The climatologist Giacomin:«Stop confusing climate change and global warming» – The videos

Guest at the Open festival, the president of the Italian Climate Network association explains why terms and themes are often confused, as for climatology and meteorology

«We tend to confuse meteorology and climatology».This is the phenomenon described by Serena Giacomin – climatologist, meteorologist and president of the Italian Climate Network association – which occurs when weather conditions bring colder than average temperatures to our country, often becoming a pretext used by many to deny that the planet Earth is warming at rates that make it more difficult every day to mitigate the effects and reduce the intensity of climate change.On the sidelines of the Festival of Open – The challenges of the future, the expert explained what are the most extreme scenarios that lie ahead for the climate system and how citizens and institutions can work together to avoid them.

To those who are personally committed to slowing down climate change, many respond that it is the institutions that must act, because individual actions are a drop in the bucket.What do you think?

«It is important that an individual becomes more aware and carries out effectively virtuous actions towards the environment around him.It is certain, however, that the action of the individual is an action that manages to have an impact when it becomes a collective action.So we need to try to make this happen.The community must then be able to bring about what is defined as systemic action, therefore an action that comes from above and which can then allow the individual and the community to change effectively and on a large scale.We then ask ourselves:“Whose responsibility is it to change?”.Each of us has this responsibility, starting from the individual citizen who must also rediscover the desire to go and vote and perhaps choose who to vote for based on the commitment being made towards the environment and climate change."

This summer has alternated many extremely hot phases with decidedly cool ones.This was enough for those who deny the existence of climate change to return to office.

«There is a tendency to confuse climate change with global warming.Above all, we tend to confuse meteorology and climatology.We deal with meteorology every day, which is that scientific subject based on the physics of the atmosphere, which it gives us back as information
weather forecasts as we all know them.Meteorology fluctuates very rapidly,
so hour by hour, day by day.Climatology, however, has a much more statistical basis.To define a climate variable we need at least thirty years of data behind us."

So how can below-average temperatures be explained in an increasingly warmer world?

«Within these decades there are meteorological fluctuations that can also lead us to experience situations of negatively anomalous temperatures, therefore lower than normal.Global warming can be called the triggering cause.With the emission of the greater concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this atmosphere tends to warm more and more globally.Furthermore, there are many climate changes, starting from the melting of the ice, rising seas, but also, if we want, loss of biodiversity.Within the various effects, and therefore within climate change, there is also the so-called climatic extremization which leads us to experience, at a meteorological level, situations that are extreme and therefore opposite to each other".

Perhaps the most extreme peak that lies ahead is the shutdown of the Gulf Stream.

«And speaking of climate extremes, if the Gulf Stream were to weaken to the point of stopping, we would actually experience an extremely colder climate compared to the one we are living in today, but above all compared to the one in which we developed as a society and as we know it now as a socioeconomic system.And perhaps this is the key point of all:we talk about the climate as if it were an environmental problem.In reality, everything depends on the climate in which we live, how our cities are made, how they were built.What is the production system on which we
we base all our various activities, our industries, our modality is all measured based on the climate in which we have lived in the last decades.If we alter this climate in any way, we find ourselves in maladapted situations and therefore no longer capable of absorbing these changes."