I participated in the event “Next Generation,Please!”, organised by the Centre
for Fine Arts / BOZAR in Brussels, in which I was acting as “the climatologist”.
I was supposed to listen and give comments to proposals made by high school
students for a festival that would mix climate science and art to express their
awareness about climate change, but not
only: issues like gender, inequality, activism, revolt in general also came up.
It was exactly one month after the invasion of Putin into Ukraine.
Since a
while, during similar events, I have been asking students why they were raising awareness about climate change. I asked them to be explicit and tell why they were doing
what they were doing, which is not always an easy thing to do, but a
prerequisite for being credible. I explained that for my generation, when we
were in high school, there was no climate change problem yet. The first
warnings had just appeared in the scientific literature, and more scientists,
including myself, decided to dedicate a scientific career in studying this
issue. It would take a few decades more before climate change was taking up
by mainstream media and eventually by decision makers in industry and politics.
So our generation had to realise that climate change was indeed a
problem: realise in the very sense of making the issue a reality. For us scientists,
who eventually understood how emissions of greenhouse gases were
changing climate in a dangerous direction, it was only logical to conclude that
something needed to be done about it. When I asked the students in Brussels why
they thought climate change is important, they were startled: of course it is
important, how can you doubt about this, we must act, change, it is our future, … . The students participating in
the event were only a small sample of the Belgian youth, and possibly, since
they were participating, they had a larger than average interest in the issue.
But anyway, I came again to realise that these youngsters had heard about
climate change all of their young lives; that the issue had been fed to them
together with the mother milk, so to speak, and certainly school education had
explained the issue rather well. If Greta Thunberg, 4 years ago already, had
been able to create an avalanche in awareness among the youth, it is
also because that youth was somehow prepared, consciously or unconsciously.
That was my conclusion: we climatologists can now retire, or, if we are not
ready for that, change jobs.
And that is
what I decided to do after the event in Brussels, where I was invited as “the
climatologist” but also as the representative of the previous generation. During the discussions
the students openly said that they would no longer live the way their parents
had lived. I was sitting there and did not even smile. They were right: our
generation could as well be scrapped, next generation please! But rather than
being scrapped by these youngsters, I prefer to scrap myself as “the
climatologist”. The climatologists,
those who have understood how the climate system works and how we are changing it, had indeed done their job,
and done it well. Solving the problem is now a task for many different sorts
of people. I will not retire, only change job and continue as an “extended climatologist” as I called myself once, or, which is actually the case, as the director
of the Museum of Anthropocene Technology, which allows me to deal with the
issues of our times through objects rather than words.
