Extreme Heat: "Instead of Building Bombs, Apply the „Paris Agreement“ in its Most Drastic Form"

Deaths, illnesses at work, monuments and public places closed, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Atomium in Brussels. A wave of extreme heat in Italy and in much of Europe. Extreme, but not "exceptional": Luca Mercalli, president of the „Italian Meteorological Society“, has been repeating it for years, based on scientific evidence: These temperatures will become increasingly frequent.

Mercalli says: "These events are also a serious threat to tomorrow's economy. Dozens of GDP points will be lost in the next decades. These are now constant phenomena and every time we are here talking about unpreparedness. The summer of 2003 was the first time we found ourselves in contact with the African anticyclone and clearly it could have been a surprise. That year in fact there were 20,000 deaths in France and about 20,000 in Italy too, but it was the first major episode of African heat in the history of climate, it had never happened before."

And he continues: “22 years have passed, there have been at least another ten. For example, the summer of 2022 was the hottest ever for all of Europe and in Italy, a year earlier, we also had the highest temperature ever on the European continent, in Syracuse.“

The heat emergency repeats itself every year and every summer the decalogue of things to do is published. Ordinances are issued by local administrations, but what has been done so far to help the population?

“In these twenty years some progress has been made, the main one is that now the weather forecast also issues the heat emergency bulletin, which did not exist in 2003. Health safety plans have been created for the weaker groups, so for some time now the elderly, especially those who live alone, have been monitored. There are climate shelters, that is to say trivially a supermarket or a place that has air conditioning that is declared a meeting point for those who do not have the possibility of having it at home. Something has been done, but it stopped there for a bit. From a structural point of view, much more needs to be done. There has been a lot of talk about greenery in cities that helps to reduce the temperature in cities by a few degrees, but little has been done about this. It is not that the situation has changed radically in European cities in the last twenty years, from the point of view of urban greenery. On the contrary, very often we find ourselves with contradictions linked to the climate because when intense storms arrive, trees fall and can be a threat to people's safety. On the one hand, municipalities should plant more trees, on the other they cut them down for fear that they will fall on citizens.“

We are not ready for what is the future scenario of a further continuous increase in these heat waves, which will become more frequent and more intense. ⁠In any case, will we never be able to return to milder summers?

“Not even in your dreams, the climate situation now has development times on the order of millennia. Whatever we do, even in the hypothesis of a general recovery of humanity that, instead of building bombs, finally decides to put the Paris agreement on the ground in its most drastic form, that is zero emissions by 2050, we will still have two degrees more on the earth's climate for centuries. In the best case, we can stop the situation. However, if we do nothing, temperatures will continue to rise, potentially up to 4 degrees more by the end of the century”.

It is necessary to talk about “adaptation”: What is the first thing that in your opinion is necessary to do?

“There isn’t one, it’s the biggest problem in the history of the future of humanity. We need to completely change the entire structure of the world economy and get out of the economy of infinite growth, because this is the first problem behind everything. We are in an economy that pushes us to grow, to consume anything and we are on a planet with limited dimensions. The current economic system is incompatible with the physical structure of the planet. We should develop a different economic model that ensures the well-being of people without chasing the continuous growth of consumption, otherwise we can also put in a bit of renewable energy but we won’t solve the problem. Then there are all the proposals that were contained in the Green Deal: the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, the circular economy to use fewer raw materials and recycle more waste, agriculture that weighs less on biodiversity, sustainable transport. We are doing the complete opposite of what was put in the Green Deal because the lobbies of any sector are tending to water down the measures to maintain their current privileges. There is always an excuse. Any measure is sent back more or less. less to the point. It's just greenwashing operations."

Not to mention that this heat could cause or be a contributory cause of other extreme and damaging climate events.

“They are all linked, that is, a higher temperature favors an amplification of the intensity and frequency of flood events, for example. The Mediterranean is boiling, 5 degrees more than it should be. Currently the surface temperature is around 26 degrees, so more water evaporates. This creates the conditions for the development of a storm or more intense rain, like what happened in Bardonecchia. All things that are not a surprise, they have been written in climate change reports for 30 years. Every time we do everything as if it were something new, but there is a specific year that acts as a watershed between scientific and political awareness of the climate problem, which is 1992, when the United Nations conference was held in Rio de Janeiro where the climate convention was signed. Basically we did small things, decorative things. 2024 was the year with the highest carbon dioxide emissions ever and in 2025 it is very likely that there will be no change in this trend. Words are one thing, international treaties are of paper and the facts are these. The world is consuming more and more energy, producing more and more waste and there are no radical choices to change direction.

(Source: Il Fatto Quotidiano)