Labont Seminars 2021/22 – Climate Crisis and Future Generations

4 March 2022, h 4:00-6:00 pm

Antonello Provenzale (CNR Research Director at Institute of Geosciences and Georesources), “Climate crisis and the third human revolution”

Earth’s climate has always changed. From the frozen Snowball of 700 million years ago to the hothouse during the Eocene between about 80 and 50 million years ago, to the glacial-interglacial oscillations of the last three million years. So why do we worry for a temperature increase of just a few degrees? Well, mainly because… now we are here. Surely, the planet is not in danger for such a temperature increase, as it has witnessed much worse events and it survived anyway. But many species did not – sometimes, more than 90% of the species were washed out from existence in a geological blink. And – if possible – the self-called sapiens species would like not to take this route too early. On top of this, the current changes are very rapid – five to ten times faster than recorded paleoclimatic variations – and this means that the global ecosystem could get into some turmoil before settling to a new state. In this talk, we discuss some of these issues, in the light of our own species’ perspective and of the three revolutions it went through: the passage from hunter-gatherer to farmers, the industrial revolution, and the ongoing revolution based on AI, resource concentration and global crises (climate, biodiversity, soil loss, nitrogen, overpopulation).

Attend the seminar clicking here! (pw: VMj56HApmU4)