A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #471 - ANTHROPOCENE OR CAPITOLOCENE? - Climate Anomalies and Resistance from Below (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The sultry summer we're experiencing is further evidence of ongoing 
climate change. The scientific community has long identified its cause 
in human activity resulting from industrialization: the term 
Anthropocene was coined for this reason. While the responsibility is 
certainly human, not all humans are equally responsible for the disaster 
we're facing; some, in fact, prefer to speak of the Capitoline cene, 
that is, the role of the capitalist system, or at least an economic 
system based on unlimited growth and development that ignores the finite 
nature and human circumstances. What can we do in the face of all this? 
While the fight against the capitalist system is central, even small 
initiatives that local communities can undertake are crucial: to reverse 
the trend of rising temperatures, to restore space for collective action.

Climatic anomalies and resistance from below

Climate analysis for this current year paints a rather disturbing 
picture. First, the global anomalies of the first six months of the year 
are worrying, with June 2026 being the warmest ever in Europe since 
records began with adequate measurement instruments: the average 
temperature exceeded the 1991-2020 thirty-year reference climate average 
by 3.05 degrees. This is truly disturbing considering that the goal of 
the Paris Agreement was to keep the anomaly below 1.5 degrees, but even 
below 2 degrees would be significant. Yet we are likely laying the 
groundwork for going further, at least in Europe. European overheating 
is now a well-established fact: the anomaly in our continent appears to 
be almost double the already significant anomaly in other temperate 
climate areas at similar latitudes.

The cause of this overheating has been identified: the presence of a 
vast area of the Atlantic Ocean, south of Greenland, with 
colder-than-average waters has led to the destabilization of the oceanic 
anticyclone, commonly known as the Azores High. Until about 35 years 
ago, this high was dominant in summer over the European continent and 
determined its climate: mild and stable but without extremes, thanks 
precisely to its oceanic origin, it brought blue skies and cyclical 
afternoon instability with thunderstorms in inland and mountainous 
areas. Today, however, its expansion is minimal in summer, allowing 
relatively cold air to descend towards the Portuguese and West African 
coasts. This is immediately countered by extremely warm air rising from 
the Sahara desert, free to reach the Mediterranean and, increasingly, 
all of Western Europe. France now experiences temperatures above 40 
degrees Celsius every year for days or weeks, and in recent years, even 
the British Isles have been affected by African breezes. In winter, 
things are no better. In the climate we knew until the 1980s, this 
anticyclone often expanded northward along the Atlantic meridians, 
causing, in response, descents of Arctic air responsible for the cold 
phases that also made the climate of the Mediterranean mountains snowy.

Today, however, it is expanding along parallels, horizontally, so to 
speak, and is ultimately making European winters stable and mild. 
Ultimately, it is absent in summer, when it was the main protagonist, 
and invades us in winter, preventing the meridional exchange of cold and 
snow. But the most disturbing thing is that the colder-than-average 
ocean area at the foot of Greenland | which, as we said, is at the 
origin of this upheaval in the atmospheric circulation of western and 
southern Europe | is likely due to the melting of Greenland ice caps 
caused by Arctic warming, another area particularly affected by the most 
evident effects of the climate crisis. This is the situation at the 
European level. And in Sicily? The situation this year has had a very 
peculiar evolution. The winter was very rainy. In the early months, 
currents between the sirocco and the levant prevailed, swollen with 
humidity, capable of causing accumulations double or triple the average 
in eastern and central areas. The culmination of this persistence was 
the so-called Cyclone Harry. It was a truly devastating event, with 
ground winds peaking at 130 km/h on the ridges between the Nebrodi and 
Peloritani mountains, breaking numerous records in central Sicily with 
peaks just over 100 km/h. But beyond the single record, the duration of 
the gusts (over 24 hours) and the vastness of the affected territory 
were exceptional.

