small contribution in this sense. The iPhone one, for example, no longer limits itself to saying when and where it will rain with incredible precision, but tries to give a bit of historical context, comparing what has happened in the last 30 days compared to the last 50 years. For me who live in Rome for example, today it says that the average temperature of the last 30 days was 5 degrees higher to that from 1970 to today. Five degrees higher is an enormity: the iPhone always points out to me that a maximum of 18 degrees is usually recorded at the end of April. Late spring instead of midwinter. In the same period, rainfall is usually around 8.7 centimeters, this year it is 1.1. How much is “one point one” of rain in a month? It is less than what happens in the least rainy month of the year in Rome: July. In short, we are a patient with a fever and we are not treating it. This should worry farmers on tractors, and all of us who have children and the political leaders we have elected. And instead we fight over John Travolta’s shoes. The qua qua dance seen from here is not a fool, it is a metaphor of our attitude.