Valladares (CSIC) asks not to frivolize with climate change: “We seek a miracle to maintain our way of life”

– “You can not put in the same debate a scientist and a denier,” he said in RNE

– Ensures that social inertia slows down the fight against global warming

Las Mañanas de RNE – Fernando Valladares, CSIC: “We want the bell to save us that allows us to continue with our unsustainable rhythm of life”

The CSIC biologist and professor at the Rey Juan Carlos University, Fernando Valladares, has asked that “show debates” on climate change be avoided. Valladares, interviewed in the program Las Mañanas of RNE, has criticized that this summer was discussed in some media about heat waves and climate cycles “from equidistance”, remembering that you can not put on the same level a scientist and a denier. No one can deny from science that the warming of the last 70 years has human influence, he says.

Question: There is a UN report that says we don’t comply. He says we need to quadruple the annual return on renewables to achieve the decarbonisation target. Do you agree with that diagnosis? Are we not meeting the objectives?

Answer: Yes, indeed, that analysis is quite accurate and for me the most important thing is to understand the causes. What’s happening so we don’t do what we all know it’s time to do?

Question: Do you see it feasible, for example, that by 2030 electric vehicles will become 60% of new vehicle sales, which is what the United Nations said this morning.

Answer: It is a difficult scenario, it is a challenge. But I see that there are the technological wickers to do it. Perhaps the inertia that will cost the most to overcome are social or interest group inertia. They have made many old-fashioned cars, there are important financial investments to maintain.

Question: Why are we not meeting the goals at the set pace?

Answer: Well, there is no reason. There is a list. I sometimes talk about up to eight or nine different factors. Many have to do precisely with a society in which we say one thing and do another. Also that we seek miracles. We like to believe that it is possible to contemporize things that science says are incompatible. We are getting to the core of the socio-economic system, we are getting to the essence of a system that has always been based on infinite production and when proposals are made to reduce that production, it collides with that structure. Neither politicians dare to take measures that can take away votes, nor do big companies want to miss the opportunity to make large amounts of money. The citizens themselves are a little used to doing things in a way and making a change of direction costs us all. Science had been saying for 50 years that these were the scenarios in which we were going to travel. And here we are. And now there is talk of the damage that the measures can cause to the Gross Domestic Product. The Gross Domestic Product must not be above people and this is something that we have forgotten.

Question: Have you been surprised by the debate this summer, of those who consider that what we have experienced is a cyclical event, not a worrying sign of the evolution of the climate? There has also been a debate on social networks, I do not know if there is a threshold of skepticism still about climate change in Spain …

Answer: Skepticism about climate change is bought by two types of people. On the one hand, ignorant people who do not know, who do not know about the subject. I want to think that those people are not many. The second group is more dangerous, which are those who have interests, the big businessmen, some politicians who have already had an electoral strategy, who have made promises impossible to keep. The last 70 years of warming cannot be understood except for human involvement. The good news of that is that, if we have done it, we have the solution. The nuclear issue, which in Spain was practically closed, is also reopened. It is reopened by that search for the miracle of which I spoke before. A miracle to maintain our way of living. Then you pull the nuclear or deny climate change.

Question: Then there are the undocumented debates, which is another problem…

Answer: In the Decalogue for the communication of climate change, what is tried is to avoid this equidistance. There are media that have had no scruples in making pure spectacle of deniers. I think there is little professional ethics. It is said that we are going to bring to the debate a denier and a non-denier. And that equidistance is very misleading, because for every denier you have a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand informed scientists who say the opposite. I have been called many times to ask if I knew any deniers and I have always said no. That they are an endangered species.

Source: RTVE