THE CLIMATE ENIGMA AT THE BEGINNING OF THE THIRD MILLENNIUM & THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Here’s what you need to know:
Dr. Arch. Franca Colozzo (ITALY)
The huge catastrophes that we face in various parts of the world, worry us about the violence of the weather phenomena even where they did not exist before, leading us to think about how to face the challenges of the future and the climatic emergency.
Without going into specific questions, we are still on the high seas despite: the Paris Agreement on the disregarded climate; the 25th Madrid Climate Conference 2019 and subsequent COPs – “How long does it take, as long as it takes“; the young Swedish Greta, the modern Cassandra, who managed to move masses of young and old through her continuous work in the media to stem the catastrophe; the general alarmism spread in the media, but disregarded in daily life through deep-rooted bad habits; the indifference of the American ex-President Trump, with his denial of climate change induced by wicked human activity through the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and of those who persevere to deforest the Amazon rainforest, our green lung; etc.
The list could continue indefinitely, but the preliminary analysis that underlies it needs a summary as soon as possible. We are faced with the nightmare of a temperature rise of 1.5 ° C in 2040. How to stem it to avoid reaching a point of irreversibility of the world situation:
- How to prevent the temperature rise by 1.5 in 2040?
- What corrective measures to implement?
- How to convince the major producing countries of harmful emissions into the atmosphere to pollute less?
- How to reduce the CO₂ increase progressively, but effectively (2.7% every year)?
I would like to try to give answers based on my acquisition of concepts that, during my professional life, have represented the key points of my business. For example, on my debut as a teacher of technical disciplines, during the first stages of my teaching career and in conjunction with my activity as an architect. Well, I’m talking of 1984/90 when I was teaching how to design and realize a simple solar panel for laboratory experiments. The result was exciting for the students who had then physically made the object, trying to measure the increase in water temperature at the beginning and end of the experimentation in the open air, during a sunny day, through a simple thermometer. At the basis of this design was my willingness to direct students on virtuous cognitive paths for understanding the use of energy at low cost and without waste.
It is well known that performance in physics does not represent 100% and energy waste is commonplace. Think of an internal combustion engine and what is statistically lost, based on the car models used, in the fuel and performance ratio of the vehicle. Wastes are recurrent as regards energy transformations and this belief is shared by all.
Yet, just at school, physics applied to domestic and industrial uses are often not taught to make known to large sections of the population how to avoid waste and also how to obtain an optimal economic yield. Unfortunately, from my previous experience, ignorance in this area is truly surprising.
Then we should start with an appropriate knowledge of the home economy in terms of energy, recycling, the environment, the use of household appliances, etc. to be able to think about changing people’s habits, including food and consumer habits in general. For this reason I have always affirmed that changing people’s habits is difficult, immersed as we are in a continuous media bombardment aimed primarily at sponsoring companies that are often polluting, interested only in their immediate profit.
How do you get out then? Should we hope for intervention from above to address the environmental problem? Or roll up our sleeves and start from the bottom?
I believe that the latter should now be a strong point: the individual can set a good example for the family and the community, starting to respect the environment and to behave virtuously in all areas (nutrition = health; energy, climate, recycling, education of offspring in this direction, etc.).
But to do this you need to have a basic preparation that is not for everyone and here action from above comes into play: the public school, as a state organization with ministerial programs and civil norms that regulate every respectable society. Therefore, the pincer effect I mentioned in my previous proposal returns to the fore again. By pincer effect I mean talking about joint actions from below and above. A society cannot be transformed only inductively (from the bottom up), but needs intervention from above to structure the key pillars of a social structure: education, industrial production of goods, agriculture and handicrafts.
A social system is a complex system made up of micro families. I imagine it as a complex atomic structure which, in order to function properly, must have all its elements in a certain order. If the order is disrupted, with loss or purchase of electrons, here we are faced with positive or negative ions based on the number of electrons. The strong structure of an atom, difficult to modify except through the breakdown of strong interaction (i.e. atomic cleavage), is the one that represents the central pin, united and cohesive, difficult to modify.
Well, our society needs strong and cohesive structures, in the democratic sense of the term, aimed at pursuing the common good in a holistic vision of a future that is today in embryo.
WHAT MEASURES TO ADOPT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT?
To my questions that have remained pending, I will try to give an answer based on the assessments that I have gradually formalized. Banning fossil fuels (especially coal) appears to be a necessary measure to curb the growing trend of temperature rise with all the consequent climatic variations induced by this phenomenon.
We must isolate the counter-current policy of the American ex-President Trump, who abandoned the Paris and Madrid climate conferences in order to deny the direct relationship between rising temperatures and climatic variations, with excessive events. His denial of the explosive effects of such policies leads him to enhance the use of coal.
Extend the use of alternative energy sources to fossil fuels (coal, oil, etc.), such as photovoltaic panels for the production of electricity, solar, energy from the tides, geothermal energy, wind, energy from waste, etc.
Change human habits, replacing the usual habits with new ones. The phenomenon that I call “pincer” can start both from below, from people, and from above, but it will be necessary to reverse the propaganda route of the large manufacturing companies. The large industry, in fact, aims at an immediate and not long-term profit, for which it uses devastating advertising by directing people towards incorrect consumption, in an incorrect way and with improper materials (e.g. plastic).
How can we avoid this and ensure that people become more and more environmentally aware?
