We have a handful of years to stop global warming, yet we are doing anything but. This is why we find ourselves in the age of hyper-surrealism. An editorial by LifeGate's scientific director, Simone Molteni.
On Friday 24 May I was asked to give yet another lecture on the ongoing climate emergency. I have done it a thousand times over the past twenty years, to audiences of every age, from primary schools to care homes for the elderly.
Inspired by the venue – the Triennale di Milano – I took the liberty of founding a new avant-garde movement: hyper-surrealism.
I, a simple engineer constrained by a logic that grows ever more uncomfortable as a lens for interpreting the present, could find no more fitting term to read reality and sum it up for a general audience.
Put simply, we are living in a historical period in which things are happening that are by now well beyond the surreal.
Anyone who has listened to a scientist worthy of the name, or has looked closely into the subject of environmental sustainability, should have immediately grasped my provocation. Science states unequivocally that we are not doing enough, and that unprecedented and potentially frightening scenarios await us in the near future — at least for a large part of the population: the most vulnerable part, and, by a cruel irony, the part that bears no responsibility for the situation.
Leggi anche: I giovani di Fridays for Future Milano. "Ogni promessa che fate al Pianeta è debito"
https://youtu.be/jrOQ4yVVjnQ"]
Thousands of scientists explain clearly that it will be very difficult to stay below the one-and-a-half degrees of warming called for by the Paris Agreement, given that we have already taken one degree. And that scenarios with four or five degrees more are now possible in the near future. I recall the president of a very large insurance company stating that a world four degrees warmer is "simply uninsurable".
For those who still today, without expertise and without shame, maintain denialist positions, I would point out that the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere is measured with scientific instruments — it is neither an opinion nor an article of faith. We are in a new climatic era because the atmosphere contains more than 410 parts per million of CO2, a concentration never seen in our history as Homo sapiens.
In short, we are on the Titanic not one minute before but one minute after the collision with the iceberg. Not all is lost if we move quickly (The lifeboats! The emergency procedures!).
But on the bridge, people continue to drink champagne and talk about football and new, even faster ships, silencing with an air of superiority the young sailors of Fridays for Future who are trying to draw attention to the fact that the ship is about to sink.
Drinking champagne might even be forgivable, if it were the result of a conscious choice to go extinct with a certain style (borrowing from Paola Antonelli and the excellent Broken nature).
Instead, all of this is happening out of sloppiness and plain unawareness.
This is why everything today strikes me as more than surreal: we have a handful of years to make a titanic course correction (it has to be said) to our society, yet we are talking about and doing something else entirely.
Instead of throwing ourselves into applying the solutions we already have and inventing new ones, we are still wasting time with those who think they are cutting a fine figure by denying reality and the problem itself.
A century after André Breton — the founding theorist of surrealism — I have therefore ventured, with scant modesty, to lay out the foundations of hyper-surrealism.
The artwork that represents it? For now I choose Isaac Cordal's work "Politicians discussing global warming": in all likelihood, despite the title, those half-submerged politicians were not even discussing global warming.
The greatest exponent of hyper-surrealism? Without fear of contradiction, Donald Trump. And not only because of his hairstyle. If the situation were merely surreal, he would be the mayor of a small town in Texas. But in the age of hyper-surrealism, someone who denies the most important problem facing our species, who rehabilitates asbestos after years in which the debate was considered closed, who boasts of not reading books despite having access to all the knowledge in the world… well, someone like that is perfect for the role of the most powerful man in the world.