"Humanity's developments are most closely intertwined with the surrounding nature. A secret harmony is established between the land and the peoples it nourishes; when reckless societies dare to tamper with what defines the beauty of their territory, they always end up regretting it. Where the soil has been defaced, where all poetry has vanished from the landscape, imagination has died out, the mind has become impoverished, and routine and servility have taken hold of the soul, leading it to torpor and death. Among the principal causes of the decline of so many successive civilizations, the brutal violence with which most nations have treated the nourishing Earth must be placed first."[1]
The geographer and anarchist Élisée Reclus, in his 1866 essay "Du sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes," reprinted in the aforementioned text, already gave us an example of that "sentiment of nature" that would characterize all of his mature geographical work. As a careful observer of the land and landscapes that surrounded him, which he had observed throughout his work as a geographer, he was not unaware of the destructive work that man was wreaking on both agriculture and nascent industrialization. Reclus's reflections are essentially based on his empirical observations, but science had even earlier identified certain mechanisms that demonstrated how human action affected the climate and, consequently, the land.As early as the early nineteenth century-in 1822 to be exact-Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) was the first to discuss the "greenhouse effect." Although he didn't foresee its consequences for climate, he hypothesized that energy from the Sun, reflected skyward by the oceans, was trapped by water vapor and other gases in our planet's atmosphere.
It was Eunice Newton Foote, at a time when women were often excluded from academia and science, who paved the way for modern climate science.
Foote was the first scientist to test the effect of sunlight's heating on various gases and theorized that changing the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would alter its temperature. She presented this research in her article, "Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays," at the 1856 conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution presented the research, as social norms of the time prevented women from presenting papers before the association. Joseph Henry, reflecting the changing times, including the issue of rights, introduced the research findings by stating: "Science belongs to no country and no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true."[2]
The importance of Eunice Newton Foote's discovery lies in the fact that, as early as the 19th century, a female scientist had identified the crucial role of CO2 in warming the atmosphere. This insight is the basis of contemporary climate science and our current concerns about climate change.
Foote's discovery was later confirmed, again in the 19th century, by the Irishman John Tyndall and the Swedes Svante Arrhenius and Nils Ekholm.
John Tyndall is considered the "father" of climate science and discovered and explained the greenhouse effect, demonstrating that gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, absorb infrared radiation (heat). His 1859 discoveries paved the way for subsequent research, particularly that of Svante Arrhenius, who in 1896 developed a model to calculate the impact of CO2 on global temperatures.
Today, the scientific consensus remains nearly unanimous: over 99% of scientists agree that global warming is caused by human activity.[3]
There is none so blind as he who will not see.
This proverb, originating in the Gospel of John, effectively summarizes the position of those in power who deny, against all scientific evidence, that the climate crisis is a consequence of global warming. 170 years after Eunice Newton Foote performed simple experiments with flasks and sunlight, demonstrating that carbon dioxide trapped more heat than the normal atmosphere, we are witnessing delusional declarations from those who hold the fate of humanity in their hands.
During his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September 2025, US President Donald Trump made a series of statements regarding climate change. In front of approximately 190 representatives of countries from around the world, Trump called global warming "the greatest scam ever perpetrated in the world."
Earlier, in 2012, he tweeted that the Chinese invented "the concept of global warming" because they believed it would somehow harm US industry. In late 2015, he called global warming a "hoax."[4]
Despite the obvious charade of these claims, the campaign against any green approach went so far as to coin the phrase "clean, beautiful coal," making it a trademark of his political rhetoric to promote the American mining industry, claiming that new technologies would make coal a green energy source. Faced with such arrogance and ignorance, the response of Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University, is exemplary. "Coal kills millions of people every year. The American president can tell you that coal is clean, but there are people-mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters-who will die for this lie."
The natural conclusion of these ravings came on January 20, 2025, when US President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders calling for the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The US president, in this denialist campaign, is in good company: populist leaders and billionaire entrepreneurs echo him, from Europe's Orbán and Salvini, to Latin America's Milei in Argentina and Bolsonaro, now out of the picture, in Brazil, with the support of entrepreneurs who exploit climate denialism to protect industrial assets tied to fossil fuels.
