Antonio Aretxabala Díez, Geologist. Professor of the School of Architecture of the University of Navarra.
A new climate, a new mentality and a new urbanism?
It does not go unnoticed that this year is abnormal in terms of rainfall and cold, several records have already been broken, in Spain, USA or Germany, but the now so-called Mordor climate is nothing new. Since the last glacial maximum, some 20,000 years ago, our world has undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis: one of the most abrupt changes in the entire history of the Earth has taken place in the blink of an eye geologically speaking (a ratio of 1/225,000 in the total life of the Earth); it is therefore a sigh in which we have gone from a frozen wasteland everywhere to a temperate world in which our civilization has grown and prospered, today the city already represents the structural unit of a system that we can call Earth.
During this period, a staggering 52 million cubic kilometers of water were redistributed around the planet in the way liquid water is distributed, slowly and spread out, as a large solid continent melts, ice sheets melted, and previously depleted global sea levels rose by more than 130 m, compensating for the weight distribution of the huge ice masses.
The rapid global warming, on the order of 6°C, resulted in a new atmospheric circulation with new patterns that were much more dynamic and not so closely tied to preferred motions. This resulted in a modification of the most important wind trends and a complete rearrangement of climate zones. But these were not the only consequences of the dramatic post-glacial transformation of our world.
Change is not only external
The results included large isostatic readjustments, cortical movements, rebound earthquakes in previously ice-covered regions at high latitudes, and a dramatic increase in the level of volcanic activity in several areas as the pressure of the plug that was supporting such huge amounts of solid, for example in Iceland, decreased.
The adoption of a uniform approach that contemplates atmospheric and telluric changes in close relation is already an emerging view increasingly present among scientists who contemplate the concatenated natural processes. The recognition of differences in potential, both in rate and scale of the post-glacial warming period is also a view that explains many of the enigmas of terrestrial dynamics.
From this we can also deduce the possible influence of anthropogenic climate change in relation to a series of dangerous geological features through a wide variety of environmental adjustments that affect both the atmosphere and the hydrosphere and also the deep zones that support our cities and therefore our personal, cultural, affective relationships....
When we try to anticipate the potential assessment response of the Earth as a system, it seems prudent to consider that soon, warming levels of 2°C will be inevitable, the consequences of which we are beginning to see. Analysis of 66 stations spread across both slopes of the Pyrenees mountain range sample that temperatures have risen 1.2 Degrees from average since 1950. "The Pyrenees is a hot spot in the process, an area where unmistakable signs of global change are already visible", summarizes Gabriel Borràs, manager of Adaptation of the Catalan Office of Climate Change (OCCC).
We are already witnessing the change
It is important to emphasize that, even if we take into account that there are significant uncertainties when projecting the future in relation to the dynamics of the environment in which we live, human beings are already witnessing such changes that will affect above all the narrow and fragile interface (between the atmosphere and the hydrosphere) in which we live, which we modify and which responds to our activities in the form of storms, tornadoes, eruptions or earthquakes. Rainfall records are being broken with increasing frequency, heralding what scientists have been anticipating for decades. Our civil infrastructures, reservoirs, power plants, industry, and therefore our cities, will be greatly affected; what is happening now is but a first draft of what is to come.
It is not a matter of announcing catastrophes, but of anticipating reality and taking effective steps to strengthen our cities, and the tools to do so are two: CULTURE and SCIENCE, the way to make it tangible is to rethink the urbanism of the 21st century in a society that insists on living in cities and individualizing space and time.
Since 2010, more than 50% of the world's population has been living in cities, a new experience for life on Earth.
Each of the first two phases of the modernization of our civilization and whose framework was adopted by the city: the classical city and the industrial city, corresponded to a profound mutation in the ways of thinking, producing, using and managing territories in general and cities in particular, especially the circulation of people and information: mass transportation, newspapers, radio, television and telecommunications.
Social scientists rarely go ahead and dare to advance general and flexible guidelines, they participate in diagnosis policies that feed programs of study of urbanism, consultancies and even Departments of urbanism of universities, with an anecdotal influence in plans and projects, big or local, administrations even less, it is not already in their Genetics to go ahead to a much more refined, holistic and participative knowledge of the environment: SCIENCE and of the human relations with it, between us and our historical heritage: CULTURE. The two pillars on which we must think the multidisciplinary urbanism of the present, its scenario is a society that is already capable of individualizing space-time in cities that are expanding unstoppably.