Giuliano Panza, professor of geophysics at the Trieste University, warned, in a long interview with Prof. Franco Battaglia for the Italian daily La Verità, against the “danger” of committing resources to a “fake emergency” of climate change. The interview is from last July 28, but has been drawn to our attention only now.
Prof. Panza has a long curriculum vitae. He has been director of the Earth’s Structure and Non-linear Dynamics Group at the Trieste International Center of Theoretical Physics; is a member of the prestigious Italian Accademia dei Lincei and of the National Academy of Sciences; has been given honorary titles at the University of Bucharest and a professorship at the University of Beijing; and he is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Prof. Panza is also a signer of the international petition “There is No Climate Emergency” underwritten by more than 1,000 scientists from around the world.
Those scientists “aimed at alerting responsible legislators at the highest levels on the danger of committing resources on a fake emergency,” Panza said, adding that “those resources are taken away from real emergencies and, sticking to Earth sciences, the real emergency is not climate-governing — the climate is ungovernable — but protecting us from undesirable and disastrous climate events, in the same way as it is necessary to protect us from earthquakes — they too, are ungovernable.”
After having explained that current climate models are failing because they did not forecast, for instance, the evolution pattern of the Troposphere in the first fifteen years of the current millennium or in past periods, such as the Roman warm period etc., Prof. Panza insisted: “Building a civil protection policy based on such a poorly defined risk, whereas real risks are irresponsibly ignored, is definitely deplorable.”
Among real risks, Panza mentioned the seismic risk, which is his particular area of competence and a top priority for Italy. He rejects the methods used to map seismic risks, which are based on probability calculus: if a certain area is historically hit with a frequency of, say, 1,000 years by a major earthquake, that area is defined as “low” risk for a period of a thousand years. Vice versa, a historical pattern of 100 years defines a “high” risk. Prof. Panza proposes a “deterministic” approach: studying the physical description of the process that causes the earthquake and the path followed by seismic waves. In that way, you can evaluate the capacity of response of the area to potential sources of earthquakes.