The Consequences of Climate Change
In October 2025, before COP30, Bill Gates entered the debate, earning Trump's applause: "We just won the war against the climate change hoax. Bill Gates finally admitted he was completely wrong about this," he added, "It took courage to do that, and for that we are all grateful."
But what did Bill Gates say that was so important?
The Microsoft founder stated that climate change, although it has serious consequences, "will not lead to the end of humanity." Gates added that, although climate change will have "severe consequences, people will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future." He then argued that addressing disease and poverty globally would help prepare vulnerable populations for a changing climate, rather than raising warnings of global catastrophe.[5]
Bill Gates' approach to climate change reflects the vision of the economic and financial elites who govern the world and outlines a path that, to some extent, is already being realized today. Armageddon, the final apocalypse, that many climate catastrophists predict, is not actually around the corner: like many processes, it will be accompanied by a series of small and large disasters, and we are already witnessing this in many parts of the world in recent years. What is certain will be the different impacts that climate change will have on different territories.
Where poverty is a constitutive trait of communities, natural forces-water, seas, and rivers; wind; heat-will destroy landscapes, sweep away homes and places of production, and obliterate cultures; where wealth is concentrated, barriers will be erected, people will build on water, purify the air, and people will look to space with the idea of colonizing other hypothetical planets in mind. A blind faith in technological possibilities that in the short term seems and will seem sufficient to counter ecological disasters, accompanied by a deep-rooted class egoism that seeks to conceal the obvious signs of a process rapidly approaching the point of no return.
In the beating heart of capital, in the financial cities of London, New York, Singapore, Paris, and Milan, what is happening in Niscemi, and in the many Niscemis around the world, is little more than a blip, the inevitable and natural consequence of the elements. All this, while not impacting the mechanisms of exploitation and accumulation, will not halt the process; environmental contradictions will increase, and the consequences will increasingly be transversal, crossing continents, territories, and cities, involving social classes and classes.
Perspectives on Anticapitalist Struggle
Many in the left-wing political debate argue that ecological issues, like those of peace, are unsuitable for creating strong anticapitalist forces. This limitation lies precisely in their universality, which prevents them from establishing themselves as social forces, lacking a defined social identity. This point of view, if taken schematically, fails to grasp the changing reality-namely, the acceleration of climate change-and the new militant subjectivities that these contradictions have generated, which are not unrelated to radical protest practices and horizontal and essentially libertarian forms of organization.
Perhaps speaking of an "environmental proletariat," as Japanese environmentalist philosopher Kohei Saito does, citing Anglo-Saxon authors[6], may seem excessive, but undoubtedly the intertwining of environmental protection, opposition to war, and economic struggle represents the ideal terrain for building a vast and deep-rooted movement that can concretely counter the mad rush toward increasingly widespread and devastating war scenarios and the environmental disaster that war strongly accelerates.
Notes
[1]Élisée Reclus, Nature and Society: Writings in Subversive Geography, Elèuthera, Milan, 1999, p. 175.
[2]Kyla Mandel, "This woman fundamentally changed climate science - and you've probably never heard of her," «ThinkProgress», 18/05/2018. (https://archive.thinkprogress.org/female-climate-scientist-eunice-foote-finally-honored-for-her-contributions-162-years-later-21b3cf08c70b).
[3]Scientific consensus, «IPCC Focal Point for Italy», (https://ipccitalia.cmcc.it/consenso-scientifico).
[4]Anthony Zurcher, Does Trump still think it's all a hoax?, «BBC», 02/06/2017, (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40128034).
[5]Bill Gates: "Climate change will not make us extinct," «Prometeo 360», 29/10/2025, (https://prometeo.adnkronos.com/green-economy/bill-gates-cambiamento-climatico-non-fara-estinguere-umanita-strategia-green-premium).
[6]John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth, Monthly Review Press, New York, NY (US), 2010.
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