Long-term thinking is based on the awareness of turning the page, but to do this it is necessary to convince consumers of the goodness of these measures. Adopting them does not only mean saving the environment, but the human race, otherwise doomed to extinction. Already much of the damage has been done with the extinction of about 80% of animal and plant species. If we continue on this wavelength we will face an apocalypse and I say this not to make the Cassandra, but to prevent one of the most unfortunate environmental conditions produced by men and not by the Precession of the Equinoxes.
It is known that glaciations and climate changes occur periodically (a long time interval of about 10,000 years, i.e. the time that the Earth’s axis describes, forming a virtual cone, around the perpendicular to the ecliptic that the Earth travels in its revolution around the Sun), but the trend of temperature rise has undergone increasing peaks as a result of progressive industrialization (from 1750 to 2011 there has been a continuous increase), with a crescendo that reaches our days and a peak between 2002 and 2018: in the last fifty years then the surge is evident through the graphs that describe this worrying phenomenon. It is useless to resort to the Holocene or to previous periods of glaciation, it is evident that the ongoing phenomenon is exclusively linked to human activity. So if we continue along the same lines in 2040, we will overcome the critical point of no return with an irreversible greenhouse effect.
THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
The role of women in the face of climate change is not negligible as, at least in Western societies, richer and more technologically advanced, they have consolidated consumerist habits and incorrect behavior.
Faced with the unconditional use of weapons and explosives, which involve a substantial source of pollutants together with harmful CO2 emissions and the greenhouse effect, women have also adopted completely incorrect life models, aping, for example. in Europe, American disposable lifestyles. The pressures exerted by women, especially the younger ones, who live in a society without values and traditions consolidated over time, at the mercy of consumerist and misleading propaganda, have contributed to forms of waste, such as throwing away food, using myriads of household appliances, making exorbitant demands on one’s classmates, easily using and throwing away everyday objects and mimicking what is advertised on social media.
The female attitude seems irrelevant, yet it is a devastating multiplicative factor in the face of a substantial education in Home Economics, a subject that was taught around the 1960s in Italian schools, then supplanted by Technical Education and later Technological Education. There is very little left of this last teaching subject since the segment of students, male and female, who approach IT and use it without in-depth knowledge, appears increasingly ignorant.
Therefore, I view with serious concern the advent of Artificial Intelligence in the hands of people who are highly unprepared and incapable of solving mathematics problems or simple arithmetic operations. My experience as a teacher of technological education in the first years of teaching, after having passed numerous exams and having attended over 30 courses over the long term, has led me to understand how difficult the approach to technological subjects is for young people who love everything right away.
To conclude, I believe that women, as mothers and main protagonists in raising children, should have an important role in making an environmental change by setting their example as a guide in the evolution of society. Especially today, when they hold increasingly demanding and important leadership roles, women should question themselves about their ethical mission in the social sphere and what direction to give to their offspring to ensure that the new generation is educated in ecological and environmentalist values. Ultimately, climate change is essentially the fault of industrial civilization starting from the end of the 19th century with the surge that in 1990 with further scientific advancement, the invention of plastic, and the use of nuclear energy in the energy field, unfortunately also war, etc.I believe that a great turning point can be given by a form of awareness on the part of women to start, together with men, a new awareness of the role that humanity must play within planet Earth to safeguard not only the human race but also all other life forms that exist in the world, both on land, in the air and in the oceans.
CONCLUSION
From the premises it clearly emerges, in my opinion, the need to educate the population, especially the new generation, to ensure that a critical conscience is asserted, taking the upper hand over those who, in the name of profit, are sacrificing the rest of the world population, the majority since a small number of super-rich (about 62) have a wealth equal to that possessed by 3.5 billion world population. On an ethical level, it is paradoxical how modern slaves, in possession of the most sophisticated technologies, do not rebel against this blatant injustice now that the means of communication allow the majority of people to connect.
Just the need, in which it is artfully placed, makes the man even more slave than he was in the past when there was only word of mouth. We will be able to balance a similar inequality under the eyes of all, men who are now embarrassed in the grip of the arrogance of a few, at the threshold of the third millennium.
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LEGEND
The Holocene is the most recent geological era, the one in which we find ourselves and which had its beginning conventionally about 11,700 years ago. The limit with the lower epoch (the Pleistocene) is defined on the basis of the decay of 14C (a radioactive carbon isotope) and coincides approximately with the end of the last glacial phase that affected the northern hemisphere. The Holocene is the second period of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek ὅλος (holos, absolutely) and καινός (kainos, recent). It has been identified with MIS 1 and can be considered an interglacial period included in the current Ice Age.
Anthropocene (Anthropocene) s. m. The current geological era, in which the Earth’s environment, in all its physical, chemical and biological characteristics, is strongly influenced on both a local and global scale by the effects of human action, with particular reference to the increase in concentrations of CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere.
For many years geologists, experts in stratigraphy, scientists, climatologists, have been discussing the date when the Holocene, which began 11 thousand years ago, ended. The term Anthropocene was coined as early as 2000 by the Nobel prize-winning Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, while the symbolic date of 16 July 1945 is the result of research carried out by an international group of scholars belonging to the Anthropocene Working Group (Awg). (Eva Perasso, Corriere della sera.it, 21 January 2015, Scienze) – Anthropocene, the 7 signs of a new geological era [summary] Seven uncomfortable legacies we are leaving on the planet. Seven worrying evidence of the beginning of a / new course of Earth’s history, conditioned – in negative – by man. (Focus.it, 12 January 2016, Environment).