Climate change is a historical and political product

Many contemporary observers did not hesitate to denounce what was happening and were not heard. Today we live the consequences of denialism

Climate change has become the number one challenge of our societies. The news of this summer clearly shows it: droughts, fires and heat waves are no longer exceptional, but the norm. Not to mention other phenomena that do not give rise to due concern, such as melting sea ice or rising sea levels, which will cause many coasts to be submerged in the coming years.

Climate change is the main consequence of global warming: a phenomenon that is in itself natural, but one that in the last two centuries has been accelerated and exacerbated by some human practices. Among them, the massive injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, mainly due to the generalization of fossil fuels by the technological innovations introduced in England by the first Industrial Revolution and successively adopted by almost all nations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Historical milestones with serious consequences due to climate change

Both global warming and its most obvious consequence, climate change, far from being a natural phenomenon that determines the progressive alteration of some of the main biophysical dynamics of the planet, has to be considered the result of historical processes.

Let’s take a simple but meaningful example. During the eighteenth century, the invention of the steam engine propelled in England the first Industrial Revolution, which brought substantial changes, both social and productive. The establishment of the bourgeois order and the implementation of a liberal capitalist society allowed these changes to spread during the first decades of the following century throughout the European continent, which led the main countries to promote more or less successful industrialization processes, depending on the case.

All this was not at zero cost. The need for large quantities of wood and charcoal to run steam engines justified and fueled deforestation. This, in turn, led to a tightening of the climate and an increase in hydrometeorological risk in various mountainous regions of the continent.

For example, due to the absence of forest cover, in many valleys of the Italian-French Alpine arc winters began to become harsher, summers hotter and rainfall less frequent, but more intense. The mountains, stripped of their wooded crowns began to be unable to retain the rains and began to be eroded by water and winds.

The result was a significant increase in periods of famine and drought, torrential rains and disastrous alluvial events. That is, what we are now experiencing globally, by then they were already suffering at the local or regional level.

Warning voices

One wonders if our ancestors knew what they were doing when they razed entire forests, many of them millennia-old. Were they aware of the consequences that their actions would have on both the climate and the environment?

According to the official narrative promoted by the natural and physical sciences during the last decades and that today conditions the national and international governmental agendas, the answer is no. In fact, as some environmental historians have opportunely denounced, the official history of the Anthropocene erroneously states that humanity did not know what it was doing.

At least not until the middle of the last century, when biologists, chemists and geologists began to discover that our lifestyle was altering planetary processes and that this would introduce changes in climate and make exceptional natural phenomena more frequent and intense.

At the presentation ceremony of the Nobel Prize awarded in 1995 to the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, the Mexican chemical engineer Mario Molina and the American chemist Sherwood Rowland for their research on atmospheric chemistry and the prediction of the thinning of the ozone layer as a result of the emission of certain industrial gases (chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs), Ingmar Grenthe of the Swedish Academy of Sciences said: “We have come to understand that we influence and are influenced by our biosphere, our vital area. One of the goals of science is to describe and explain how this happens.”

Official account

However, under the magnifying glass of the historian, this official account does not hold up. If we return to our example, the deforestation of large areas of the Alpine arc in the nineteenth century, we find many contemporary observers who did not hesitate to denounce what was happening. Among them was, for example, the Italian Pietro Caimi, who already in 1857 referred to the savage deforestation that, in a few decades, from the first years of the nineteenth century, had stripped the mountains of Valtellina in north-central Italy.

Caimi wrote: “I would like to be a false prophet, but I predict a sad future for Valtellina if the forest devastation on its mountains is not stopped and its forests are not resurfaced. In less than a century its plains will become swamps, its hills will become barren, its rivers and streams will devastate crops and its villages. The degraded mountains will hit the population with avalanches.”

A product of our decisions

As can be seen, understanding climate change as a historical process offers the advantage of leaving the presenteeism that characterizes it today and, at the same time, offering the population a much more complete and convincing explanation of the phenomenon. Even more so if we consider that it would make it clear, once and for all, that this overwhelming disaster that scientists have been denouncing for decades is not something of today, surprising, but is something that we build with our own hands, sometimes in a reasoned and conscious way.

We no longer live in the antechamber of a new world produced by climate change, or rather of new worlds, because it is clear that not all societies are prepared or have the necessary resources to properly face this possibly disastrous situation. We are already in them and, despite that, many governments and individuals refuse to recognize it.

Analyzing and explaining with the categories and methodologies of political and institutional history the decisions that led us to the edge of the abyss could help to contrast denialism, raise awareness among citizens and hold rulers accountable. Climate change, before being natural, is a historical and, therefore, political product.

Source: El Diario AR