At the same time, we experienced extraordinary accumulations, as we were 
saying: more than 450 millimeters in 72 hours on the eastern slopes of 
Etna and 150 millimeters on the Erei Mountains. In the second half of 
the winter, west-northwest currents began to prevail, with significant 
accumulations also in western Sicily. All the reservoirs made up for the 
deficit of the previous three years, and in many, the floodgates had to 
be opened due to the inability of the dams to contain masses of water 
that had become very significant in just a few months. And now, this 
summer. Paradoxically, until mid-July, the Sicilian summer was much less 
extreme than the European or northern Italian summers. This is because 
the African subtropical anticyclone had a very westerly axis and was not 
contained by any cold currents originating from the North Atlantic: it 
was thus able to reach central and northern England, where temperatures 
exceeded 30-32 degrees Celsius, unusually for those areas. Sicily was 
therefore east of the anticyclonic core and consequently benefited from 
cooler currents descending from the Balkans: temperatures remained 
slightly higher than average, especially in the inland and mountainous 
areas, where these Balkan infiltrations brought widespread afternoon 
cloud cover and numerous thunderstorms. Unfortunately, everything 
changed on July 15th. The rising North African anticyclone headed 
directly for southern Italy this time, with high-altitude temperatures 
exceeding 29 degrees Celsius and, in all likelihood (radiosoundings are 
not conducted in inland Sicily, so we have no proof), temperatures 
reached 30 degrees Celsius at an altitude of 1,500 meters in the open 
atmosphere.

We are facing Saharan temperatures in the fullest sense of the word, 
10-12 degrees Celsius above the Mediterranean summer norm. These are the 
consequences on the ground: temperatures above 45-46 degrees Celsius on 
the plains or in the low hills, around 40 degrees Celsius at 700 meters, 
37-38 degrees Celsius at 1,000 meters, and over 31 degrees Celsius in 
the high mountains, between the Madonie and Nebrodi mountains, between 
Piano Battaglia and Portella Femmina Morta at almost 1,600 meters above 
sea level, in the heart of the Sicilian beech forests. How long can our 
ecosystems withstand this upheaval? Vegetation is exposed to 
temperatures it cannot tolerate, and not even the heavy rainfall we've 
written about is enough. Above all, these temperatures certainly don't 
occur every year; on the contrary, these temperatures have now become 
the new normal. Until the 1990s, they were occasional, as mentioned, but 
in recent years we've been seeing them constantly, from 2021 to 2026 
without interruption.

In inland areas, this configuration has even more disturbing 
implications. The high density at high altitudes combined with 
unprecedented temperatures leads to subsidence, a truly devastating 
phenomenon. Air slides from high to low and is compressed, with three 
consequences, each more negative than the other: the residual humidity 
is unable to condense into the heat clouds typical of traditional summer 
thunderstorms, which are entirely impossible during the North African 
dome's dominance; the temperature rises further due to air compression, 
with inexorable daily increases; the lower layers of the atmosphere in 
contact with the ground are unable to exchange air, and the extremely 
hot air "stagnates" above the land, making the climate essentially 
unlivable and scorching. This is obviously much less likely to happen on 
the coasts, where breezes manage to inject a modicum of dynamism into 
the atmosphere, but at the cost of extremely high humidity, which still 
results in very low levels of livability and well-being.

So, on a strictly thermal level, beyond the perceived discomfort caused 
by humidity, temperature anomalies in inland and even mountainous areas 
are reaching unsustainable levels for the population and the ecosystem 
in general. Records that lasted thirty years now last three years, 
easily surpassed by new peaks (in this 2026 wave, records from the very 
near 2023 are often being broken) and dozens and dozens of stations 
exceeding 40 degrees, essentially between 80% and 90% of those in the 
regional monitoring networks. This is the reality, while, according to 
many studies, the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has 
reached levels not seen in hundreds of thousands of years. Is it a 
coincidence that the increase in greenhouse gases coincides with the 
rise in global temperatures? According to most climatologists, it's not 
at all, obviously. The anthropogenic forcing of global warming is a 
proven fact, assuming there are underlying natural cycles, which indeed 
may exist, but are nevertheless exacerbated by the contribution of human 
activities. Global economic and political balances do not seem conducive 
to agreements aimed at reducing climate-altering gas emissions. Most 
likely, even with a slower-than-necessary transformation rate of energy 
production, the use of fossil fuels will gradually become less and less 
central. But at that point, will there still be room to limit the changes?

Certainly, we must act at the community level, even small ones: to limit 
energy-intensive activities, to ensure the best possible balance in 
cities with tree planting and soil renaturalization, to build or 
renovate buildings with greater climate resilience. These may seem like 
small things, too small compared to the magnitude of the problem and the 
planet itself. But they are practical, simple solutions that restore 
space for action in local communities, even those that some would like 
to see euthanized. And they are solutions that, as often happens during 
crises, can give new impetus to previously unknown community action.

Luca Alerci

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/wp-content/uploads/luglioAgosto2026_compressed.pdf
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