"Mr President, on climate you are wrong!" Physicist Buizza challenges Trump: 'Climate change is real, global effects'

"Mr President, on climate you are wrong!". Roberto Buizza, one of the world's most accredited climate experts and professor of physics at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, addresses Donald Trump directly after his remarks at the last UN assembly. "Is the climate change a scam? And no, the US president is wrong. This is proven by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which for 54 years has been reporting the results of science and updating the state of knowledge with contributions from the world's leading experts on the earth system - chemists, physicists, meteorologists, climatologists, oceanographers.

"What is happening is something absolutely unique," explains Buizza, who for almost 30 years was a researcher at the European Meteorological Centre, an intergovernmental organisation founded in 1975 and supported by 22 member states. In the highly advanced technological centre in Reading, a few kilometres from London, the scientist developed new probabilistic forecasting systems, applied to weather phenomena and seasonal forecasts, which are still the best in the world. "We estimate uncertainties by studying the atmosphere and the actions of clouds, oceans, ice. Our planet is a complex system whose temperature has warmed by one and a half degrees in the last 150 years. This has never happened before. Man is the cause, we are the cause'.

Fossil fuels, coal, methane gas, but also the exploitation of the land with intensive livestock farming and the use of fertilisers, have produced a very high concentration of greenhouse gases, raising global warming: "Everything is happening very fast. The climate change affects the state of the climate, as is evident from the analysis of temperatures. But it also involves very intense local variations, at the Poles as well as in the Mediterranean, a sea whose temperature has risen twice that of the global average. And all this also leads to an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme events'.

This is proven by science but also history: post-war economies grew rapidly with oil as the dominant energy source. Thus, electricity, transport, heating and industry could no longer do without it. "By now, the effects are global," the scientist continues, "not only considering temperatures, but also variations in rainfall and their geographical location, with regions such as the Horn of Africa, for example, where there is less and less rain. And so in southern Italy, Spain and Greece, where there are clear signs of reduced rainfall. It is precisely those populations that have fewer resources and therefore less chance of adapting that are affected. They are usually precisely those who have contributed very little to greenhouse gas emissions'.

"But climate change is also being experienced by colder countries," adds Buizza, "such as Canada or Russia, which are witnessing the thawing of permafrost, the frozen ground of the earth. An issue that also becomes a problem of social justice. 'That is why,' comments the scientist, 'I was shocked by the speech of the president of the United States, so selfish and disinterested in the contribution that his country could make to the evolution of the human species'.